Britain doesn't assist the Soviets with jet technology after WW2

Yes, quite correct the Miles M52 would have been the first supersonic aircraft, but as you say it was canceled and Miles aviation was instructed to hand over all of their research to Bell. The X1 was virtually a rocket powered copy of the M52. Even down to the fully moving tailplane which was also used on the Sabre. With the Nene engine the M52 would have been able to take off and land under its own power as well as achieve supersonic flight.

Mate..The Bell X-1 did not use any "stolen" brit supersonic technology. The moving tailplane was invented long before the M.52... its not a british invention..the truth is the stabilator was in mass production on French and German aircraft as early as 1915... and 2 American designs the Curtiss XP-42, XP-55, it was already a 30 year old design when the brits claimed to have invented it.
The project would have never been approved in the first place. The general concensus among jet engine experts at the time was (and correctly so) that jet engine technology was considerably less advanced than what was needed to reach supersonic performance. M.52 program was overreaching and doomed to failure from the very beginning... The UK lacked both the high speed aerodynamic research and the jet engine technology. The Governments very poor decision of selecting of the Miles company and Whittles PowerJets Ltd and Frank Whittles failure to produce the required engine left the program with no option other than cancellation. Thats the whole story your version is pure speculation without a credible support..
 
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Not true Whittles first designs were for axial jet engines he only went on to the centrifugal design for practical reasons the axial jet needed more advanced metallurgy as the Germans found. WWII German engines were scrap after 20 to 30 hours running the equivalent Welland, Derwent, and Goblin engines were good for 10 times longer running between overhauls.

Whilst Jumo, BMW and Heinkel were working on their axial designs Metrovick were working on the axial F2 which though it was never selected for a service aircraft was reliable and powerful on tests and was a basis for the development of the Armstrong Siddely Saphire.

In Hungary on August 1940 Gyorgy Jendrassik ran a bench test of his prototype Cs-1 turboprop with axial compressor. In the USA Westinghouse started design work on an axial engine the 19A in July 1941.

In 1944 well before anyone outside of Germany had seen a German axial engine. Rolls Royce started the design work on the engine that became the superb and very widely used Avon series and the basis of all modern Rolls Royce engines.

When the war ended in 1945 , Germans were miles ahead of the Brits in Jet propulsion technology, miles .. the historical facts are clear, Frank Whittles 1930 patent never produced a working engine, its was abandoned. Maxime Guillaume in France had already patented the axial flow turbojet concept 9 years earlier. Hans von Ohain built the first successful design and working prototype in 1934.. Whittle did not construct a prototype until 1935 ! Whittle's reverse-flow design was already obsolete before the war ended, the best early british engine was designed by Adrian Lombard.
The matter of fact is that Whittle was not first to achieve anything related to the development of turbojet engines....Whittles design was an evolutionary dead-end... all turbojets today use the German Axial-Flow only concept and design.
Metropolitan-Vickers F.2 never successfully passed a PFTR nor did it ever enter production... its an example of what we call a "failed attempt" to build a axial flow turbojet engine...
Its a perfect example of why the brits stuck with the outdated centrifugal compressor.. the lack completely lacked the knowledge to construct a successful axial flow engine as the German had.... a decade before the brits had one in production.
 
Without the British Engines, money gets tossed at Lockheed for this instead
lockheedl1000.jpg

The L-1000
At a meeting at Wright Field in August 1942, military researchers and Lockheed engineers reviewed the L-1000's design- it was only 24 inches in diameter, 139 inches long, and weighed 1,235 lbs. Lockheed estimated that at full takeoff thrust, the L-1000 could develop 6,700 lbs of thrust...
By comparison, that same year General Electric was working on their version of Frank Whittle's British W.1X centrifugal flow engine. GE first ran their I-A (which would later be designated the J31) on 18 April 1942, making it the first jet engine to operate in the US. It was 41.5 inches in diameter, 72 inches long, and weighed 865 lbs. At full thrust it developed only 1,250 lbs of thrust
....
The only other axial flow jet in development in 1942 was the Junkers Jumo 004 in Germany. It was already at the flight hardware stage that year and it was 152 inches long, 32 inches in diameter, weighed approximately 1,600 lbs and the early versions then being tested developed just under 2,000 lbs of thrust. LINK

It pretty much was an overly complicated 2/3rds size model of the later twin-spool J57
 
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Only if the plans also weren’t sold to the USA, because both the USSR and the USA needed the British to get jet aircraft in the air, later both used German designs. The Korean war would been different if only one side would have well developed jet aircraft.

Maybe the impact would have been larger if the British didn’t give the engine technology to the USA, because than the western world would have bought British fighters and more British commercial airlines. The 720 would have been on time to hold the comet sales low. After all they first had to get the military jet engine working to use the jet engine for commercial purposes.

Your comment doesn't have any historic or educational value... but it makes for very good propaganda... and its good for a laugh!

