Saab makes jets.

The Italians enjoyed a bit of notoriety with their early airborne bombing exploits but really, the rest of the show all the way through WWII was iffy.

Like many countries, Italy turned to it's major industrial manufacturers when it needed airplanes, because you didn't just build an airplane factory out of the blue. So, just as the Germans relied on a train factory for some of their aircraft, Italy turned to Fiat. Oddly enough, a current potential plyer in the bailout of North American automobile industry.

The Regia Aeronautica, or Royal Italian Air force was formed in 1928. By 1935 it was at war with Ethiopia. Equipped with over 1500 ill equipped, slow and virtually defenceless aircraft, they easily wupped the poor Ethiopians. The closest thing they had to airborne weapon was a spear.

When the Royal Air force got into a real fighting war in Spain in 1936, it was apparent that the weird little Fiats were hopeless. But somehow the skilled Italian pilots were among the top dozen aces of the war. Maybe being slow was an advantage.

The main aircraft was the Fiat CR 32, a biplane with just 2 machine guns and a maximum speed of just over 200 mph. At the beginning of WWII they upgraded this tiger of the skies with yet another biplane fighter, the CR 42. Finally in 1940 they scrapped the bi wing design for the C 50 monoplane. Unfortunately, it stunk and was hazardous to fly.

Mind you the Italian bombers were of an equally not quite there design too, having 3 engines. This made aiming a real challenge and impossible to see or shoot straight forward. And, once again, they were slow.

Ready the balloons.

As promised a bit of background on the Italian Air Force. They did have jet powered aircraft by the 50's, but for now lets have a look at the beginnings. The Italian Air Force was originally an offshoot of the Italian Army. In 1884, a special division, called the Aerostatic Regiment for balloon operations was created to, well, have balloons to fly. Mainly to fly over the battlefields and report back by semaphore or telegraph, the balloons, like any other suffered from one huge inescapable weakness: they went where the winds blew. But hey, they had a real cool name for the regiment.

The Italians have had quite a history with aviation, scoring it's first balloon flight in 1784. They have a page in the history of dumbass steam powered aircraft with a working steam powered model helicopter . It took to the air in 1877, but was never seriously developed further. Odd.

The Italian Air Force really came in to it's own though around 1911 when Italy and Turkey were at war. This was the first time airplanes were used in a war for bombing anything. Poor Turks.

Italy did not have an actual arm of the military called an air force until 1923 when the Italian Royal Air Force (Regia Aeronautica Italiana) was born.

Next post I look at those flying Fiats.

There's 2 of them.

Boy of boy, was the end of WWII a real watershed for jet airplane design. Not only were the planes being developed during the insanely high stress final years of the war, but they were test flying then one week and tooling the factory the next to start production. After the war, when the first passenger jet airplanes started showing up at airports, they were usually parked far away from the terminal and metal pans placed beneath the engines in case the "self igniting" jet fuel should leak out or spill.

No doubt German engineers had it down when it came to the jet powered aircraft. C'mon, the were the first to use swept wings, molded high altitude canopies, even ejection seats. (You did have to get out of them occasionally). Sadly, many test pilots didn't. The damn things were just too fast, too powerful and had only a few things sorted out by the time they were tested. Often, the fact they had a pointy bit in the front, an engine out the back and 2 or more wings, that was enough to give them a whirl.

Case in point, the Horten Ho 229. Production models were called the Gotha Go 229 and were built by Gothaer Waggonfabrik, originally a manufacturer of train cars. Hmmm, good choice. Whilst building tram cars they also dabbled in aircraft manufacturing as the Nazi government ignored the Treaty of Versailles and armed the country to the teeth. One of their early products to actually see service was something called the Gotha Go 242, described as an "assault glider". The only assaulting thing it really did was drop off 2 dozen really angry German troops. They had, after all, to travel in the damn thing. It never actually assaulted anything.

Back to the Go or Ho 229. It was designed by Walter and Reimar Horten. The design was a flying wing type powered by twin jet engines. The Horten brothers were not university trained but had been avid glider builders for years (between the wars it was the only things with wings you could get away with building in Germany). The flying wing was something they played around with alot and knew the advantages when it came to powering the aircraft as a wing only design limits drag because there is no fuselage. Less drag means more range, larger payload and faster speeds. A wing and a couple of engines is really only half an airplane. This plane, could have however actually met the 1000, 1000, 1000 design objective dreamed about by Goring. He wanted an aircraft that could go a 1000km, carry 1000kg of bombs and go 1000km an hour.

The test version was a bizarre combination of wood (plywood actually, now that's safe) and welded steel core frame. Unpowered gliders were first tested in the spring of 1944 with unmanned powered tests that winter.

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.

People are passengers too.

Ok, readers, back on track. More of what we love. Explosions, flaming crashes and all done in the name of science.

