Jet engine Essay Example For Students

Jet engine Essay The Jet Engine and the Revolution in Leisure Air Travel, 1960-1975 Peter Lyth Air transport for European tourists got off to a shaky start in the late 1920s. 1But it was to be thirty years before leisure air travel was to appeal to anyone but the rich and adventurous. High cost, fear of flying and the absence of toilets in early airliners (an unfortunate combination) were the main deterrents; the unpressurized aircraft of the inter-war years were noisy, slow and not especially comfortable despite the efforts of some airlines to make aircraft cabins resemble the first-class state-rooms of an ocean liner. This changed fundamentally after 1958: with the introduction into airline service of the Boeing 707, the Douglas DC-8 and the de Havilland Comet 4, aircraft were capable of flying fast, high and with hitherto unknown smoothness. The jet age had arrived. This paper considers this age and its impact on tourism in the 1960s and 1970s. It argues that while the revolution in European leisure air travel that took place in these years was obviously the result of social and economic change (more disposable income, a greater propensity to take fore ign holidays and the entry of new capital into the independent airline industry), there was also a critical additional factor. Thiswas the breakthrough in transport technology represented by the jet engine and it is on this aeronautical artifact that the papers main focus will lie. I Technological change was crucial to the process of economic and social modernisation in both the 19thand 20thcenturies. New technologies of power generation, manufacturing, transport and communications changed the world and shrunk time and space. What is generally termed Fordism grew out of the mass production of automobiles to encompass a whole array of practices and institutions that now underpin modern Western society2. In the wake of Fordist mass production, a Fordist lifestyle of mass consumption set in after 1950 and this included the international tourist industry, the single largest and fastest-growing industry in the world3. The technological change that triggered and accompanied this explosion in tourist activity was the introduction of the jet engine. Indeed the jet engine has been as vital a part of social modernisation as mass tourism itself. The jet engines evolution and dominance in aerospace propulsion since 1950 is traditionally described in terms of the transfer of technology from military to civilian usage: the turbo-jet grew out of the Second World War and the preparation for it, and was later installed in civil transport aircraft. Certainly all the early jet engines were intended for military aircraft and, as one of the leading researchers in the field has pointed out, the development of turbo-jets is a striking example of the commercialization of military technology.4The point to be made here, however, is that the progression of jet engine use from military to commercial aircraft was not just a case of technological determinism; there is also a social dimension. International tourism became a mass industry in the 1960s because it became fast it became what o ne might term speed tourism (the qualities of which we will return to later) and it became fast because of jet aircraft. The theoretical background to this proposition lies in the idea of the social construction of technology pioneered by the sociologists Wiebe Bijker and Trevor Pinch. According to the social constructionist view, technological change is socially determined rather than technologically inevitable, in other words, it is social rather than technological processes that lead to a sole dominant meaning for a technical artifact. Initially a broad flexibility ofinterpretation will attach itself to a piece of technology let us say the jet engine but eventually, through action within the social and economic environment in which the artifact exists, a single meaning emerges5. The jet engine was conceived in an entirely military setting, its purpose was ill-________________________________________Page 22defined but seen more or less in terms of propelling fighter aircraft to higher speeds and altitudes. It was only in the late 1940s that the first engineers began to consider the possibility of commercial airliners being powered by jet engines and this was at a time when many scientists seriously doubted that human passengers would be able to withstand the strains of travelling at speeds in excess of 500 miles per hour. What changed the jet engines social environment was the advent of mass tourism in the late 1950s and 1960s, in particular the dramatic increase in foreign holidays taken by northern Europeans. Many Britons, for example, took their first holiday abroad at this time; and for the average working or lower-middle class Briton abroad was still an intimidating concept. The Inclusive Tour by air, promised direct travel to a beachside hotel on the Mediterranean, in what amounted to an hermetically-sealed tube, without the risk of