Jet-powered aircraft are so central to our modern world that we hardly give them a second thought. However, like many things we take for granted, they have their origins in warfare. We plan to cover many other wartime inventions on this channel, but what's your favourite?

Chris from Military Aviation History channel has researched the infamous Me 262 demonstration. He concluded there is something of a myth about it. After all, the 262 was ready for service six months later (the demo was in November 1943, not August). In fact, all German fighters were stressed to carry bombs. The delays were down to difficulties with engine manufacture..

I really appreciate that you guys used footage of the tail-dragger Me-262 at the right moment in the narrative. Kudos to whomever got it included.

My English mom, Valerie Gretton Lowe, grew up on the same street where Jettie Whittle lived during the war. Her dad (my grandfather), George Lowe, was an electrical engineer who designed the electric motors for laying the Project Pluto pipeline.

It’s a myth that the inclusion of two hard points for bombs delayed the introduction of the ME262A, the main reason was the availability of reliable engines. The short supply of engine manufacture caused this, and their inherently unreliable status caused the biggest delays. The British design was a radial jet engine that didn’t need as much high temperature alloys as the axial flow type that the Germans used. The German Jumo 004 engine life was typically only 10 hours. Whereas the Gloster meteors Rolls-Royce RB.23 Welland engine was 180 hours! Whittle knew that an axial flow engine had some advantages, but life time and reliability were not as good at that time.

The P-80 was still flying in the 1980s in the Alaska Air Command as the T-33A when I was stationed there. They were used for aerial reconnaissance, and intercept targets for the F-15s there. It was a two-seater then - converted from its role as a jet trainer.

My father may well have been one of those people running for cover when Whittle's prototype engine went out of control as he was an engineer on the project for a while.

Chuck Yeager: "First time I saw a jet, I shot it down."

The transition from piston engine power to jet involved what Kuhn would call a "paradigm change." That's why it met with so much resistence at the beginning.

My great aunt from Coventry once went on a date with Frank Whittle. She didn't like him. Thought he was too full of himself.

"It felt as though angels were pushing." General Adolf Galland, after test-flying the Me 262 jet on May 22, 1943. After the war he got to fly the Meteor, and concluded that a winning combination would be the 262 powered by the Rolls Royce jet engines of the Meteor.

This is my favourite episode on this channel ever. Please do more special episodes on new technologies from the war

This was quite the interesting Special episode to watch, especially on the German Me 262 jet fighter. It and the British Gloster Meteor did not significantly made much of an impact on the war, but they did set the path for future jet aircraft such the F-86 Sabre and Mig-15 aircraft.

While the Heinkel He 178 and the Gloster E.28/39 are often credited as the world's first jet-powered aircraft, there's a lesser-known contender that deserves mention. In Italy, Secondo Campini, an Italian engineer, developed an experimental jet-powered aircraft called the Campini Caproni CC.2 in the late 1930s. What makes this airplane particularly interesting is that it used a unique type of jet propulsion known as a "thermojet" or "jet engine with a heating chamber." Instead of the traditional jet engine design, which relied on exhaust gases for propulsion, the thermojet design used a piston engine to compress incoming air, heat it in a combustion chamber, and then expel it at high speed through a nozzle.

After the war, Hans von Ohain went to work for the US Air Force. He was Chief Scientist at the Air Force Aero Propulsion Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, and later a professor at the University of Dayton.

I do love seeing these breakdowns of the tech of the war. I would very much like to see an update video of how the atomic weapon program is going by this point in the war

You got something very wrong. Messerschmitt wasn't involved in the jet engine design (Jumo004), it a was a Junkers Motorenwerke development thus "Juno"

Hi Indy These extra special episode are nice to watch and learn. Thanks

I always find it fascinating that just one day apart the Me262 and the Gloster Meteor had their first combat missions.

Interestingly Whittle and Ohain became friends after the war. Both were very smart men of their area of expertise. In my books both earn credit as inventors of jet engine.

Two names: Sir Frank Whittle and Hans von Ohain... Sad that most tech advances are made during wars, but we reap the benefits today

Carrying bombs was part of the design process for the 262 from well before Hitler saw it fly.

