From Skies to Space: The Jet Engine Revolution | Full Science Documentary

foreign that revolutionized Global Travel a breakthrough that can Propel us faster than the speed of sound it's launched robots to other worlds but unleash Untold horror on our own it's also made our world a smaller place it has kind of revolutionized the way that we view the world it's taken this enormous in Impossible Planet and shrunk it to this little tiny thing that we can cross in just a few hours [Music] very name defines the world's most glamorous people [Applause] [Music] but are its ga

s guzzling days numbered or is there a planet-friendly future for the jet engine [Music] foreign the jet engine has transformed Our Lives the most amazing thing about jet engines is that they're a way to take a multi-hundred ton hunk of metal full of four or five hundred people and shove them through the air at nearly a thousand kilometers an hour they're an insane invention convention propels millions of us to our loved ones to Exotic parts of the world it delivers food from distant climbs but

the jet is a surprisingly recent invention revolutionizing Mankind's Quest To Fly since ancient times humans have dreamed of traveling the skies high above the world of hassle below don't we all just look up in the sky and we see birds flying and we think I want to do that and I think that in an engineer's brain starts the cogs turning where they want to find a solution [Music] but the runway to the skies has been long and dangerous [Music] Our Journey Begins in France in 1783. with Daredevil sc

ientist jean-francois pilatro de Rosier this fire-breathing scientist filled his lungs with hydrogen and blew it through a flame to demonstrate its explosive dangers all right [Music] but it was only when he revealed the lifting potential of hot air in a silk and paper balloon that Palazzo de Rosier made history the first human to reach the sky watched by 400 000 people [Music] by using the concept of density hot air is much less dense than cold air it's kind of like the fact that an air bubble

can rise through water because water is much more dense than air a hot air balloon had air heated up in the balloon and that hot air that was trapped in the balloon itself gave rise to a basket which was utilizing this idea that we could leave the ground as a result of a difference in density this was our first form of rudimentary flight although there wasn't really any directionality to it you couldn't steer you were just at the mercy of the Winds inevitably the Daredevil palatra de Rosier came

to a terrible end on his third trip into the sky his balloon caught fire and he plummeted to his death flight is a dangerous business hot air balloons remained a slave to the Four Winds until in 1895 a German inventor named Ferdinand vonseplin sent air travel on a new course a guy called Zeppelin found a way to create some kind of steering by putting hydrogen gas which is even lighter than hot air it's the lightest element we have in a big balloon that also had some steam-powered propellers [Mu

sic] sturdy and maneuverable in 1909 the first passenger airline opened for business in Germany de log of the Zeppelin's lighter than air secret was hydrogen the very gas that Palazzo de Rosier warned us about in 1937 the Hindenburg revealed just how dangerous hydrogen could be [Music] today balloons still run on the density difference between hot and cold air they're considered far safer but they remain the same problems of speed and direction what was needed was a faster and more maneuverable

way to propel us through the air and into an era of cheap and safe Global Travel and the key to both lay in an invention that was already transforming travel on the ground the motor engine sorry foreign motor engines power cars of incredible speed and sophistication but step back in time and we find a very different Beast Germany 1885. the gasoline-fueled Benz patent motor car is considered to be the world's first automobile but the heavy engine is totally unsuited to power a flying machine [Mus

ic] until two brothers find a timely solution it's 1903 in Dayton Ohio USA Orville and Wilbur Wright have designed a flying machine powered by a car engine and so the Wright brothers decided to try and build a combustion engine that would turn you know the explosion the mini explosion of fuel and air inside an engine and and turn it into useful motion and stick that on their plane as a way of propelling it forward but one issue weighed them down now of course around this time we already had the

internal combustion engine for cars but the trouble is is that these internal combustion engines were really really heavy you know they're made out of steel nevertheless on the 17th of December 1903 the Wright brothers are confident enough to carry out a test flight against all the odds their flying machine gets airborne Brothers had a trick up their sleeves their engine wasn't made of steel [Music] aluminum had recently only just recently become a thing that was produced in enough quantities to

