Not Much of an Engineer

by Stanley Hooker

  Thus, in the period from January 1944 to October 1945, the engines for the Meteor had progressed as follows:

  (a) The W.2B/23 or Welland at 1,600 lb thrust with a diameter of 43½ in and a weight of 850 lb. The engine had reversed-flow combustion, and followed Whittle’s original design conception. More than 100 were manufactured at Barnoldswick and went into service with the RAF in the summer of 1944.

  (b) The B.37 or Derwent I at 2,000 lb thrust with a diameter of 43½ in and a weight of 950 lb. This engine had straight-through combustion chambers designed by Lucas, and was produced for the Meteor at the new Rolls-Royce factory at Newcastle-under-Lyme from late 1944.

  (c) The B.37 Series V or Derwent V at 3,500 lb thrust with a diameter of 44 in and a weight of 1,250 lb. This engine in the Meteor raised the World Speed Record to 606 mph in October 1945 and to 616 mph in the following year. It was produced in the post-war years at Derby.

  With these increases in power taking place, the fuel consumption of the engine was improved. If anything the range of the Meteor was extended by the more powerful engines.

  Jet engines were much simpler to fly than piston/propeller engines. In the latter there are at least two controls, the engine throttle which controls the power, and the propeller pitch control which fixes the rpm. There are sundry instruments that have to be watched: boost pressure, oil pressure, coolant temperature and rpm. On a simple turbojet there is only one control, the throttle. The only instrument that needs watching is the jetpipe temperature, which has a maximum marked on it which must never be exceeded. Turbojets are like people: if anything is wrong, the temperature goes up.

  I remember seeing the first Meteor at the RAE being handed over to an operational squadron. The young fighter-pilot flew in on a Spitfire, was led over to the cockpit of the Meteor, and briefed for a few minutes, whereupon he climbed into this enormous new twin-engined aircraft with a radically new type of engine, and took off to the war! It was as undramatic as that, and I marvelled at the cool, calm competence of this young man.

  The speed and apparent ease with which the Nene and the Derwent V had been designed, made and tested to their full power had profoundly impressed Hs. Neither engine saw service with the RAF until the war was over, and until the end Rolls-Royce continued to produce vast numbers of Merlins. Hs said:

  ‘When the war is over, you will be able to buy Merlins on any street corner for a bob a dozen. We must press on with these jet engines, or we shall have nothing to do’.

  The British fighter design teams had been heavily engaged throughout the war on the Hurricane, Typhoon and Tempest at Hawker, and the Spitfire with both the Merlin and the Griffon engines at Supermarine. As a consequence, neither Sydney Camm at Hawker nor Joe Smith at Supermarine had paid any real attention to the jet engine. The Gloster Meteor designed by George Carter was the only British jet aircraft in production when the war ended, although de Havilland’s Vampire, powered by their own Goblin with a thrust of 3,000 lb, was cleared for production by English Electric up at Preston.

  We made a gallant but unsuccessful effort to get the Nene into the Vampire. The installation work was in the hands of Witold Challier, who worked for Dorey. Challier was an excitable Pole, who was a Don at Warsaw University when war broke out, but walked to Constanza in Romania, and through various vicissitudes arrived at Rolls-Royce, where he gave us invaluable service estimating the performance of aircraft fitted with our engines.

  Hs became irritated at the slow progress of the installation, and Challier, resenting the criticism, waved his arms in the air saying,

  ‘There you are, it’s all Challier’s fault. You say Challier make a miracle, and you don’t pay me for that’.

  At this we all laughed, and Hs replied.

  ‘The last man that made miracles did them for nothing’.

  More laughter, but Challier had the last word.

  ‘And look what happened to him!’

  Due to the lack of applications for the Nene, Hs called on Camm and Smith to bring to their attention the potential of this new type of engine, and the rapid progress that was being made with it. In the past, aircraft had been designed to suit the available engines, because it took years longer to get the engine to a stage of reliability than it did to design and make the aircraft. Hs realized that all that was now changed.