My family was friends with another whose patriarch was known as Poppa Al. He died at the age of 105 in 1990. I often think about all the history he saw in his lifetime. He grew up when the concept of an airplane was fiction, learned about the Wright brothers, saw bi-planes and tri-planes evolve into monoplanes. He saw the creation of jet engines, then the breaking of the sound barrier, then the various generations of fighter planes, etc. This episode reminded me of him.

I can highly recommend the book: 'not much of an engineer' by Stanley Hooker, who was lead jet engineer at Rolls-royce during the war.

wished you guys had talked a bit more about the Gloster Meteor, which was the only other operational jet fighter to actually enter service in July 1944, playing a tangible role against V1s.

Early "jet engine" concepts such as ducted fans or piston engine powered compressors for the jets (Caproni Campini) would have deserved brief mention

Fascinating video, one of the best. I would love to see a part 2, cause I’m positive you could have easily gone on an hour or more of talking about it. Bravo for you and your team. Really excellent.

aaah, the 262, the most beautiful aircraft ever built....

Galland was such a pilot. Despite his rank he was always happiest flying.

Fantastic and well researched as always. Quite fun to think that an individual born in say 1900 could have gone from riding horses to flying the concord in the span of his life. I wonder if we will ever again experience such rapid technological advances as the 20th century did.

While in the Army, I studied German at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, CA in 1974. One of our teachers was one of the a chief aircraft designer in the Air Minstry in Berlin, during the war, and had to meet Hitler daily towards the end of the war. He said that they had tried to convince Hitler that it was better suited as a bomber interceptor. They even had Hanna Reitsch try to convince Hitler, but he was adamant. Towards the final months of the war, he said that no one countered anything Hitler said or you could disappear. He escaped Berlin from the roof of the Air Minstry Building, which was not bombed during the war and still stands today, in an experimental one-man helicopter in the middle of the night. He basically flew from one roof top to the next to avoid all of Russian night fighters that filled the sky. He finally reached the British lines and was interrogated by two British officers, who asked him which planes he had worked on. He answered - ".... mainly the jet aircraft". They then asked him, "What's a jet?" He explained and they said that he was obviously lying, because there's "....no such thing as a plane that can fly without propellers!" This news was so top secret that the only people who knew about jets were Allied bomber crews and fighter pilots. This was later confirmed, by an old friend who was the Flight Engineer/Top Turret Gunner on a B17. He said that he was in the turret one day and saw a dot in the sky, obviously a German fighter. As he turned his guns to fire he thought he had plenty of time, when all of a sudden the jet flew right over the bomber, barely missing them. The jet pilot had miscalculated his attack, but what shocked my friend was the incredible speed. He had thought that he had plenty of time to turn his guns to fire, but the ME262 was on him in flash. Then there was the fact that there were NO propellers. Nobody in his crew who saw it could believe their eyes! When they returned to their base, they were ordered during debriefing not to discuss this with anyone or face a courts martial and time in the brig. He said that he had almost messed himself when the jet first flew by, but was happy just to be alive. ME262 jets then started to shoot B17 bombers out of the sky in increasing numbers. For the life of me, I can't remember the German teacher's name, but my friend, Alan Morton, later worked for NASA and met Werner von Braun in person numerous times.

I know it's a popular theory that Hitler himself was one of the allies best tool for defeating the Nazis. Another great episode!

Great episode. Thanks for posting.

ME 262 was such a beautiful machine.

The patent for the jet engine was granted in 1927 so Frank Whittle was really ahead of the game.

The negative aspect of bomb carrying capacity on the development time of the ME-262 is grossly overstated. At the time, fighter aircraft were more and more used to drop smaller bombs in a tactical ground support role. It was thus a logical question to insure that the new jet fighter would be able to provide such a ground support role also. For a specific bomber role, the Arado234 was in development. The only limiting factor that a jet bomber request could have had was the limited supply of the jet engine that both of the mentioned aircraft shared.

amazing, thank you

WOW just thinking about all the tech that came out of ww2 in the 1930's to 1940's it's just amazing. I would love to see like a list of all the new stuff that came from it, I think it would be a pretty big list.