encountering foreigners en route6. But the success of the sealed tube approach to travel depended on speed only a jet aircraft travelling at high speed could make such a journey tolerable. With the speed provided by jet engines, the level of passenger comfort on board commercial airliners was less important, individual passenger space could be reduced and more seats crammed into the cabin. This, in turn, led to economies in unit operating costs for airline. I want to suggest therefore that jet engines not only changed the speed and size of the international tourist industry, they also changed its cost and its nature. As it became faster, tourism became cheaper and moved down market. Indeed, it became cheaper because it became faster. When civil airliners were relatively slow in the early 1950s, with an average cruising speed of around 250 miles per hour, they had to be comfortable luxurious even. When they got faster, passenger comfort could safely be dispensed with. The revolution in international tourism brought about by the jet engine not only changed spatial relationships between tourist gene rating and recipient nations, it has also changed the travel experience itself. Tourists no longer crossed a landscape on route to their destination, the approach was no longer gradual, and there was no need for the slightest degree of acclimatisation. Instead instant departure was followed by instant arrival. The tourist overflew everything and remained ignorant and oblivious of what lay between his point of departure and his destination. This might have led to severe culture shock as the stark contrast between, for example, a suburb of Manchester and Palma de Majorca, sank in. But this seems not to have happened. The speed tourism born out of the jet engine imparts to the traveller a sense of superiority which makes acclimatisation unnecessary. Speed tourists arrive as masters overtheir destinations. The historian David Nye has noted of tourist destinations and landscapes that the tourist gaze is embedded in technological structure, so that the modern tourist exerts his or her ma stery over sites and makes them man-made; where the 19thcentury tourist gazed at Niagara Falls or an Alpine peak, and allowed himself to be uplifted by nature, the modern tourist looks at a landscape and thinks in terms of speed and immediacy: the strongest possible experience in a minimum oftime.7It is the argument of this paper that this sense of speed and immediacy, this sense of mastery over tourist destinations, originated with the jet engine. II Although the turbo-jet engine was proposed, in theory, by the British Royal Air Force officer Frank Whittle in a patent he took out in 1930, it was the German physicist Hans von Ohain who built and ran the first jet engine with the help of the Heinkel aircraft company in 1935 and flew the first jet plane in 1939. Broadly speaking, the Germans were ahead of the British up until the middle of the Second World War with both the Junkers and BMW firms developing engines. Whittles first engine, the W1, powered a jet aircraft in 1941. By the end of the war both Britain and Germany had operational jet fighters the Gloster Meteor with Rolls Royce Derwent engines and the Messerschmitt Me.262 with Junkers Jumo 004s. The German engines were more advanced in that they had axial-flow compressors,the technology that was to form the basis of post-war jet engine development. The Americans were behind the British and Germans but caught up after they secured a Whittle engine in 1941 and both the General Electric and Pratt Whitney companies were able to copy it8. After the war, with the Germans eliminated from all competition in engine and airframe manufacturing, ________________________________________Page 33the British tried to consolidate their advantage in jets. The problem was that although they led the Americans in engine construction, they were well behind the United States in airframe design. This weakness showed itself with tragic consequences when Britain flew the first commercial jet airliner, the de Havilland Comet 1, in 1952. The Comets short life ended with a series of crashes in 1954; it was not the beginning of the jet age as some Britons thought, but an unfortunate false start. The Comet was,of course, much faster than the fastest piston-engined airliners of the time the Lockheed Super Constellation and the Douglas DC-7C, with their complicated radial engines but it was too small (36 passengers) to represent anything approaching a vehicle for mass transport. The fulfilment of that task had to wait for another four years until the Boeing 707 entered service with Pan American Airways in 1958. The 707 the first big jet passenger aircraft was powered by the innovatory and highly successful Pratt ; Whitney JT.3C, which had undergone a long period of development in military aircraft as the J-57. In Britain, the Rolls Royce equivalent to the JT.3C was the Avon, which powered a number of military types in Europe as well as the Comet 4 and the French Caravelle twin-jet airliner. The problem