#jetengine
#aviationhistory
#militaryhistory
#aviationdocumentary
The story of Frank Halford, the de Havilland Goblin jet engine the Vampire, and of the secret Rover jet engine Frank Whittle wasn't told about.
Part 2 and Part 3 of The Birth of the British Jet Engine.
I was going to post these as two separate videos, but on reflection, they work better as one continuous one.
Late in 1940, two of Halford's engineers were shown round a car factory in Luton and spotted something they were never meant to see.
A few weeks later Halford was asked whether he'd build a jet engine of his own. 248 days after the first drawings, the H.1 ran on the test bed at Hatfield, and within a year two of them had taken the first Gloster Meteor into the air.
Meanwhile, up in Lancashire, Rover were building Whittle's W.2B and quietly building an engine of their own on the side.
The men at Waterloo Mill called it the Whizzer. It ended with Rover's jet work changing hands over dinner at a pub in Clitheroe, and Rolls-Royce in the jet engine business.
Along the way there's a violin bow, some tree trunks, a biscuit factory, a tunnel under the Thames, and a test pilot pulled halfway into a jet intake.
This one is ad-free for the first 72 hours.
No YouTube ads at all, so put the kettle on and settle in.
Part 1, Frank Whittle and Power Jets: https://youtu.be/CvZUeZ60lGI
Thanks to:
The de Havilland Aircraft Museum.
The Science Museum, London
RAF Cosford
RAF Hendon
Midland Air Museum
Gatwick Aviation Museum.
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CHAPTERS
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Intro: 00:00:00
Part 2:
00:04:00 Chapter 10 - Accidental Jet Man "Frank Halford"
00:43:54 Chapter 11 - Safe Pair of Hands "The H.1 design"
01:03:43 Chapter 12 - Keep Them Burning "Combustion"
01:12:29 Chapter 13 - The Singing Engine "Running the H.1"
Part 3:
01:20:14 Chapter 14 - The Whizzers "The fourth engine, Rover"
01:50:04 Chapter 15 - Somebody Else's Lady
Further reading
Philip Birtles – Postwar Military Aircraft: de Havilland Vampire, Venom and Sea Vixen
David S. Brooks – Vikings at Waterloo
George Bulman (ed. M. C. Neale) – An Account of Partnership: Industry, Government and the Aero-Engine (Rolls-Royce Heritage Trust, 2002)
Duncan Campbell-Smith – Jet Man (2023)
Ronald W. Clark – Tizard (Methuen, 1965)
Anthony Furse – Wilfrid Freeman: The Genius Behind Allied Survival and Air Supremacy 1939–1945 (Spellmount, 1999)
Hermione Giffard – Making Jet Engines in World War II
John Golley & Bill Gunston – Genesis of the Jet: Frank Whittle and the Invention of the Jet Engine
A. A. Griffith – Report on the Whittle Jet Propulsion System, RAE Report No. 3545 (1937)
W. A. Harrison – de Havilland Vampire (Warpaint Series No. 27)
Ernst Heinkel (ed. J. Thorwald) – He 1000 (Hutchinson, 1956)
Sir Stanley Hooker – Not Much of an Engineer
A. J. Jackson & R. T. Jackson – de Havilland Aircraft since 1909
Barry Jones – British Experimental Turbojet Aircraft
H. I. H. Saravanamuttoo, G. F. C. Rogers & H. C