A jet engine is an internal combustion engine. The definition of an IC engine is to use the fuel and the air mixture themselves to generate power (compared with the steam engine, which uses an external source i.e. water to channel the energy to generate power. Which is an external combustion engine). A jet engine has all the processes a piston engine has. But it is separated into 4 different components (compressor, combustor, turbine and exhaust) to perform them simultaneously, rather than doing them in the same chamber one after the other as in a piston engine.

marvelous special episode

Fun fact: in supersonic speeds, the volume/speed relationship inverts. This is why turbojet engines have big air intakes and small exhausts, but ramjet engines have a big cone in the middle of the air intake and big exhausts.

The Arado Ar 234 flew reconnaissance flights over the United Kingdom in 1944 & in 1945; as late as April 1945. Mark Felton has a video about this jet called Nazi Spy Jets- Secret UK missions.

I found your explanation of how a jet engine works an easy to understand video. Thank you for a job well done .

Blazing Combat #4. Me-262 tells the story quite well. Excellent art work

Note. Asking a fighter aircraft to carry bombs wasn't unusual. Many aircraft of the time had a fighter bomber variant. Hitler felt that a high speed bomber during the Allied invasion in the West could be decisive if in sufficient numbers. Able to get in, drop bombs, cause chaos, get out and keep doing it. As it was, the aircraft wasn't ready, or in the numbers that would be needed for June '44.

Nice & fresh content exploring one not so much explored topic of WW2. Congratulations!

Indy explains the working principle like he understands it! Chapeau!

Awesome video

Others mentioned besides Britain and Germany. Japan: The Ishikawajima Ne-20 was Japan's 1st turbo jet engine, based of drawing of the German BMW 003 (competitor of the Junkers Jumo 004 used in the ME262.) The Ne-20 was used in the Nakajima Kikka jet prototype which flew on Aug 7, 1945 - sandwiched between Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombs. Italy: Caproni Campini N.1 prototype jet was power by a motor jet to compress the air instead of a turbine in front of the combustion chamber. It flew on 27 August 1940, but was sloooow. Italian research tried to improve it but stopped with surrender in 1943. USSR: The USSR did invent the Lyulka TR-1 jet engine, but when tested on a US Lend-Lease bomber, it did not work well. Nothing more was done until after the war when the USSR copied captured German Junkers 004 and BMW 003 engines. USA: The first US prototype jet aircraft, the Bell XP-59A Airacomet, flew 2 Oct 1942, but had many, many problems which led to none in combat before the end of the war. The engines were variants based on samples of Whittle's from Britain.

I've stood at the nose of the Me-262 that the US Nat'l Air and Space Museum has on display. It's stunningly beautiful.

Thank you for this episode 🙏

I first knew of the Horten jet bomber through games like Medal of Honor Frontline and Battlefield 1942 Secret Weapons.

As cutting edge as the Me 262 was, adding the necessary hardware for use as a bomber was a minor detail. Personally, I think the Germans did an amazing job getting such an advanced fighter into combat as quick as they did. Korean veterans I've spoken with hated when jets flew ground support missions. The training necessary to be accurate was not there at this stage of the jet plane.

Many people who ask “why didn’t the Allies in WWII jump at the chance to use jets?” tend to ignore the complexities of making major changes like that during a war. All the Boring But Important stuff would be affected: production lines would have had to be re-tooled, workers re-trained, supply chains altered, and raw materials reallocated. Pilots would have had to be re-trained and even after their basic training would lack experience with the new planes. Mechanics and support crews, just as important to flying as the pilots, would also need complete re-training. Of course I'm not denying that it's possible to do that, there are many examples of rapid technological change during the war; but given that they were doing fine without them, the Allies correctly saw jets as something that would be important in a future war, not the current one.

Happy birthday Indy!!!

The Arado 234 was used to bomb the Rhine bridges.

With the way the story often gets told (visionary inventors ignored by stuffy higher-ups), I do wonder what might have happened had either main country here gone 'all in' from the first instance. Would jet aircraft have been the wonder-weapons to win the war early, or would difficulty in pilot training and logistics (after all, you can't reuse any existing factory tooling or manufacturing expertise) have meant ultimately less success than sticking with piston power for as long as they did?

My Grandfather worked at the Landrover plant in the Birmingham area of England during the war as a skilled fitter. Apparently Whittle did some of his work there on the jet engines. Also, I think the Meteor may have entered service before the 262, but I'm no expert. Nice show, thank you for the content.

