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aerospace industry l engineering
90 Years
of Jet Propulsion
January 2020 marked an important anniversary
for aviation. On 16th January 1930, Englishman
Frank Whittle patented the first jet engine.
Without our knowledge, it was the beginning
of the history of one of the most successful products
of První brněnská strojírna Velká Bíteš, a. s.
In 1930, the jet engine was patented by
an officer of the Royal Air Force (RAF),
Frank Whittle. His drawing included a compressor, a combustion chamber, a turbine
and a nozzle: all basic components used
in jet engines to this day. This type of
propulsion provided significantly more power than even the most powerful piston
engines.
International competition
d
Five years later, German physicist Hans
Joachim Pabst von Ohain started development on a similar design. Having
received strong support from the state administration, Germany won the race and
was the first to get an aircraft propelled
by a jet engine in the air. The first German experimental jet aircraft, Heinkel He 178, took off in 1939, while the British Gloster E.28/29
followed a whole two years
later. The development of
jet engines transformed
the way World War II
was fought and later also changed the landscape of air transport.
PBS is a Czech
flagship
d
Frank Whittle's brilliant invention was, in
part, the reason why
the Czech Republic
became a superpower
in production of aircraft
engines. The Czechoslovak aircraft industry started producing jet engines
after World War II. The only
purely Czech company that
currently develops jet engines
is První brněnská strojírna Velká
Bíteš, a. s. (PBS). Boasting over 200
years of history, the company has been supplying turbine engines to the
world for over 50 years. In the 1970s, the
company started development on air generators and auxiliary power units for starting up aircraft engines. PBS has been developing its own jet engines since 2001.
The first tests of a functional prototype of
special 2020
T+T Technika a trh