with the first generation of axial-flow jet engines like the JT.3C and the Avon was that they were noisy and costly to operate. Direct operating costs for advanced piston-engined passenger aircraft like the DC-7C had fallen to a point where they were close one US cent per seat-mile in the late1950s and initially jet airliners were unable to compete with this, although their total unit costs were less because the much greater capacity of the 707 and its Douglas equivalent, the DC-8. What changedthis, and brought the real commercial breakthrough for jet passenger aircraft, was the development in the 1960s of the by-pass engine9. The great merits of the by-pass engine to airline managers was that itadded additional thrust to the jet, lowered fuel consumption and was substantially quieter than straight jets like the JT.3C with their deafening whine. The first engine to incorporate the by-pass feature was the Rolls Royce Conway, which had a low by-pass ratio of about 5 per cent. It entered se rvice from 1960 on the Boeing 707, later on the Vickers-Armstrong VC-10. Interestingly, Pratt ; Whitney initially opposed the by-pass idea, but relented when their archival GE threatened to providethe new engines to Pratts customers and they added a front-fan to the JT.3C, creating the JT.3D turbofan10. The by-pass engine formed the basis of the commercial jet revolution in the airline industry. Their greater power meant that more passengers could be carried because bigger aircraft could be built around the new engines and existing ones stretched. The jet airliners which appeared in the 1960s the Boeing 727 tri-jet and the Boeing 737 and Douglas DC-9 twinjets would not have been possible without them. Soon the three main engine manufacturers were going much further and increasing the by-pass ratio from the modest ranges of the Conway and the JT.3D to over 50 per cent, using huge front fans on the new generation of civil engines which finally entered service in the 1970s: Pratt Whi tneys JT.9D, the GE CF6 and the Rolls Royce RB.211. Not all civil jet engine development, however, went in the direction of economy and quietness. In Britain the Bristol-Siddeley Company had built the Olympus engine a powerful straight jet with an afterburner for the Avro Vulcan V-bomber. In the 1960s it was chosen to power an airliner that was a veritable symbol of elitist travel: the supersonic Anglo-French Concorde. So, while the technology of the by-pass engine heralded air transports coming-of-age as a mass transport mode, the Concorde andits military-style Olympus engines followed an alternative path and revived the old notion that the richshould be able to travel faster than the poor. The Concordes Olympus engines not only used vast quantities of fuel but they were appallingly noisy. In operation with British Airways and Air France from the mid-1970s, the Concordes engines were such an environmental hazard that they nearly destroyed the airlines chances of operating commerc ially when the Americans refused to allow the plane to land in New York. Although it was undoubtedly an instance of bold technological initiative and collaboration, the Concorde seems to have proved to be a false path in aeronautical history11. Bycontrast, the by-pass engine was the catalyst for a mass transport revolution and the rapid expansion ofthe international tourist industry. Which gender is more likely to drive after drinkin Essay26What entrepreneurs like Langton and Williams had grasped apparently well in advance of the flag-carriers management was the economic and also the social significance of jet aircraft. They had understood that if you carry passengers fast, you dont need to carry them in great comfort. Luxury carriage, the traditional product of the old scheduled airlines, was only necessary when aircraft were driven by piston-engines and therefore inherently slow. Jets brought speed and lower prices, but they also bought more spartan service, more democratic and proletarian conditions on board. The jet engine, and particularly the by-pass technology which began its development in the 1960s, was the catalyst by which the air transport ________________________________________Page 99industry matured into the mass service undertaking it is today. It was the key artifact in the transformation of the airline business from a travel opportunity for the adventurous elite into a transport industry for the masses. 1In 1928 Imperial Airways did launch what appears to have been the first inclusive package tour by air,but at a price (435 per person) and with an itinerary which was clearly targeted at a wealthy and exclusive clientele. It was a winter holiday comprising a 35-day tour of France, Spain, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria and Italy, and included de luxe accommodation in the best hotels all along the route. Imperial Airways, About the First Winter Air Cruise, November 1927. 2See David HARVEY, The Condition of Postmodernity, Oxford, Blackwell, 1989. 