No surprise at all that by the end of WWII, the military jet was moving ahead almost daily in capability, range and, dare I say it, ease of use. Fires, flame outs, explosions all dropped off as engineers and pilots got a grip on the new technology. Purpose built aircraft with real performance began to emerge and find their way into the next wars.

So too, as the years after 1945 dragged on, the technology began to leak out into the commercial sphere. The jetliner was close.

The first "jetliner" was a modified Lancastrian. So just what is a Lancastrian? They were modified Lancaster bombers used for transport and passenger service during the tail end of WWII and through the early 50's.

The airplane was used to test jet engines for use in commercial airliners. Typically the outer 2 piston engines were replaced with jet engines. They were still a little leery of equipping this rig with 4 jets. The very first flight occurred in the fall of 1945. Powered by 2 Nene turbojets and 2 Rolls Royce Merlin power plants this was the first jet powered aircraft to carry passengers.

All sorts of variants ensued but the most noteworthy was the 1947 version that used the de Havilland Ghost 50 turbojet engine, the engine slated to power the first real jetliner, the Comet 1.

At least one version had captured German rockets tied under the wings too. Now that's more like it.

Turn the lights out when you leave.

So now that jet engines made things go fast, it became increasingly obvious that shit would happen correspondingly faster too. Meaning that if trouble did strike, there was a lot less time to save your butt.

Enter the ejection seat. The first ones were arguably conceived by Germany in the years between the wars when they were spending a lot of energy not arming themselves to the teeth. I say this because there is debate the the Brits had a few ideas of there own too about the same time.

No doubt as aircraft performance increased, the possibility of simply climbing out of the stupid thing, walking to the edge of the wing and jumping off with your parachute, decreased.

The early plan was a lot like a Wyle E. Coyote episode. That is to say the ejection from the aircraft was accomplished by a really big spring. Nice. Of course, the pilot opened the canopy first. Otherwise he had a headache.

The Germans actually did work out the concepts before the UK. In fact they had a few workable ideas in the early 30's. They thought of the spring under the seat method and and external style spring powered device that was like a small crane above the pilot that yanked the pilot free from above and tossed him kind of like a trebuchet. I'm thinking I might want to walk off the end of the wing.

The British version of the spring thing did not eject the seat, only the pilot. Christ. In reality, they never got farther than the drawing board and didn't look at the idea till after the Second World War when they had a chance to look at captured German aircraft.

Cooler, and smarter heads prevailed and by the start of the war they had moved on to compressed air and explosive charge systems.

Oh weely?

So history has a way of having a laugh every now and again. Case in point: British engineer Frank Whittle was the first to patent a real turbo jet engine. The year was 1932. He managed to build a functioning prototype by 1937. Though strapped to a test bed, it ran just fine. British military were not that interested.

On the other side of the channel, Hans von Ohain, a German engineer, had been tinkering with his own turbo jet. And the laugh is they never knew of each others work. The difference was German industrialist Ernst Heinkel saw a demonstration of the lab model and was hooked.

Heinkel had acces to the tools, machinery and expertise to build lots of stuff. He teamed Ohain with master machinist Max Hahn. Together they created a fully functioning stand alone engine. Heinkel was ready with an airframe and on August 27, 1939 (less than 2 years from workshop bench to production) test pilot Erich Warsitz successfully flew the He 178. This was the world's first turbo jet airplane to take to the skies. Erich Warsitz (know as titanium gut, cast iron constitution guy) was also the first guy to fly a rocket powered plane, the He 176, only a few months before. Hope he had a pension. Military testing was undertaken in quiet remote areas to maintain "secrecy and reasonable safety". Nice to know they care.

A whittle bit of this and that.

There was no shortage of good ideas when it came to getting the jet engine off the ground. The real stopper was there was no materials or equipment that could handle the temperatures or pressure levels that were going to be needed to run a jet engine with enough snot to propel an airplane faster that an propeller driven engine.

For example, in 1915, the Hungarian Albert Fono devised adding a ramjet to a cannon fired projectile. The idea was the size of the cannon could be smaller and lighter as the jet engine equipped bomb would fly father on it's own. Although it was never built (denying the world ballistic missiles for, oh, a good 25 more years or so) he did patent a jet propelled airplane in 1928. It too, was merely a blueprint that awaited smarter minds and cleverer processes.

Maxime Guillaume, a French engineer, actually was the first to patent the jet airplane. He eclipsed the Hungarian by 7 years.

A Norwegian, a Hungarian, a Frenchman and finally a German and a Brit. The jet was about to be born.

Those wiley Norwegians, again.