Whittle's engine didn't work when it was forced on the US by Churchill as part of the begging bowl called Tizzard Mission.. GE engineers have extensively redesigned it to make it work. Whittle's engine design belongs to Jurassic Park . Americans would have built their own engine before the end of WW2 , they stopped own developments and paid hard cash for Frank Whittle's patent because Britain needed the money ,all postwar engine technology in the US was predominantly influenced by German axial flow designs. Whittle was outdated before 1950.. Even without this the US would have built the 707 and dominated the world of aviation ahead of Britain..

Regarding Korean war: The SABRE with axial flow German engine defeated the MIG-15 powered by an old fashioned centrifugal British engine ...
Von Ohain and Anselm Franz (Jumo 004A and 004B designer) relocated to the US post WW2, the US produced the first commercial axial turbojet in 1948 the GE J47, coincidence? The UK produced it's first commercial axial turbojet in 1950 (for all their alleged lead), and the French ATAR 101B based on the BMW 003 and BMW 018 and under the management of Hermann Ostrich (designer of the BMW 003 and 018) first flew and entered production in 1951. Given the inordinate claims of the vast superiority of British jet engine engineering, isn't it odd that they did not produce a modern pattern turbojet until two years after the US? Isn't it odd that the French with no jet engine engineering experience at all could under a German Jet engineer fly their first engine only 1 year after the vastly superior British and their Mirage III exceeded Mach 2.2 before any other British jet ?
 
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I think it would have been even better with swept wings, but is that a good reason to cancel? Fund a version with swept wings, for heaven sake.

The M52 used a turbofan engine with afterburner. Britain was well ahead. I don't think we should have shared with the USA either. They gave us nothing in return on this deal.


Britain was not ahead in anything..It would appear there was considerable evidence that the Whittle W.B.2/700 engine fell well short the performance required, in addition Frank Whittle himself was failing, at this point deeply locked in the grip of amphetamine, tranquilizers and alcohol abuse he was committed to a hospital for rehabilitation, he was removed from Powerjets ltd. in January 1946 and 2 weeks later the Miles M.52 project was canceled. The UK government at this time was deeply in debt due to the war and its unlikely the project would have continued even if Whittle had delivered a viable engine but it was most likely the main factor in the projects cancelation


I love how the brits persist in the myth that the Stabilator the all moving tailplane was invented during the Miles M.52 project lol!!! Fokker Eindecker featured a stabilator in 1915
Chief Aerodynamicist Dennis Bancroft stated that the Bell Aircraft company was given access to the drawings and research on the M.52 in 1944 BEFORE design work was completed on the Bell X-1 but unfortunately his remarks do not prove accurate nor is there any evidence that the already completed X-1 design was influenced at all by the Miles .M52 data as it empennage bares no similarities whatsoever... stories that the stabilator was added after the X-1 design was completed is also false as the pivot assembly for a stabilator was already build into the X-1 original design as far back as early 44' this confirmed by the development team that installed an electric trim actuator without any knowledge of the M.52s tail design. fortunately Bell Aircraft Corporation had included an elevator trim device that could alter the angle of attack of the entire tailplane. One only has to look at the two aircraft to see there see no similarities in their control surfaces or design...The UK was completely delusional in regarding itself as a technological superpower in the postwar era !
 
One point about centrifugal versus axial compressors: this isn't something where the British invented the Centrifugal compressor and the Germans the Axial one. AA Griffith for instance working at Farnborough had been promoting gas turbine (mostly turboprop) engines based around Axial compressors since 1926. Whittle's genius was that he recognised that a working jet engine could be built based around a centrifugal compressor, and that this would vastly reduce the risks and workload involved in building such an engine.
The reality is that centrifugal compressors are really easy to design to a good standard and are robust and lightweight, while axial compressors are a right pig to do well. They're technically better - the reduced frontal area cuts drag and there is no limit on the compression ratio achievable by stacking stages, as Griffith pointed out to Whittle in 1930 - but the drag increase is only really critical in the trans-/supersonic region which aerodynamics didn't let them get into at the time, and the compression ratio limit was set by the available metallurgy. That means for the WW2 generation of engines a centrifugal compressor was the best option, and from the 1950s or so onwards axial flow is better for the bigger engines, centrifugal flow for the smaller ones (helicopter engines mostly still use centrifugal compressors).
 
Development of the all-moving tailplane...

...In Britain, at least, relied upon a diving modified Spitfire. Squadron Leader Martindale nearly died in a Mark IX Spit that accidentally touched Mach 0.92 on 27 April 1944. Look it up. Got interested in this and chased an even faster dive :-

Was astonished to learn that in 1952 a Spit Mark XIX from RAF Kai Tak (Hong Kong) flown by Flt-Lt Powles had climbed to 51,550 feet and in an uncontrolled dive hit Mach 0.96 or 690 mph, from evaluation of his recorded flight data, so Powles and his plane were lucky to land undamaged.
 
.In Britain, at least, relied upon a diving modified Spitfire. Squadron Leader Martindale nearly died in a Mark IX Spit that accidentally touched Mach 0.92 on 27 April 1944.

Martindales Spitfire. The propellor reduction gears broke and the prop came off at nearly 600mph.
Spitfires-that-nearly-broke-the-sound-barrier.jpg
 
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