  ‘Tell us the size of engine you want, and we will make it to measure quicker than you can make the aircraft’, Hs said to Camm and Smith. And if we had stuck to the Whittle-type centrifugal engine I think he was right; but, of course, the wheels of progress were churning on, and it was becoming clear that the axial engine, with its smaller diameter and higher efficiency, would soon take over. Thus, the prophecy that Hs made to Whittle in the early days came true. When Whittle extolled the virtue of the great simplicity of his engine, Hs looked at him and drily remarked, ‘Wait until we have worked on it for a while; we will soon design the simplicity out of it!’

  Following Hs’ tour around the aircraft designers, both Joe Smith and Sydney Camm came to Barnoldswick to view the Nene running on the test bed. Sydney Camm had with him a project drawing of a fighter aeroplane, later to be produced as the Sea Hawk for the Royal Navy, which featured both a divided air intake and a divided jetpipe. One criticism of single-engined jet aircraft had been that if the air intake was in the nose of the aircraft and the jet discharged from the tail, then the whole of the fuselage was full of wind, and there was little room for fuel and equipment.

  Camm’s proposal was to take the air in at the junction of the wings and the fuselage, and thus have two ducts leading to the engine. The cockpit and nose of the aircraft was thus unaffected. Similarly, the jetpipe was likewise divided into two, one curving out of the fuselage on each side. Hs always referred to this as a ‘birfucated jetpipe’, because this sounded more difficult than a bifurcated pipe. In fact, splitting the pipe into two lost practically none of the jet thrust, and gave very little mechanical trouble. Years later, when we were considering vertical take-off, both Camm and myself remembered the ‘birfucated’ pipe, and this led to the arrangement of the Pegasus engine in today’s Harrier.

  Joe Smith went back to Supermarine, and with Alan Clifton designed the Attacker, which also was produced only in small numbers. The Nene just did not catch on in England. It is one of the staggering examples of Britain’s inability at the political level to get things right in aviation that no government effort whatsoever was made to do anything on a big scale with this world-beating engine. Yet it is probable that more Nene engines were subsequently made than any other jet engine in history — in the United States, Soviet Union, France, China and many other countries.

  The American interest stemmed from Phil Taylor, the ex-Chief Engineer of Curtiss-Wright, who were heavily involved in wartime production of air-cooled piston engines. After quarrelling with the Board of his company, Taylor came to England in 1946 and visited Hs at Derby. They were old (rival) friends, and Taylor asked Hs for an option on the licence for the Nene. We had already tried to interest Pratt & Whitney and Curtiss-Wright in the engine but had failed, quite frankly because neither company, drunk with the huge production of piston engines for the American war effort, had yet appreciated the impact of the jet on future aircraft.

  Hs agreed to give Taylor the option, and the latter returned to the States, and persuaded the US Navy to have a Nene engine tested in the Navy Yard at Philadelphia. The American Type Test was more severe than the British one at the time, having a duration of 150 hours as against 100 hours, and containing much longer running periods at full power. No American engine had succeeded in passing this test without the replacement of major parts at various intervals. This applied to the GE I-40 engine, which by this time was called the J33. It was rated at 4,000 lb thrust, but was as large and as heavy as the Nene which gave 5,000 lb thrust.

  Under the patronage of the Navy, John Herriot took two Nenes to Philadelphia and installed them ready for Type Test. To the delight of the Navy, the engines sailed
through the Type Test without incident. The Navy then insisted that their main engine contractor, Pratt & Whitney, should come down to Philadelphia to inspect the engines after test. To Phil Taylor’s satisfaction, they also insisted that Pratt & Whitney take a licence from Rolls-Royce for the manufacture of the Nene forthwith, and Bill Gwinn, the General Manager of Pratt & Whitney, and Wright Parkins, the Chief Engineer, came to Derby for that purpose.

  In the meantime, Phil Taylor had collected nearly a million dollars for graciously surrendering his option on the licence to Pratt & Whitney, and everybody came out of the deal very satisfied and happy. Ever afterwards, the Nene in the USA was known not only as the J42 (its official designation) but also as ‘the Needle Engine’, because of its effect on the US engine firms.

  And so, full manufacturing details of the Nene engine were given to Pratt & Whitney and the great engine factory at Hartford, Connecticut, was transformed to make it. It is a sobering thought, that the two great engine competitors of Rolls-Royce, which today have the bulk of the world’s aviation business, namely Pratt & Whitney and General Electric, both started with British engines — the former with the Nene, and the latter with the original Whittle W.1, given to General Arnold in 1941, before the USA was a participant in the war.