It's Monday and I'm back. I spent the weekend looking through material for today's post and coming up with many possibilities. Remember, I am easily distracted. I have found that about the best music to do the nasty work of keeping the fires burning at the Barn is by far the wonderful streaming audio from CBC, in particular the Signal with Laurie Brown. Heard every evening from 10pm onwards, but because of the time zones you can pick it up as early as 6pm. Want to hear what I'm listening to? Click on this - http://www.cbc.ca/radio2/mediaPlayer.html?ATLANTIC_HI

Anyway, this post's title hides a rather interesting story. Ægidius Elling was a Norwegian inventor who is credited with if not inventing, at least figuring out, the gas turbine engine.

For those of you non techies out there, that's a real jet engine. His original patent for this engine came out in 1884. Trouble is, as he progressed through the theoretical to the practical he realized that there was few materials out there that could hold up to the high temperatures that modern jet engines produced. He was, in essence, making a modern jet engine in 1903.

Issues with safety and reliability prevented the jet engine from moving beyond Ellings prototypes. It would be over 2o years later when British engineer Frank Whittle patented a workable engine in 1932.

Coandă you fly?

I'll just jump ahead thousand years or so (because I want to ) and leap into the modern age a bit. What I really mean is about 1910.

In this year a Romanian engineer by the name of Henri Coandă built the very first jet powered airplane, the unimaginatively named Coandă 1910. You figure he could have named it after a bird at least.

No matter. He originally joined the military at the behest of his father. He was always interested in flight and paid special attention to artillery. However his inventive spirit and the army life was not a good fit and in 1908 he left to pursue a career in science. He found his way to Paris and enrolled in the École Nationale Superieure d'Ingenieurs en Construction Aéronautique. Two years later he was an aeronautical engineer. The year is only 1910.

He moved quickly. He was curious about how wind moved over the surfaces of airplanes and experimented with many shapes first using a fast train to mount his test subjects on, and then developing a wind tunnel, complete with smoke trails. Again, this guy was doing this stuff in 1910.

He then sat down and built the world's first jet airplane. Just like that. It was powered by a genuine jet engine, not an exploding keg of gunpowder strapped under the wing. Although not that powerful, and destined to be the poor cousin of jet propulsion, the thermojet engine he built was an amazing device indeed. A standard 4 cylinder piston engine powered an air compressor that forced air at amazing high speed into a combustion chamber where fuel was delivered and set alight. The roaring flames out the back pushed the plane through the air. In an age when inventors flew their creations, you got to figure he had as much raw courage as technical skill.

The damn thing flew, but crashed on later flight and burnt up. He walked away. By then though interest and money were lacking, so jet planes were put on the back burner. He continued to design and build airplanes over the years, but he maintained a quirky side throughout his life. He developed a jet powered sleigh and an early version of the hovercraft.

Eastern winds.

As is often the case, the more I look into something, the more it grows tentacles. As I snooped about to find worthy historical tidbits to weave together a reasonably accurate account of the history of jet engines I ran into all sorts of side roads to explore.

One of the basic ones is there is considerable history around rockets, and it begs the question, where do you split the jet engine off from rockets? I'm going to perform the surgery at the moment when jet turbines (what we call jet engines) were invented.

But there are some cool old rocket stories. The ancient Chinese had the gunpowder going on and it is assumed that occasionally something more substantial than a firework was fired heavenward. Chinese history records a fei tschu, or flying vehicle around 1750 BC, apparently capable of flying thousands of miles. No pictorial record has surfaced so we can only surmise at what powered it.

However, the crafty Turks with a long scientific heritage, look like they came up with rockets for at least firing at their enemies, if not for travel. With the Crusades and all, there was a sense of urgency to get going with weapons technology. Witnesses have recorded the Turkish forces using rocket powered "torpedoes", and books on military technique stating the same still exist today.

And in the 1600's Lagari Hasan Celebi is reported to have strapped no less that 140 pounds of gunpowder powered rockets to his back while slung under a seven winged monstrosity. He reportedly shouted he was going to "talk to Christ" and took off. The rockets fizzled and he came to earth over the ocean, landing safely.

Scrambled eggs.

I'm finally at the next obsession. It has all the elements of a good one: Excitement, danger, strong odours and rending human limbs. It has for me also, that extra twist of scientists bedecked in top hats toiling over Erlenmeyer flasks and steaming coils of copper tubing. And of course, they then attempted to ride these things.

The basic idea of hot gas escaping through an opening is as old as boiling water. The aeolipile is the first purpose made device to use hot gasses to propel something. Invented by Hero of Alexandria, (sometimes called Heron) a Greek scholar living in the first century AD. The motor was no more than a delightful toy for his and his colleague's amusement. An amazingly simple little gizmo it consists of a suspended metal ball with 2 tubes on either side to the axis. When filled with water and heated from below the escaping steam jets whizz the thing around and around.

Hero was a cool inventor. Among his other ideas were a wind wheel that powered an organ and the first coin op vending machine. It dispensed holy water. Damn. You have to admit, he had a sense of humour.