The first jet airplane - 1910 / Coanda

[VNugget]

You can read about it in detail here, but here is the summary.

Apparently, the first jet airplane (kind of) was developed and flown NOT during WWII, and Heinkel et al. had nothing to do with it. It was built and flown in 1910 by Henri Coanda, a Romanian aerodynamicist who studied in Germany and France. Apparently the reason it doesn’t “count” is that it did not use a turbine – the compressor was turned by a plain old 4-stroke reciprocating engine, running at 1000 RPM and geared at a 1:4 ratio. (The “throttle” was an iris/camera aperture-like opening in front of the compressor.)

It crashed on its first flight, interestingly enough because Coanda was not a pilot. He merely wished to test the engine, but it was so powerful that the plane took off. Further development ceased due to a lack of funding.

WHY IS THIS NOT IN THE HISTORY BOOKS?

But wait – it gets better!

As a byproduct of his development, discovered the real reason wings develop lift at high lift coefficients (called, you guessed it, the Coanda effect) by observing that the flames from the jet hugged the fuselage instead of deflecting to the side, like he intended with a system of curved baffles. This is, curiously enough, missing from every aerodynamics textbook and syllabus I have come across.

Very interesting indeed.


edit: More here and here.

 

[EOpilot]

Actually I have seen this in the history books (and you must have seen it somewhere, too, since you're reporting it).

And a jet engine without a turbine section is not a jet engine. It's called a ducted fan.

Revolutionary at the time, but not a jet. Just a really fancy prop.

 

[105viking]

a pulse jet has no turbine, yet is not a ducted fan.

 

[VNugget]

It was not just a fancy prop... the compressor did not just sit there and spin at 4x the engine RPM and provide direct thrust (if that's what you were implying); it actually compressed air into a combustion chamber, where fuel (and exhaust from the recip) were introduced, and.. well.. combusted. Just like any other jet. The only difference is in what’s turning the compressor.


... unless all those pages are wrong, in which case I eat my words.


I found out about it through a series of links when I was looking up the Coanda effect.

My surprise of its lack of fame is genuine... one would expect it to be right up there with the He-178 (well, you don’t hear about the 178 much)/Me262/Spirit of St. Louis/Wright Flyer/Bleriot Monoplane/X1/X15/etc.

edit: I added the word "not" in the first sentence... Jesus what originally came out was dumb. Oops.

 

[fr0g]

a "ducted fan" would imply that the thrust created by the engine would be created by a fan that is surrounded by an enclosure - however, it is clear that most of the thrust created by this engine was from the combustion in the burner stage, independent of the "ducted fan" compressor. I would therefore venture that it was in fact a primitive form of jet engine.

"turbojet engine
n : jet engine in which a turbine drives air to the burner"

or:

"noun: a gas turbine in which the exhaust gases provide the propulsive thrust to drive an aircraft "