  The one-time greatest engine company of all, Curtiss-Wright, did not face the challenge of the jet until it was too late. Then in the 1950s it plunged in with British engines — the Armstrong Siddeley Sapphire and the Bristol Olympus, for both of which they took licences. But it was too late, and the once dominating piston-engine manufacturer is now reduced to the status of a minor sub-contractor. Thus are the sins and omissions of the father visited upon the children.

  Meanwhile, the Meteor squadrons were seeing widespread service with the RAF. I remember Sir James Robb, C-in-C of Fighter Command, writing to me saying that, despite its two engines, it only took half the effort to maintain a squadron of Meteors as it did with Spitfires, which spoke volumes for the reliability and simplicity of the jet engine vis-à-vis the Merlin.

  The Meteors saw action in France in 1945, but were not allowed to go further forward than Eindhoven in the Netherlands in case, I discovered afterwards, one of them should fall into Russian hands. But the Russians knew all about this new aircraft and its engines, and after the war ended they came to Derby to try to purchase a licence for the Nene, or, failing that, to buy some actual engines.

  I was detailed to look after the mission, but had to keep them at Derby and not take them to Barnoldswick where the main engine development was still going on. They were, as usual, a charming and lusty lot of fellows and we had some great parties in the evenings at the Midland Hotel. I remember one evening they were all sitting together, obviously telling jokes in Russian. One would have thought that one could speak Russian for ever in that normally very quiet hotel in Derby in 1946 without being understood. I called across to the interpreter and said, ‘I hope those stories are clean’.

  ‘As a matter of fact they are not’, said a young lady sitting quite independently some distance apart. She turned out to be a Czech dancer who had skipped from her troupe, and was waiting to be collected by some good lady, and to start a new life in England!

  With Sir Stafford Cripps at the Board of Trade, the left-wing British Government appeared perfectly happy to sell our latest engine to the Russians, and in September 1946 clinched a deal for 25 Nenes and 30 Derwents, the first few of which the team took back to the Soviet Union and copied exactly in double-quick time. They were produced in colossal numbers for the MiG-15 and -17, Il-28, Tu-14 and many other aircraft. These aircraft were also supplied to the Soviet satellite countries, and North Korea! Over 20 years later I saw VK-ls (Soviet Nenes) being overhauled in Romania.

  On my first visit to China in 1972 I was taken to the Peking Aeronautical Institute where they have a display of aero engines. Right in the fore-front was a sectioned Nene engine of which, of course, the Chinese knew I was the Chief Engineer. I inspected the engine carefully and said, ‘Yes, the Russians made a very good copy. They even copied the mistakes!’ My hosts were much amused at this, and later, when we visited the engine factory in Xian, I found that the Nene was still in large-scale production there in 1975.

  By 1947 we had completely mastered the centrifugal engine — in sharpest contrast to the axial type — and at Derby we very quickly added a further half inch (12.7 mm) to the Nene impeller, and made other changes to handle an airflow increased from around 90 lb/sec to a remarkable 130, or a growth of well over 30 per cent. This fine engine, named the Tay, combined all that was best from Frank Whittle and his team, from Rolls-Royce and from our specialist suppliers who produced the essential alloys and accessories. But nobody in Britain had designed an aircraft to use it (if we discount a special version of the Viscount which could hardly have been a greater misuse of this powerful jet). In contrast the Tay was instantly snapped up not only by Pratt & Whitney and the US Navy (and, later, the USAF) as the J48 but also by Prince Poniatowski, boss of Hispano-Suiza. This French company, already making Nenes, called it the Verdon and built it for large numbers of swept-wing fighter and attack aircraft.

  The immediate post-war period, like the 1950s that followed, was a time of rapid technological change. Many top decision-takers in Britain were unable to take sensible decisions. As soon as the jet was shown to work, they thought piston engines must instantly be obsolete. As soon as they heard about axial compressors they thought centrifugals must be obsolete. In 1947 our aircraft industry could have made very good use of the Tay. The huge numbers produced elsewhere more than justified Frank’s unswerving belief that it was correct to start the jet era with the well-proven centrifugal compressor.

