Word: ramjet
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...Hungry Speed Animal. Above Mach i, thinks the NACA, another and stranger type of jet engine begins to come into the picture. This is the "ram-jet," which used to be called the "flying stovepipe" before its proper design was found to be enormously difficult. The ramjet does look simple. It is a hollow cylinder open at both ends and subtly shaped inside. When it is moving rapidly, the air coming in the nose is compressed as if by the compressor of the turbojet. Fuel is burned near the point of highest compression. The energy added to the compressed...
...jets develop some power at low subsonic speeds, but they are efficient only above Mach i. For speeds even higher, it is possible to design a 20-inch-diameter ramjet that will develop (theoretically) as much as 30,000 h.p. They use a corresponding amount of fuel. Northrop's turbine expert Tom Quayle calls the ramjet "the hungry speed animal...
...enthusiastic about ram-jets. They think of them chiefly as power plants for guided missiles, those "uninhabited aircraft" with which warring continents might blast one another to rubble from different sides of the earth. Super-enthusiasts think they may have a peacetime future also. A speed-hungry traveler, ramjet propelled at Mach 3, may start from New York at noon and flying west would see the sun sink rapidly in the east. He'd be in Honolulu in time for breakfast the same...
...speed record (650.6 m.p.h.). Douglasmen hoped that it would make air history by breaking through the sonic wall-i.e., by flying faster than the speed of sound (about 765 m.p.h. at sea level). ¶ In St. Louis, the McDonell Aircraft Corp. put the world's first ramjet helicopter* through its paces for the U.S. Air Force. In test flights, the 310-lb. "flying bike" readily lifted an additional 300 Ibs. and attained a speed of 50 m.p.h. To the Air Force, it looked like just the thing for short-range observation work, artillery spotting and courier service...
...missiles through the sonic barrier. So they had, but their missiles were even less airplanelike than Vicky. Even the initially controlled V-2 (which reaches nearly five times the speed of sound) is not supported by the air, as a genuine airplane must be. The U.S. Navy's ramjet, or "flying stovepipe," is merely a power plant boosted into the air for a brief, uncontrolled flight...