I can't hear you.

So after another couple of days of out of town stuff, I'm back again and hope to shed some light on a little known piece of jet plane history.

The British were the only other WWII participant (the first being the Germans) to have operational jet aircraft. They did not meet in combat, but the Gloster Meteor is credited with shooting down over a dozen German V-1 flying bombs.

Now things moved fast at the end of the war and many new types of jet aircraft came out of England then. An example is the deHavilland DH-100 Vampire which came out in 1946. One version of the airplane was a swept wing oddity called the Swallow. The real name was the de Havilland DH 108. It had no tail wing and resembled early German rocket powered death traps. The Swallow was no easier to fly.

The swept wing design and stubbiness of the fuselage made the plane quick in the turns but broke just about every other engineering rule it could. The first one out of the gate could barely hit 300 mph, but a second version, powered by a more powerful engine, broke apart during a high speed dive. It had anti spin parachutes attached to the wingtips, as it was near impossible, given its design and shape, to break the spin using normal techniques.

These aircraft were flirting with the sound barrier and on September 9, 1948, with John Derry at the controls, a Swallow broke the sound barrier. Although not the first ever, it was one of the first jet powered aircraft to do so.

No matter, every prototype crashed. Next, Horton hears a who.