actually be useful for maybe Building engines aluminum is one of the most abundant elements on our planet but it was not until the late 19th century that it could be separated from other elements and used in its pure form since then this lightweight but strong metal has been used for car production bicycles even our favorite can of drink [Music] aluminum was the Wright Brothers secret the timely answer to their biggest problem wait an aluminum engine propelled the Wright brothers into history a

nd internal combustion-powered flight finally took off the first planes actually use the same kind of engine that you use in a car or a motorbike an internal combustion engine where you put the fuel into some Pistons they're going up and down and then that linear motion can be conversed into rotary motion and used to turn a propeller and that propeller then pushes the air backwards if the propeller is forcing the air backwards then the propeller experiences an equal and opposite Force which push

es the propeller and therefore the plane it's connected to in the forward duration the Wright brothers invention is still the basis of all propeller planes engine turns the propeller pulling the plane through the air while the wings use the airflow to lift the plane up faster and more maneuverable than a balloon the internal combustion engine powered propellers were the only way to fly until the pressures of a world war led to an astonishing breakthrough 1940s Britain fires and messerschmitz bat

tle for supremacy of the Skies both Britain and Germany have Engineers searching for an advantage in top secret unsung France from Germany and Frank Whittle from Britain lead the hunt both men know that the greatest obstacle to faster planes is the power of the internal combustion engine the engine is turning propellers and they're essentially relying on lift they work in the same way as a wing to to propel the plane forwards there's only so much lift you can get so they needed a different way t

o be able to go faster military engineers in both Britain and Germany thought they could come up with a design which would allow them to move their planes faster something that was absolutely critical if you're going to use them for Warfare Franz and Whittle both find a way to compress the air and fuel mix without the need for heavy Pistons cylinder blocks or crankshafts if you imagine a jet engine as being like a tube and at the front of that tube you've got a turbine which is turning and sucki

ng in air from the surroundings I meant that tube gets narrower and narrower until you get to the combustion chamber that's the place where the combustion happens it's where the fuel is mixed with the air and set on fire that means that fuel massively increases in temperature and so it wants to expand that means it's forced out of the back of the jet at incredibly high speed [Music] it then pushes the plane forward thanks to Newton's third law which is for every Force there is an equal and oppos

ite reaction so this backwards force of the of the thrust going that way pushes the plane forward really fast as Allied planes erode German air superiority pressure is on to turn the tables but Britain doesn't want to give up its slight advantage the stakes are high and both men find different approaches to the jet solution [Music] Frank Whittle first had the idea of a jet engine while a student in the late 1920s and has been working on it ever since he understood the fundamentals of lift and dr

ag the basic principles of Aviation and from that he was able to deduce that if he wanted to fly further then you needed to fly faster and from the really the limitations of air density he realized if you want to fly faster you needed to fly higher and in 1941 he delivers the first British aircraft to be powered by a jet engine the Gloucester whittle Whittle seems to have won the race but his design is underwhelming the Whittle jet engine isn't reliable or powerful enough to propel a military ai

rcraft in Germany Anselm Franz has an advantage he can build on the work of another jet physicist Hans van ohhein bronze improves Von ohhein's design increasing the flow of air through his jet engine to create even more thrust and in 1944 Germany starts production of the world's first mass-produced jet-powered airplane the Messerschmitt me 262 fighter plane the me-262 left Allied Fighters for dust but it arrives too late to save the war for Germany but Franz is jet engine will transform the worl

d for the better [Music] in 1949 the first commercial jetliner takes to the air the de Havilland comet other companies around the world begin to follow suit and by the early 1960s civilian jets are flying everywhere [Music] between 1957 and 1978 Boeing delivered 725 of its first jet airliner the 707 for commercial use but flying on a jetliner is The Preserve of the Rich and Famous and soon the celebrities of the Skies become known by the engine that carries them around the world what you had in

