4 minute read
BOOK REVIEW
What if?
Jet Man: The Making and Breaking of Frank Whittle,
Genius of the Jet Revolution by Duncan Campbell-Smith Head of Zeus, 2020
ON A STORMY
November evening in 2018, I drove from Bristol to Rugby to stay the night at Brownsover Hall Hotel. I had booked a place to attend a lecture there the following day, on the life and career of the British inventor and aviator Sir Frank Whittle, to be presented by his son, Ian, a former RAF and airline pilot. The lecture was to be held in the very room that had been his father’s office during and immediately after the Second World War.
After breakfast, I drove into Coventry, where I am a Freeman in recognition of my ‘servitude’ as an indentured apprentice in and near the city. I found my way to the suburb of Earlsdon, where I stood for a short while before a small terraced house that bore a small plaque above the front window, marking it as Sir Frank’s birthplace.
My interest in the life and times of this great British innovator stems from the fact that I regard him as having laid the foundations for my lifetime career in gas turbine design. I own several of his biographies, but was still pleased to read Duncan Campbell-Smith’s new tome.
Jet Man provides a very readable, authoritative and unbiased insight into Whittle’s life and work between 1928 and 1948. The book has been thoroughly researched by the author, who goes into considerable detail; at times he gives an almost dayby-day account of the trials and tribulations that Whittle experienced while dealing with a highly sceptical bureaucracy. With a career lifetime in gas turbine design behind me, I would have preferred to see more technical detail of the design issues and development problems that Whittle encountered; however, to do justice to this work would probably require another volume.
In November 1929, the former RAF boy apprentice was given short shrift for his revolutionary ideas by a man who had also been considering the possibility of using a gasturbine device to drive an aeroplane propeller. A decade later, that same man, AA Griffith, was still pursuing a complex concept that had yet to work. In contrast, Whittle, with relatively little in the way of funding, had demonstrated a working prototype of his simple turbojet.
Even with the evidence of progressive improvements through three rebuilds, there were sceptics, among them Major George Bulman, who continued to be opposed to the accelerated development of Whittle’s engine, more than likely because of the negative experience he’d had with a disastrous engine project, the ‘Dragonfly’, at the end of the First World War. Nevertheless, his antipathy persisted, even after the Gloster E.28/39 ‘Pioneer’ flew successfully in 1941, becoming Britain’s first jetengined aircraft, and design was proceeding on the Gloster ‘Meteor’, which was to be powered by two of Whittle’s engines.
Bulman’s opposition was clearly misplaced. Whittle’s W.1 engine, which powered the first flight of the E.28/39 in 1941, had a higher thrust-toweight ratio, was more efficient, had considerably better handling and was far more reliable than the axial flow engines that powered the Luftwaffe’s much-vaunted Me262 in 1944.
Bulman was also implicated in the duplicitous behaviour of the Rover Car Company, which was contracted
Frank Whittle in 1946 during a lecture tour
for production manufacture of the Whittle W.2B engine. This engine, with significant changes relative to its predecessors, suffered from a problem that continues to be the bane of all gas turbine engineers to this day – a phenomenon known as ‘surging’. The eventual solution, the so-called No.13 Diffuser, was validated after intensive development work.
Rover had stealthily incorporated design changes that they hadn’t divulged to Whittle and they failed to deliver a flight-standard engine after more than two years’ work. Their involvement ended with the handing over of their Clitheroe and Barnoldswick factories to RollsRoyce, in exchange for Rolls-Royce’s tank engine works in Nottingham. Rolls-Royce went on to successfully produce their equivalent of the W.2B as the ‘Welland’. This was followed by the development of Rover’s ‘straight through’ version of the W.2B, which became the ‘Derwent I’.
As Jet Man’s subtitle – and the above examples – indicate, Whittle had a difficult time of it in the UK. Even after his achievements were recognised, he was treated in an appalling manner here in the UK, to the extent that he spent his last and, perhaps, happiest years in the USA.
Campbell-Smith pointedly includes in his prologue the introductory and concluding paragraphs from a memorandum regarding a jetpropelled interceptor fighter, dated 25 October 1938, that was submitted to the Air Ministry by Squadron Leader F Whittle. Campbell-Smith asks his readers to imagine what might have been had Whittle’s genius been recognised and a secret jet engine and jet fighter programme been initiated before the war. What if a few squadrons of Gloster ‘Pioneers’ had been in service during the summer of 1940 as the Blitz began? What if? ■
