Turbojet

A turbojet is an airbreathing jet engine that compresses incoming air, burns fuel with it in a combustion chamber, and expands the hot gases through a turbine and propelling nozzle to produce thrust for aircraft. The British engineer Frank Whittle filed his first patent for a centrifugal-compressor turbojet in England in 1930, while the German physicist Hans von Ohain independently developed an axial-flow turbojet design in the same decade; von Ohain's engine powered the Heinkel He 178 to the first turbojet-powered flight on August 27, 1939, and Whittle's own design entered operational service in the Gloster Meteor in 1944, alongside the German Messerschmitt Me 262. An earlier patent for a similar concept had been filed by the French engineer Maxime Guillaume in 1921 but was never built. Turbojets went on to power early supersonic fighters and the Concorde, and their simple, high-exhaust-speed design remains common in cruise missiles.