the 60s was you know literally the Jet Set that's where the term comes from which was sort of a group of people that had you know the the Charisma and the looks and the money to not just sort of conquer the skies which was huge but to make the world smaller the stars who belong to the exclusive jet set include the likes of Frank Sinatra and Bridget Bordeaux and they Revel in the Jet Set name and the glamor [Music] all those glamorous photos of kind of the wind blowing up and and people smiling a

nd waving it was a performance it was almost like being on the red carpet soon the jet the Jet Plane is supersized and overnight the door to Global Travel is opened up to everyone [Music] the jumbo jet is first flown commercially in 1970. and its massively increased cabin capacity seize prices drop and passenger numbers increase all of a sudden air travel goes from something that's for the very select few to something that's accessible to everyone and this means that we can take holidays that th

e average family can can visit New destinations see different cultures experience new things and again we kind of see a huge sort of Leap Forward culturally in our society suddenly the world is our oyster ordinary folks can holiday an exotic Faraway places and the expanded Horizons have a dramatic impact on life back home and all of a sudden our High Street changes because what happens then because we can travel and we've tried this amazing food called a kebab or a curry or or something else in

different part of the world we then bring it back and we cook it for our friends today high volume travel around the world contributes hugely to the global economy every year airlines fly nearly four and a half billion passengers on almost 45 million flights around the globe but the jet engine has also transformed the world in more Sinister ways [Music] from the 1950s onwards the skies fill with military as well as passenger planes and one country dominates the United States of America in late 1

945 just months after the end of World War II a new conflict begins and the United States designs a jet that can deliver nuclear bombs to far away Targets in Europe and Asia before returning to the U.S dubbed the Cold War by British writer George Orwell in the new world order the two great Global superpowers the capitalist United States and the Communist Soviet Union are pitted against each other this is a deep-seated ideological battle that threatens the world with total annihilation frightenin

g time for people you have to remember there's this very quick technological advancement now we we have the ability to obliterate the world and and people are told this right so there's you know public announcements on the on the TV and radio we all know the atomic bomb is very dangerous explaining how the end will look if it comes and and you know and constantly feeling like you're you know this idea of a few minutes to midnight you know that you're very close to everything being taken away fil

ms are broadcast in the UK and the USA advising people how to survive the destructive power of a nuclear bomb and drills are organized in schools to show pupils how to protect themselves what are you supposed to do when you see the Flash it means you're in a constant sense of anxiety that you're constantly looking you know over your shoulder you're constantly worrying about what you know that next step is going to be and during that period of the Cold War that's what it always was that at any da

y in any hour and any minute it could be the end less of the sky largest and fastest guest bomber in the world but the very engine that can deliver the bomb becomes the best Safeguard against it ever being used in 1957 the U.S Air Force demonstrates the reach of its new B-52 strato Fortress nuclear bomber by flying them non-stop around the world the capability of the B-52 acts as a nuclear deterrent in the increasingly hostile standoff this time the threat of War sees the jet engine propelled to

new heights during the Cold War the US and the USSR were thinking of ways of attacking one another they saw the limitations with the plane planes can be shot down is there some way we can send a warhead without having people with it and the problem is is that these two countries are quite far apart so if you want that trajectory you actually have to pass out of the atmosphere into space and that means things like the jet engine can't be used because there is not enough air there for propellant

to to make it work so you need to create a missile that takes the air with it the V2 rocket a flying Laboratory the V2 rocket developed by the Germans late in World War II proves that once launched ballistic missiles are almost impossible to stop as the second world war ends both the Russians and the Americans rushed to exploit the Germans engineering superiority the USA captures V2 Creator Werner Von Brown and his team and the Soviet Union also snaps up large numbers of captured German V2 scien

tists for its own research program [Applause] both sides invest huge amounts to take the jet engine to the next level [Music] the Russians are the first to prove that jet power can take us into space in what seems like the blink of an eye they supersize the German V2 on the 4th of October 1957 the Soviets used the world's first jet-powered intercontinental ballistic missile to launch Sputnik a gigantic jet engine Powers Mankind's first satellite far beyond the Earth's atmosphere but Nick hurdles

