Secret Weapons by Brian Ford Read Free Book Online Page A

Force (Armée de l’Air) finished building the first He-274 and renamed it the AAS-01A. The second prototype was flown in December 1947 AAS-01B. Both were employed as test-bed mother ships for the launch of rockets and advanced jet planes at high altitude, and were in use until they were broken up at the end of 1953.
Birth of jet planes
    These amazing aircraft clearly show that Ernst Heinkel was a leading innovator on many fronts, and the best example of this is the introduction of the jet fighter. Jet-propelled planes could have radically altered the course of the war, but they arrived on the scene too late to make a crucial difference. The origin of the aircraft jet engine dates back to July 1926, when a young British engineer named A. A. Griffith published a paper on jet turbines. The idea was followed up by Frank Whittle, then an enthusiastic Royal Air Force (RAF) recruit, but Griffith dismissed the idea of a jet plane since he was convinced that a turbine could never generate the efficiencies needed for flight. Undeterred, in January 1930 Whittle took out a patent for the first jet engine. It attracted little interest with the RAF and they placed no restrictions upon the concept. Whittle made great progress as a pilot, and yet although companies showed some interest in his proposals for a jet plane none were willing to put up the money necessary to build a prototype.
    During the following year, an Italian experimenter named Secondo Campini sent a paper on jet propulsion to the Italian Royal Air Force (Regia Aeronautica Italiana) and in 1932 he demonstrated a jet-propelled boat on the Venice lagoon. In 1934 he received the agreement of the Italian Royal Air Force for the development of a jet aircraft. Campini commissioned the Caproni factory to build his prototype. On 27 August 1940 test pilot Mario De Bernardi took the plane into the air and the World Air Sports Federation (Fédération Aéronautique Internationale) recognized this at the time as the first successful flight by a jet aeroplane, until news came of the Heinkel He-178 V1. This had flown for the first time in August 1939, powered by the HeS-3B engine invented by a German designer named Hans Joachim Pabst von Ohain. As we shall see, this highly innovative aircraft would give rise to a revolution in aircraft design – one we are still experiencing today.
    However, the reality is that Campini’s aircraft did not have a jet turbine at all. His design featured a 670hp (500kW) Isotta Fraschini piston engine which drove an air compressor, forcing air into the combustion chamber where it mixed with a spray of fuel. Although the exhaust gases propelled the device forward, the use of a piston engine as the compressor means that it was not a jet turbine. Another Italian named Luigi Stipa also designed the Stipa-Caproni experimental aircraft in 1932, which had a ducted fan, and he also tried to claim it as the first jet aircraft. Both his plane and the Caproni-Campini used a jet of gas to propel the plane along, but neither was a pure jet turbine.
    Meanwhile, in Britain, Whittle was still trying to develop his jet turbine idea, and in 1934 he was authorized to take the two-year engineering course at Peterhouse College, University of Cambridge, where he graduated with a first-class degree in Mechanical Sciences. Whittle received a note in the mail to remind him that his patent for a jet engine was due for renewal in January 1935. He could not afford the £5 fee. The Air Ministry told him that it was not interested in funding the renewal either, and so the patent lapsed. However, in September 1935 Whittle was introduced to two investment bankers at O. T. Falk & Partners, Sir Maurice Bonham-Carter and Lancelot Law Whyte. Whittle explained that a reciprocating engine, with its metallic components jerking up and down, seemed to him condemned to extinction. He insisted that the smooth-running jet turbine was obviously the way ahead. Whyte felt that this was a proposal of