page_title: Jet aircraft
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Jet aircraft / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Campini-Caproni CC-2 aircraft
context_page_description: A jet aircraft is an aircraft propelled by jet engines.
  Whereas the engines in propeller-powered aircraft generally achieve their maximum efficiency at much lower speeds and altitudes, jet engines and aircraft achieve maximum efficiency at speeds close to or even well above the speed of sound. Jet aircraft generally cruise at faster than about Mach 0.8 at altitudes around 10,000–15,000 metres or more.
  Frank Whittle, an English inventor and RAF officer, developed the concept of the jet engine in 1928, and Hans von Ohain in Germany developed the concept independently in the early 1930s. He wrote in February 1936 to Ernst Heinkel, who led the construction of the world's first turbojet aircraft and jet plane Heinkel He 178.
context_section_description: After the first instance of powered flight, a large number of jet engine factories were suggested. René Lorin, Morize, Harris proposed systems for creating a jet efflux. In 1910 the Romanian inventor Henri Coandă filed a patent on a jet propulsion system which used piston-engine exhaust gases to add heat to an otherwise pure air stream compressed by rotating fan blades in a duct. It was installed in his Coandă-1910 but this craft probably never flew.
  Rocket-powered jet aircraft were pioneered in Germany. The first aircraft to fly under rocket power was the Lippisch Ente, in 1928. The Ente had previously been flown as a glider. The next year, in 1929, the Opel RAK.1 became the first purpose-built rocket plane to fly.
  The turbojet was invented in 1939, independently by Frank Whittle and later Hans von Ohain. The first turbojet aircraft to fly was the Heinkel He 178 V1 first prototype of the German Air Force, the Luftwaffe, on August 27, 1939 in Rostock (Germany).
  The first flight of a jet-engined aircraft to come to public attention was the Italian Caproni Campini N.1 motorjet prototype that flew on August 27, 1940. It was the first jet aircraft recognised by the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (at the time the German He 178 program was still kept secret). Campini had proposed the motorjet in 1932.
  The British experimental Gloster E.28/39 first took to the air on May 15, 1941, powered by Sir Frank Whittle's turbojet. The United States produced the Bell XP-59A using two examples of a version of the Whittle engine built by General Electric, which flew on October 1, 1942. The Meteor was the first production jet as it entered production a few months before the Me 262, which itself had been in development since before the start of the war as Projekt 1065.
  The first operational jet fighter was the Messerschmitt Me 262, manufactured by Germany during World War II, which entered service on 19 April 1944 with Erprobungskommando 262 at Lechfeld just south of Augsburg. It was the fastest conventional aircraft of World War II – although there were faster aircraft propelled by unconventional means, such as the rocket-powered Messerschmitt Me 163 Komet. The Messerschmitt Me 262 had first flown on April 18, 1941, with initial plans drawn up by Dr Waldemar Voigt's design team in April 1939, but mass production did not start until early 1944 with the first squadrons operational that year, too late for a decisive effect on the outcome of the war.
  Around this time, mid 1944, the United Kingdom's Gloster Meteor was being committed to defence of the UK against the V-1 flying bomb – itself a pulsejet-powered aircraft and direct ancestor of the cruise missile– and then ground-attack operations over Europe in the last months of the war. In 1944 Germany introduced into service the Arado Ar 234 jet reconnaissance and bomber, though chiefly used in the former role, with the Heinkel He 162 Spatz single-jet light fighter  premiering as 1944 ended. USSR tested its own Bereznyak-Isayev BI-1 in 1942, but the project was scrapped by Joseph Stalin in 1945. The Imperial Japanese Navy also developed jet aircraft in 1945, including the Nakajima J9Y Kikka, a modified, and slightly smaller version of the Me 262 that had folding wings. By the end of 1945, the US had introduced their first jet fighter, the Lockheed P-80 Shooting Star into service and the UK its second fighter design, the de Havilland Vampire.
  The US introduced the North American B-45 Tornado, their first jet bomber, into service in 1948. Although capable of carrying nuclear weapons it was used for reconnaissance over Korea. On November 8, 1950, during the Korean War, United States Air Force Lt. Russell J. Brown, flying in an F-80, intercepted two North Korean MiG-15s near the Yalu River and shot them down in the first jet-to-jet dogfight in history. The UK put the English Electric Canberra into service in 1951 as a light bomber. It was designed to fly higher and faster than any interceptor.
  BOAC operated the first commercial jet service, from London to Johannesburg, in 1952 with the de Hav
caption: Caproni Campini N1 in flight
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