its way into space make a date with history that hurdles the dawn of a new era but how can a jet engine work in the vacuum of space the trick is to carry oxygen in liquid form the ballistic missile it mixes your two fuels so you have liquid oxygen and and more conventional propellant they get mixed together and ignite it similarly to in the jet engine right that causes a great expansion which is directed out of the back and that produces the thrust at incredible speeds that that propels the the

rocket along and so actually well on its path it's being propelled up to incredible speeds on this part and then just following the laws of gravity to reach its targets jet engines that launch Sputnik give the rocket a range of 8 800 kilometers easily able to deliver a nuclear warhead to Targets in the United States [Music] America is gripped by Sputnik Mania [Music] and it urgently needs to show the Russians it can Strike Back [Music] their first attempt is a dismal failure but scientists work

around the clock to ensure a success next time round okay we'll start the fuel loading and on the 31st of January 1958 American jet engines fire Explorer 1 into orbit around the Earth [Music] plain language the United States was in the space business along with the Russians and Explorer one was the beginning [Music] the U.S space exploration program continues a pace overseen by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration NASA formed later that year [Music] [Applause] [Music] but the Russi

ans score another first when on the 12th of April 1961 Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin becomes the first person to orbit Earth people on Earth could see Gagarin see Earth [Music] foreign [Music] jet engines are behind a string of impressive firsts the U.S has to work hard to regain the propaganda initiative in May 1961 President John F Kennedy makes a bold public promise I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal before this decade is out of Landing a man on the moon and return

ing him safely to the Earth [Music] but Kennedy also wants to take the heat out of the rising fear of nuclear war not see it governed by a hostile flag of Conquest but by a banner of freedom and peace we have vow that we shall not see space filled with weapons of mass destruction but with instruments of knowledge and understanding and so the pressure is on America's engineers to rise to the challenge [Applause] [Music] not because they are easy but because they are hard if you want to get people

to the Moon The crucial thing you need is speed because what you need to do is get those humans moving fast enough that they can escape the enormous force of gravity trying to pull them back down to the surface of the Earth to 40 000 kilometers an hour which is utterly immense the problem also being to be able to do that you need a lot of fuel so you're taking a lot of oxygen and a lot of your other fuel together to mix it but the more fuel you take the more mass you have that means you have to

have even more fuel so it's a really big technical challenge that took a long time to be able to come up with a solution a solution is finally here a three-stage rocket with enough thrust to get humans to the Moon the first rocket that was big enough and powerful enough to manage this was the Saturn V still the largest rocket ever built it was over 100 meters high weighed about 3 000 tons and about 90 percent of that weight was just Fuel and liquid oxygen to propel that thing into space [Music]

on the 16th of July 1969 U.S astronauts Neil Armstrong Edwin Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins set off on the Apollo 11 mission [Music] [Applause] [Music] five jet engines launched the rocket from the ground and a further six give it the speed it needs to escape the Earth's gravity [Music] on the 20th of July yet another jet engine delivers the astronauts safely to the surface allowing Armstrong to become the first man to walk on the moon he famously describes the moment [Applause] the jet has de

livered Beyond its inventors wildest dreams so in 1969 the jet engine that step until this point allowed us to kind of explore our world all of a sudden allows us to leave our world so you have those iconic images of being able to look down at our planet now I think there's nothing more unifying than feeling that you're a small part of something bigger so to see those first images would have felt that as race as you know as a human race we had not only conquered the skies but conquered the futur

e [Music] [Applause] [Music] with the moonwalk the United States wrestles back the initiative from the Soviets [Applause] astronauts are hailed as the ultimate American Heroes and the Soviets are left in their wake Jets have taken humankind into space but are there any limits to the speeds jet engines can achieve on Earth [Music] Philadelphia the rocket-powered American plane the Bell X1 was the first craft to travel faster than the speed of sound tracking the dawn barrier in level flight pilote

