March 5, 1943 – The first flight of the Gloster Meteor. Aviation history is dotted with examples of individual technologies that changed the course of aircraft development, but one of the most far-reaching advances was the development of the turbojet engine. And while we often associate that advance with WWII, its origins can actually be traced back to before the war even started. Royal Air Force engineer Sir Frank Whittle was the first to design and produce a practical turbojet engine, forming Power Jets Ltd. in 1936 to develop his engine. Though he found it difficult to find financial backers for his project, and hard to find anybody to build a plane to put the new engine in, Whittle eventually visited the Gloster Aircraft Company in
1939. There he met Gloster’ s chief engineer, George Carter, who took an interest in Whittle’ s new engine and began considering an aircraft design in which to implement the turbojet. The first proof of concept aircraft was the Gloster E. 28 / 39, a single-engine aircraft that took its maiden flight on May 15, 1941. With proof that the turbojet would work, Gloster moved ahead with work on a production fighter, but decided to use two engines to make up for the lack of power in the early turbojet. By 1940, Carter had the first proposal for the twin-engine Meteor fighter, and within 6 months Gloster received an order for 8 prototypes under Specification F9 / 40, which was basically written to match the fighter already in development. The Meteor was built in a modular fashion consisting of five main sections: nose, forward fuselage, central section, rear fuselage, and tail sections. Various companies were contracted to build modules, and this modular concept allowed production to be dispersed and also facilitated disassembly and transport of the Meteor. The Meteor was introduced on
July 27 1944, with the first aircraft delivered to No. 616 Squadron of the RAF. At first, the Meteor was used against the German V-1 flying bombs, and on August 4, 1944, Meteor pilots claimed the first kills when they shot down 2 V-1s. They would eventually claim 14“ buzz bombs” by the end of the war. Meteors were initially forbidden from flying over German-held territory for fear that one of the fighters could fall into enemy hands. But when the V-1 threat subsided, Meteors finally were finally sent to Europe in January of 1945, but the clash between the Meteor and the Messerschmitt Me 262, Germany’ s first operational jet fighter, never occurred. Production and development of the Meteor continued after the war, and Royal Australian Air Force Meteors saw significant action in the skies over Korea during the Korean War. Nearly 4,000 Meteors were built by the time production ended in 1955, and the Meteors ended their days with the RAF as target tugs, flying into the 1980s.