Among them was aerospace and in October 1945 Sir Frederick Handley Page, the legendary British aircraft industry pioneer, penned an article for The Engineer outlining how war time developments could translate into civil air transport.
“The war, with its prodigal expenditure of brain and man-hours on the improvement of the aeroplane and its power plant as a fighting machine, has compressed perhaps thirty years of normal technical development into less than six years,” wrote Sir Frederick. “Many of these new technical developments promise much for the future safety, economy, speed, and regularity of air transport. Jet or gas turbine propulsion and its numerous derivatives, rocket power, Radar, laminar flow, and low-drag aerofoils, are all capable of diversion to serve the needs of the transport operator and the user of high-speed travel the world over.”
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In the latter years of WWII the jet engine propelled Germany’s Me 262 and the UK’s Gloster Meteor.
These fighter aircraft had a limited impact during the war, but Sir Frederick noted that if ‘one flies high and fast enough, jet-driven aircraft can be designed to have quite a useful range.”
He added: “The gas turbine, with its power mainly directed to drive a propeller, as with the reciprocating engine, offers for the commercial aircraft a more reasonable fuel consumption, and in comparison with the reciprocating engine gives a greater freedom from vibration and consequent greater comfort to the air passenger. The noise and vibration of the propeller will, however, still remain.”
Taking a great leap forward, Sir Frederick then addressed another form of propulsion that has so far failed to take off in the civil aviation industry.
He wrote: “A little farther from practical achievement, but now no longer to be overlooked as a future engineering possibility, is the controlled use of atomic power.
“The amount of energy released by the ‘fission’ of uranium is approximately 25 million, million foot-pounds per lb of the material. From petrol, combining, of course, with a vastly greater quantity of oxygen from the air, one can only obtain 14-million-foot pounds per lb. In round figures, therefore, the new stuff is at least one million times as good, always provided you have discovered how to make it release its energy slowly and that for this process the weight of the necessary equipment does not offset the saving in fuel.”
Coming down to earth, so to speak, Sir Frederick considered the possibilities afforded by rockets.
“The only transport vehicle if one may so call it, in which great power of a more normal kind has been developed, is the rocket bomb,” he said. “Here for a very short space of time (approximately one minute) over 750,000HP is developed so that the missile may reach the stratosphere and then by its own momentum proceed on its trajectory of approximately 250 miles. The useful load-again, if we may so call the explosive warhead, is only about 2000 lb, so that the weight carried per horsepower is but a small fraction of what more normal forms of transport would carry for the same expenditure of power.”
Going back to compare different eras of aircraft development, Sir Frederick went on to consider the difference between aircraft developed by Handley Page for the two world wars and how a ‘flying wing’ could be key to developing ‘very large aircraft’.
“Our 1918 four-engined [V/1500] bomber, built to bomb Berlin, had a total weight of 30,000 lb, had a wing span of 120ft, and an area of 2,880 square feet. The Halifax, with an all-up load of approximately 70,000lb, has an area of only 1,250 square feet and 104ft. span. On the other hand, the speed of the Halifax is three times that of the V/1500, and its bomb load is ten times greater for the same range. Its engine power is more than four times as great.
“What has happened is that in twenty-five years the aircraft has become denser, occupying much less space and weighing more. Still, in spite of all improvements that are made, as the aircraft gets larger and the span increases, the weight of the structure increases disproportionately, and if very large aircraft are required, relief must be sought in a distribution of the cargo space and cargo spanwise across the wing - a requirement that points to the adoption of the flying wing.”
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