In Germany and the UK the internal politics of the air ministries held up jet development. Unknown to Whittle there was another gas turbine project underway in the UK in the hands of A A Griffith. Griffith was an engineering scientist of such great reputation that he was asked for an opinion on Whittle's simple design which he rejected as not able to produce enough thrust. Whittle was completely unaware of A A Griffith's involvement. There were other delays in the Whittle engine program particularly the squabble between Whittle and Rover.

Adolf Galland to Hitler: “The future is now old man!”

The Luddites in the RAF and Luftwaffe had very strong competition from the USAAF when it came to jets. In fact the USAAF was probably even more backward than the RAF or Luftwaffe.

Frank Whittle's brilliance and dedication to engineering changed the course of aviation history forever. His invention of the jet engine opened up new horizons in speed and altitude for aircraft, paving the way for modern aviation as we know it today. A true pioneer whose legacy soars with every jet-powered flight

He used kilograms as if it was an imperial unit. That grinds my gears.

05:24 "... the maiden flight of one of the first jet planes in the world, the German made He-178..." The Heinkel He-178 was the first aircraft designed to be powered by a gas turbine It was powered by Hans von Ohain's Heinkel-Hirth HeS-3, the first gas turbine to be the sole power plant of any aircraft. It flew for the first time on 27 August 1939, before any other aircraft powered only be jet propulsion. It's first flight was followed by that of the Heinkel He-280 jet fighter (30 March 1941) and the British Gloster E.28/39 (15 May 1941) With respect I think the He-178 should be recognized as THE first jet plane in the world.

Really great episode! I'm glad you're back to highlighting specific elements of the war.

Excited for more airwar coverage. Wish the channel had more time to discuss the battle for the skies.

It's interesting that the allies also had jets, but rather than swept wings they focused their aerodynamic research on laminar flow, resulting in the P-51 Mustang and Hawker Tempest.

I recall hearing about a German test-pilot who, after his first time flying a jet-powered airplane, stated that he was in a moment experiencing the entire future of aviation.

I do not remember which youtube channel it was, but they asserted that it took 700 man hours to build a jet engine and 4,000 man hours to build a Rolls Royce Merlin.

the 262 could never have impacted the outcome of the war. but itll always remain a milestone in aircraft technology

Thank you for the lesson.

There were bomber projects planned before the jet was presented to hitler, showing there were already ideas at the prototype stages for a bomber 262.

The kilogram is a unit of mass. The newton is a unit of force. The imperial slug is a unit of mass. The pound is a unit of force. Thrust of a jet engine is measured in pounds or newtons.

The Gloster E28/39 was the fourth to fly even after the Italian.

Always been interested in the ME 262.

I can't wait for all the jet warfare content when the Korean War series gets here, one of the historical combat scenarios I am most curious about.

Terry Gilliam is proud - @1:31. Frank Whittle gave his tech to the U.S. - specifically General Electric, in 1941?

Really enjoyed this special. If you are ever looking for a historical perspective of early jets, I would recommend seeing if you could get some input from Dr. Thomas Barber. He is a Prof. Emeritus from the University of Connecticut. I recommend him because he is (or was as of a year ago) still aware/active and just a few years ago gave a 'history of the jet engine' presentation that included Christmas photos of himself, Whittle, and Messerschmitt at his home in the '70s. A bit unhinged, but one of my favorite presentations.

Thanks!

Hang on, hang on! The Gloster Meteor did make it in time for the war and entered service only shortly after the Me-262 in 1944. This is the first time I've been a bit disappointed in this channel's accuracy!

Thank you.

great video!

The Mk XIV Spitfire was only about 34 mph slower than the 262 in level flight and faster in a dive. The 262 only went to around 450 mph, or the pilot was in trouble. The makers said it went to 550 mph, no one else reached that. 262 pilots were told not to go over 450 mph as stability was affected.

Great video. But about the delays on Me-262, 'Military History Visualized' made an excellent research on the matter.

There's an almost forgotten moment in the history of jet engine design that happened in Spain just before the Spanish Civil War. Military engineer Virgilio Leret had a prototype of the jet engine by 1935. He was killed by the fascists in the early stages of the fascist coup that lead to the war. His wife, Carlota O'Neill, was able to smuggle the designs to British commander James Dickson in 1940, hoping it would help the allied war effort against the nazis.

