With plenty of pilots and aircraft on hand following the end of the war, the commercial airliner quickly became a familiar sight in the skies over America.
While surplus aircraft such as the Douglas DC-3 (above) assumed important roles in the early days of commercial flight, the advent of more advanced and specialized airliners such as the Lockheed Constellation brought the flying public into the airplane in droves.
The days of propeller powered commercial aircraft such as the Douglas DC-6 were numbered with the advent of the jet engine. Borrowing on wartime technology first deployed in the Messerschmitt Me-262 and the Gloster Meteor, American aircraft designers asserted themselves in the post war period with the first airplane capable of achieving level supersonic flight, the Bell XS-1.
The idea of attaching a jet engine to an airplane had been an old one with patents for various forms of jet propulsion being granted as early as teh Wright brother's era. But the basics for advancing this technology, along with the metal to construct turbine rotors, did not yet exist. Early jet propulsion work took place in England and Germany during the war, but the German contribution to jet propulsion would be greater appreciated in the postwar years. American advancement in jet engine technology is indebted to the voluntary contribution of German scientists after the war, as well as to the capture of German scientific documents. America dominated the field of jet-powered aircraft technology well up until the early part of the 1960s.
The U.S. Air Force had entered the jet age in 1942 with the successful flight of the Bell XP-59A.
By war's end, the Lockheed P-80A Shooting Star had made its initial test flights and in 1946 crossed the United States at an average speed of 550 miles per hour.
North American first flew the F-86 Sabre in 1947 and a year later attained supersonic speed, not in level flight, but in a dive. Also in late 1947, Major Charles E. Yeager became the first man to exceed the speed of sound in level flight in the Bell XS-1.
In 1948 the Boeing B-47 Stratojet, with its swept-wing design powered by six turbojets, appeared. The benefit of applying jet power to a bomber was immediately evident, as payloads of 20,000 pounds could now be carried in smaller and faster aircraft.
The newly applied jet techcnology received its first combat experience a mere five years after the end of World War II. The first jet-against-jet combat took place in the skies over Korea in Novemnber 1950, when a Soviet Mig-15 and an American Lockheed F-80 Shooting Star locked horns in combat.
The U.S. launched the Century series of fighters that controlled the skies for almost ten years. The McDonnel F-101 Voodoo, for almost a decade the fastest plane in the world, topping out at 1,200 miles per hour.
The Convair F-106 Delta Dagger, the Lockheed F-104 Starfighter, and the Republic F-105 Thunderchief, all capable of achieving Mach 2 speed (twice the speed of sound).
The 1950s added three planes to the American arsenal of jet-powered aircraft. The Boeing B-52 Stratofortress served as the chief Strategic Air Command bomber for the great part of two decades.
The McDonnell-Douglas F-4 Phantom series began its reign as king of the fighters in 1958, with tremendous climbing ability and speed well in excess of Mach 2.
The Lockheed U-2 reconnaissance craft, traveled at 500 miles per hour at 65,000 feet and led all other aircraft in its ability to fly undetected on intelligence-gathering missions.
In 1955 Pan American Airlines shocked the industry by announcing its goal of replacing the entire fleet of propeller-driven aircraft with jet-powered airplanes, but putting the Boeing 707 into service for the first time. Powered by Pratt and Whitney J57 jet engines, the 707 quickly put the excitement back into commercial flying. Carrying up to 150 passengers more than 2,000 miles, the 707 cruised at 575 miles per hour, at 30,000 feet.
No comments:
Post a Comment