d by U.S Air Force Captain Chuck Yeager in October 1947 This research plane is drop launched from the Bombay of a B-29 bomber over the Mojave desert in California he entered a rocket plane the XS won and was dropped in midair this was an historic achievement it later achieves an amazing 1540 kilometers per hour at an altitude of almost 22 kilometers Jaeger names the plane glamorous glennis in honor of his wife as the first generation of SuperSonic fighter aircraft enter service in the mid-1950s

serious work begins on designs for supersonic passenger planes in 1962 the French and the British announced they're going into partnership to build Concord 100 passengers and all their baggage from London to New York in three hours that's the promise of the Concord The Joint anglo-french supersonic aircraft the engineers create a streamlined plane to deal with a massive wind resistance if you want to fly supersonically then the challenge really is the aircraft design rather than these straight W

ings you need oblique Wings you need swept wings and that allows you to fly faster and faster and you've got to have a much finer fuselage to make sure that you can handle a supersonic speed [Music] but the Americans don't want the Europeans to own the field so they fight back to preserve their own aviation industry in 1966 Boeing wins a U.S government contract to build a supersonic plane that carries three times more passengers than Concord but the Boeing 2707 project is short-lived the plug is

pulled due to Rising costs and the lack of a clear Market it was an ominous warning that goes unheated [Music] meanwhile Soviet intelligence is instructed to find out as much as possible about the anglo-french prototypes [Music] USSR miraculously unveils a rival supersonic plane the tupolev tu-144 the plane looks so much like the Concorde that it's dubbed the Concord ski in the western press Russia's supersonic jet concordski inevitably the head of the Paris office of the Soviet Airline aeroflo

t is arrested for acquiring classified information about Concord nevertheless concordsky scores a massive propaganda coup when in June 1969 it becomes the first civilian plane to exceed the speed of sound four months ahead of the anglo-french Concord in Concorde Spirit into the air just before conquer four years later the Soviet dream is dashed when concordsky crashes in France then suddenly without warning warning it's pulled from service after a further crash [Music] meanwhile the French and t

he British have been forging ahead with their supersonic project [Music] first commercial supersonic transport has its public debut at Toulouse in southern France and it's a moment of huge anticipation as Concord prepares for its Maiden flight at the end of the runway is Concord zero zero one 135. that has come up to 20 degrees [Music] live [Music] [Applause] was someone the great Wonder hello this Sleek aircraft is safely tested at some 70 airports on six continents in every country it has visi

ted Concord has proved to be an irresistible magnet to the crowds it makes its Maiden transatlantic Crossing in 1973. by 1976 it's finally ready to take passengers Concord has a maximum cruising speed of 2 179 kilometers per hour double the speed of sound and it slashes the journey time to the Big Apple to around three hours but as the plane forces its way through the air it creates a problem as the plane moves faster and faster as it gets closer to the speed of sound those pressure waves in fro

nt of it start to Bunch up and if the plane actually makes it to the speed of sound or moves Beyond then those pressure waves are piled right on top of each other creating a really large disturbance in the atmosphere and that's what you hear as a sonic boom when you cross the sound barrier in an aircraft you actually don't notice anything changing at all but the changes are very significant for anyone who happens to be nearby when you go through this barrier they'll hear an enormous deafening So

nic Boom which can even smash Windows of houses on the ground [Music] this loud thunder-like Sonic Boom leads to angry protests environmental groups have fought through the courts to have the flights banned and Concord is indeed banned from flying over the United States and other countries Concord Executives know that the band in America is virtually the end of the road it has cost the British and French a staggering 1.4 billion dollars to design and develop it ten times more than planned and ic

onic though Concord is it seems It's Not Meant To Fly [Music] a crash in France in the year 2000 which kills all 109 people on board and four on the ground signals the end of this glamorous but expensive status symbol both the French and the British finally throw in the towel in 2003 [Music] when the British Airways Concords return home for the final time the crowds gather for an emotional farewell [Applause] by the demise of SuperSonic travel passenger numbers on planes traveling at subsonic sp