Don’t worry about those bomber modifications, they couldn’t make enough jet engines to rule the sky. 10 hours continuous running is useful, but they needed replacing after 25 hours of flight time 😹

The Gloster Meteor did have it's World War II uses. They intercepted many V-1 flying bombs for example which it's high speed allowed it to do much more easily that it's piston powered contemporaries, although they did have trouble with the guns jamming but that was not exactly the fault of the jet engines themselves. However the Meteor and it's technology were so closely guarded by the RAF that a directive was made prohibiting it's deployment outside of the British isles so there was no way a Meteor could fall into enemy hands whether by crashing or being shot down behind their lines. Adolf Galland it's also worth noting flew with the Argentinian air force after the war too and they were equipped with Gloster Meteors which he got to fly himself. To paraphrase his opinion on the aircraft, the Me262 was a better aircraft but the British engines were far superior, probably due to war time shortages faced by the designers of the German engines in the 262.

I love these little specials

My dad landed in France right after The Battle of the Bulge. He ended up in Austria on VE day. He was studying engineering when Uncle Sam grabbed him when he turned 18 in 1943 (part of the ASTP Program). But he ended up as 'canon fodder', as he put it (mortars). Anyways, he was taking some POWs to a camp when he heard and saw his first Me-262s and he was stunned. A) Didn't have any props on them, B) It had the wrong marking on the wings. The engineer in him knew exactly what it was and it shook him. He later saw rows and rows of Me-262s parked along the Autobahns. He said if Hitler didn't insist on making a bomber out of it, the air war would have turned ugly for the Allies. Maybe have prolonged the War for a year or two.

*Jet facts:* • To a thermodynamicist, jets aren't too different from piston engines. Both have a thermodynamic cycle (suck, squeeze, bang, blow) in which air is compressed, fuel injected and ignited, and the resulting high-pressure combusted gas pushes the engine along. Indeed, jet engines have a compression ratio, as do car engines, and just like in cars, the higher it is the more efficient. • The bypass ratio is the proportion of the air accelerated by the engine which bypasses the compressor. Since the thrust increases only linearly with the speed added to the air by the engine, but the energy needed to do so increases quadratically, it's more efficient to increase the thrust by accelerating more air than by accelerating the same amount of air to a greater speed. So a higher bypass ratio is more efficient. However, it is inappropriate in supersonic jets, and it requires bigger turbine blades which can withstand greater centrifugal forces/stress. This is why old jets and supersonic jet engines are thinner than modern civilian jets. • Because the turbine and compressor blades have to be so strong (with high temperatures and pressures, plus centrifugal forces), one of the main limitations to jet design is materials science. Nowadays, each blade is typically made from a single metal crystal/grain. • Civilian jet engines are often rented out nowadays, instead of being just another part bought with the plane.

Oh boy! A bonus episode! I thought we were lucky when we got an episode by the Adorable Astrid earlier this week but now an Indy Special Episode! Be still my heart! Keep up the great work!

Military Aviation History has debunked what Galland said that turning the Me262 into a fighter bomber as it was required for all fightera at that tine. It also wasn't that an issue. It also is debatable if the jeta would have been a war winner if produced earlier as the engine had a far lower MTBF than a modern one.

well done

I have to add something to this. The first jet engine plane was Coanda 1910.

Very enjoyable and well presented. Thanks.

The early jet age is one of the most exciting times in aviation history. The people who made it happen would have grown up in the wood-and-fabric biplane era. Think what that must have been like for them to see airplanes advance to this point, less than forty years after the Wright Brother's first flight.

There is a replica 262 flying in Europe. It has popped up on a few Instagrams.

It was an informative and scientific introduction of jet engine development during WW2 by allies and Germany...

I believe the great appeal of jet engines was they ran on kerosene and offered at the time the same performance of piston engines which ran on highly refined distillates. Logistically that is a team come true and having worked around 130 octane Avgas its volatility is always in the back of your mind.

I don’t think the me262 would have made such a difference in this point of the war. If it was deployed the allies would have that on top of it’s targeting list of things to bomb.