  Chapter 5

  Axials

  By this time, the war was over, and the steam was beginning to run out of new development programmes. Never, I think, has the speed of the programmes on the Nene and its smaller brother the Derwent V been equalled, nor is it ever likely to be again. It was, of course, due to the team effort, and to the camaraderie and enthusiasm that existed throughout the Barnoldswick factory. Men, women and girls worked whatever hours were required without question, and in a spirit of co-operation beyond description. That is what used to make Britain powerful and prosperous.

  During this period we had frequent discussions with Frank Whittle, and always paid due regard to his suggestions and criticisms. We tried to embody all that was best from his work at Power Jets, and our relations were of the friendliest nature, with every encouragement coming from him. The Nene and Tay were the ultimate expression of his original concept, and he was as delighted with these fine engines as we were. He was present when the decision to scale the Nene down in size to the Derwent V for the Meteor was made; he may well have been the originator of that idea, but memory fails me on this point.

  Hs also paid us frequent visits, despite his arduous labours at Derby, Crewe and Glasgow on the Merlin and Griffon. Each Monday afternoon we attended his technical meeting at Derby to report progress, and we never felt that we were out on a limb on our own. Les Buckler’s close relationship with HPS was valuable; any manufacturing difficulties were quickly ironed out between them, and the mighty experimental shops at Derby harnessed to help us.

  At the beginning of the War, Hs had taken on Dr A. A. Griffith, FRS, who had been head of the Engine Department at the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough. Griffith was a great mathematician and scientist, who since the 1920s had been convinced that turbine engines were the coming powerplant for aircraft. Unfortunately, he was bigoted in favour of the axial compressor, and had reported unfavourably on Whittle’s engine, simply because of the large diameter and supposed lower efficiency of the centrifugal compressor. He was a curious loner, whose thinking was years ahead of his time. His fertile brain would produce some radical new idea for an engine, which he would push hard; but once others took up the idea he would lose interest, and pass on to his next invention. He thus had no concept of the team ef
fort which is required to produce a real engine.

  At Derby Hs gave him a small office at the Rolls-Royce guest house at Duffield Bank, and he had as his designer Donald Eyre, a superb artist and draughtsman. Eyre had spent many years with Royce, and his project drawings were a marvel of clarity and sophistication. I used to say they sold Griffith’s ideas just like Johnnie Walker sold whisky, and with the same soporiphic effect.

  My life-long friend and colleague, Lionel Haworth, who became one of the greatest turbine engine designers of Rolls-Royce, fell under the Griffith spell. Derby thus began to dabble in axial jet engines during the War, led by Haworth and Rubbra, and motivated by Griffith. One strange machine, the CR.4 contra-rotating engine, got as far as bench running in 1942.

  In the end, a broad-brush version of a more practical engine, the AJ.65 turbojet, was evolved in 1945/6, the nomenclature meaning Axial Jet, 6,500 lb thrust. This engine subsequently became the Avon. It was developed to more than 10,000 lb in the 1950s, powering such famous aircraft as the Canberra and Valiant bombers, Hunter, Scimitar and Sea Vixen fighters, and the Comet and Caravelle passenger jetliners. It was the most important British engine of the 1950s. But at the start of the project the war had only just ended, and since Barnoldswick was the major seat of knowledge on turbine engines, Hs was reluctant to leave the AJ.65 at Derby. He instructed my team at Barnoldswick to undertake the design and development.

  Although I was not altogether happy with the proposal for the AJ.65, I did not contest this situation. At that time Rolls-Royce had no real experience in the design of axial compressors, and I hated moving into the unknown on what was obviously such an important innovation in the new field of turbine engines. The main supporters of axial compressors were Constant, now head of the Engine Department of the RAE, and Griffith. The two companies which had toyed with axials were Metropolitan-Vickers at Manchester and Armstrong Siddeley at Coventry. Metrovick had followed the RAE lead, and with Dr D. M. Smith in control had made the F.2 turbojet, designed for 2,000 lb thrust. Although this engine flew in 1943 in the F.9/40 Meteor, its progress had been relatively slow. Apart from its smaller diameter it showed no advantages from the supposed higher efficiency of the complicated axial compressor.