eeds have soared the jet engine has effectively shrunk our planet but an even more urgent problem threatens its future global warming and air traffic is a massive contributor of atmospheric CO2 [Music] as icebergs melt and freak weather events wreck people's homes [Music] what are today's Jet experts doing to avert the nightmare of global warming the race is on to design a new jet engine that doesn't guzzle so much gas down on the ground we have electric cars [Music] could electricity power a pl

ane there are a number of people looking at what we call Urban Air Mobility or flying taxis which are battery powered driving either fans or propellers this compact Flying Saucer look alike is being developed as a five-seater air taxi which you'll soon be able to hail with an Uber Style app on your phone it has 36 electric jet engines so it can take off and land vertically in cities and travel up to 300 kilometers in an hour foreign the aim is to provide Intercity travel that is less expensive a

nd kinder to the environment with zero emissions it can go five times faster than a car and produces less noise than a motorbike in 2015 This all-electric two-engine Plane scored a historic first taking off by its own power and crossing the English Channel it was almost perfect and of course I feel good the job is done now yeah but we are still some way off using electricity to power a large passenger jet such as this Airbus 350 xwb this can carry up to 350 people over longer distances but its e

ngines burn around seven tons of fuel per hour if I were to replace that amount of fuel with batteries rather than seven tons of kerosene I would need 250 tons of batteries so that gives you a scale and magnitude of the challenge that we face 250 tons is a lot to carry to fly for an hour but frequent flyers need not despair Engineers have another way to make flying Greener and they have cutting-edge tools to help them including assisted and virtual reality today the engineers have a plethora of

tools which allows them to take a 3D representation of their engine literally move it around with their hands undo parts of it looking side it and literally take off component by component you can walk inside the engine if you like and look at how it how it relates to the aircraft to make sure there are no clashes and it fits perfectly [Music] so it's a very powerful design tool to allow you to really understand what happens during the early stages and de-risk it before you start making the expe

nsive Hardware so the ground is more fertile than ever before for engineers working on complex systems exploiting revolutionary new inventions the future for the jet engine is really to get further by being more efficient and to get there faster the next revolutionary step comes with new types of engine the synergetic air breathing rocket engine saber is being developed by reaction engines with support from BAE systems for a new generation of flying machines it will deliver the fuel efficiency o

f a jet engine with the power and high speed ability of a rocket and it will Propel both air and spacecraft it's a hydrogen fueled engine but still requires oxygen when operating within the atmosphere but the beauty about this particular engine is that the aircraft can fly at a hundred thousand feet which is more than twice as high as any civil airliner so the atmosphere is very very thin and that means there's very little oxygen so what we do is we use a novel system called a pre-cooler which r

apidly cools down that really high temperature air which is hitting the aircraft and the reason why we do that is because we need the air to be cold because if it's cold it's compressed and that means there's a lot of oxygen now and we can use that to combine with the hydrogen fuel on board in order to produce quite a potent jet out of the back of the aircraft and that drives us to very high speeds conventional jet engines can only Power aircraft up to three times the speed of sound Mach 3. but

this pre-cooled High oxygen design can operate at Mach 5. two and a half times as fast as Concord the saber engine would make it possible to fly from London to Australia in four and a half hours and space travel would be revolutionized by a reusable spacecraft using the engine means we can go anytime into space rather than having to build a rocket each time having to perhaps recover the components of a rocket to service them rebuild them and put them into space so we're looking forwards to a sit

uation where we can go into space at perhaps less than a day's notice as opposed to many months or even years we've traveled a long way from palatra De rosier's hot air balloon and the Wright brothers first propeller airplane [Music] having a spacecraft ready to go at short notice would make the Apollo program that got a man on the Moon looked distinctly old hat adventurous tourists would be able to hop on board to be whisked away to other planets a voyage into space that we never would have tho

ught possible the jet engine has revolutionized the way that we view the world it's taken this once enormous planet and turned it into this little thing that we can cross in just a few hours part of being human is wondering what's up in the sky so the ability to conquer the skies the ability to conquer where we think Divinity lies is I think the ultimate expression of human ingenuity thank you [Music]