The Development of Jet and Turbine Aero-engines

Bill Gunston, The Development of Jet and Turbine Aero-engines, second edition, Patrick Stephens/Haynes, Yeovil (1997), 239 pp., L19.99.

Richard P. Hallion, Supersonic Flight: breaking the sound barrier and beyond, revised edition, Putnam Aeronautical, London and Washington DC (1997), 268 pp., L25.00.

The jet engine is arguably the most significant innovation in long-distance transport this century. Since it galvanised air travel in the early 1960s it has become so closely identified with aircraft propulsion that one wonders how the aircraft industry managed to make so much progress in its first forty years with piston engines. Compare the swift introduction of the jet in civil aviation with, for example, the ponderous conversion of rail transport from steam to diesel and electric locomotives. Aircraft and jet engines are a technological marriage made in heaven, or at least in the upper atmosphere. By contrast the aeroplane's early liaison with the reciprocating engine, a technology borrowed from the automobile industry, was doomed by the laws of aerodynamics to exhaust itself long before the sound barrier was reached.

There would seem to be at least two good reasons for economic and transport historians to learn more about jet engines or, more precisely, gas turbines. First, for Britain they represent one of the few hightech manufacturing success stories of the last fifty years, and secondly it was technical breakthroughs during the Second World War that transformed air travel in the post-war period from a luxury adventure into a mass transport mode, and chief amongst them was the turbojet. The fall in airline operating costs which began in the 1960s was a direct result of the use of jet engines, in particular by-pass engines like the...