3In 1996 the World Travel ; Tourism Council put the value of goods and services attributable to tourism at US$3.6 trillion, or over 10 per cent of gross global product. The Economist, 10 January 1998, Travel and Tourism Survey, p. 3. 4Virginia P. DAWSON, The American Turbojet Industry and British Competition in William M. LEARY(ed.), From Airships to Airbus: the History of Civil and Co mmercial Aviation, Vol.1, Washington DC, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995, p. 127. Two cases will suffice to illustrate the point: the American Pratt ; Whitney J-57 and the British Rolls Royce Avon axial-flow engines were equally at home in jet airliners (Boeing 707, de Havilland Comet) as they were in jet bombers (Boeing B-52, Vickers Valiant). 5Trevor PINCHand Wiebe BIJKER, The Social Construction of facts and artifacts or how sociology of science and the sociology of technology might benefit each other in Social Studies of Science, 14, 1984, pp. 399-441. 6Support for this notion appears to come from a survey carried out in 1967 in which 71 per cent of respondents claimed that the attraction of Inclusive Tours lay not only in the holidays low price but the fact that they did not have to make any individual arrangements or deal with any foreign officials. British National Travel Survey, 1967, BTA January 1968. 7David E. NYE, Narratives and Space, Technology and the construction of American culture, University of Exeter Press, 1997, pp. 22-23. 8For the race to get the jet engine operational see Edward W. CONSTANTII, The Origins of the Turbojet Revolution, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1980, esp. pp. 178-207. Also helpful is Ronald MILLERand David SAWERS, The Technical Development of Modern Aviation, London, 1968, pp. 157-161. 9By-pass engines add a stream of cold air, by-passing the compressor and turbine, and joining the gas jet at the rear. This addition of colder, slower-moving air increases the mass of the jet and thus its thrust. These engines have a ducted fan at the front which, unlike an open propeller, can spin at the slower speed of the turbine hence turbofan engine. See, for example, John SNOW, Airliner Propulsion in Philip JARRETT(ed.), Modern Air Transport.Worldwide AirTransport from 1945 to the Present, London, 2000, pp. 62-64. 10John NEWHOUSE, The Sporty Game, Knopf, New York, 1982, p. 112. 11The Economist, 19 August 2000, Time and Money: Why Concorde was never the right way to speed up air travel. In July 2000 an Air France Concorde crashed outside Paris, killing over a hundred people. The type was immediately withdrawn by Air France and subsequently by British Airways. 12The package tour was more or less invented by British independent airlines in conjunction with British tour operators, see Annual Report of the British Independent Air Transport Association (BIATA), 1967, p. 18. The president of BIATA in 1967, the organisations last year, was J.E.D.Williams, the head of Britannia Airways. 13 International Tourism Quarterly (ITQ), Issues in the News, 2. 1971, Economist Intelligence Unit, London, p. 2. 14Allan M.WILLIAMSand Gareth SHAW, Western European Tourism in Perspective in Allan M.WILLIAMSand Gareth SHAW(eds), Tourism and Economic Development, London ; New York, ________________________________________Page 10101988, p. 13. 15Rigas DOGANIS, Flying Off Course: The Economics of International Airlines, 2 nd ed. London, 1991, p. 174. 16See Alan SNUDDEN, Success in a package in Journal of the Institute of Transport January/February 1990. 17F.F.HIGGINS, Tour Operating: Some Implications for Air Transport, 15thAnglo-American Aeronautical Conference, London, 31 May 2 June 1977, Royal Aeronautical Society. 18McDonnell Douglas Market Research Report, The European Charter Airlines, 2ndedition, Worldwide Horizons, Market Research Department, Douglas Aircraft Company, March 1977, MR-report, C1-800-4275, p. 1. 19Measured by passenger-kilometre, charter airlines were likely to be in front because the average charter flight is longer than the average scheduled flight; the latter usually being between north European capitals. 20See J.E.D.WILLIAMS, Holiday Traffic by Air in Institute of Transport Journal, May 1968, p. 372. 21 Douglas PEARCE, Tourism Today: A Geographical Analysis, New York, 1987, pp. 86-93. 22Geoffrey CUTHBERT, Flying to the Sun. Quarter century of Britannia Airways, Europes lead ing leisure airline, 1988, pp. 11-45. 23 Civil Aviation Authority figures quoted in ITQ, No.3, 1985, Issues in the News; 18. The other major carriers were Dan Air, Monarch and BAs charter company British Air Tours. 24Reported in ITQ, Issues in the News, 2, 1971, p. 5. 25Fares from London to Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels, Copenhagen, Frankfurt, Milan, Munich, Nice, Stockholm and Zurich were cut by half, while the peak-season fare to Rome was reduced from 92.30 to 41.15. ITQ, Issues in the News, 1, 1971, p. 4. 26 This reassessment process also took place in government, see the musings of a senior British civil servant in R. BURNS, What are Airlines for ? in Institute of Transport Journal, May 1969, pp. 127-139.