1st Jet Plane

Aged 16, he entered the Royal Air Force (RAF) at Cranwell as an aeroplane trainee, took a doctor's examination as a pilots in 1926 and entered RAF College. In 1928 he earned a name as a go-getter and in 1928 completed a final paper titled Future Developments in Aircraft Design, which dealt with the potential of missile drive.

Coanda's planes drew little attention to themselves, and the engineer remained with the prop technique; although they recognized early that prop would never surmount certain intrinsic restrictions, especially in terms of velocity. Whittle was sent into a hunting wing after completing his degree at RAF Collegiate, and in his free hours he developed the basics of the advanced turbine powerplant.

One flight trainer, struck by his drive concepts, presented him with the Air Ministry and a privately owned jet construction contractor, but both mocked Whittle's concepts as inconvenient. 1930 he patent his jet power unit and founded the Power Jets Ltd. in 1936 to construct and test his invention.

1937 he tried his first jet thruster on the floor. Gloster was awarded a contract by the Ministry of Aviation to Gloster for the construction of a new Power Jet propulsion system and to construct an experiment plane known as the 28/39. May 15, 1941, the jet-powered Gloster-Whittle 28/39 blew out a jet pilot that had been designed by the same UK jet manufacturer who had previously opposed his notions.

When Gloster worked on an airliner ready for battle, Whittle helped the Americans successfully develop a jet pilot prototyp. In 1944, with Whittle's benediction, the UK authorities took over Power Jets Ltd. At this point the Gloster meteor jets were in operation at the RAF and encountered the German Messerschmitt Me 262 in the sky over Europe.