Afterburner

An afterburner, called reheat in British usage, is an additional combustion stage fitted to some jet engines, mostly on military supersonic aircraft, that injects extra fuel into the hot exhaust stream downstream of the turbine to burn it and boost thrust for takeoff, combat, or supersonic flight. Because it consumes fuel at a much higher rate than the engine's ordinary dry operation, afterburning is normally used only for brief periods, and pilots refer to unaugmented performance as military power and augmented performance as maximum power. The Italian engineer Secondo Campini's Caproni Campini C.C.2 flew with an early operational reheat system on April 11, 1941, and British and American engineers pursued their own afterburner research soon after, with American work in 1948 producing installations on early jet fighters such as the F-94 Starfire and F-89 Scorpion. Afterburners remain standard equipment on military fighters but are rare on civilian aircraft, notable exceptions being Concorde and the SR-71 Blackbird.