Sir Frank Whittle A short life-history ... by Professor William Webb Frank Whittle was born on June 1 1907, in the Earlsdon district of Coventry, the son of a foreman in a machine tool factory. Both his parents had suffered a hard upbringing, working in the mills from the ages of ten or eleven and were uneducated. They were determined that Frank would have a better start in life. When Frank was four his father, a skilful and inventive mechanic who spent Sundays at a drawing board, gave him a toy aeroplane with a clockwork propeller and suspended it from a gas mantle. In 1912, at the age of five, he went to the local council school. When he was seven, the First World War broke out. Frank's interest in aeroplanes increased when he saw aircraft being built at the local Standard works, and was excited when an aeroplane force-landed near his home. In 1916 the family moved to Leamington Spa, where Frank's father had bought the Leamington Valve and Piston Ring Company, which comprised a few lathes and other tools, and a single-cylinder gas engine. With the war ongoing there was a great need for this sort of expertise and the business prospered. Frank was transferred to the local council school but in his spare time became familiar with machine tools and did piece work for his father. However, with the end of the war there came an end to the need for this kind of engineering work and the business floundered so badly that the Whittles were turned out of their home and had to move to rented accommodation. Frank had won a scholarship to grammar school, but Frank Whittle the cost of clothing and transport was too great for his family and so he opted to stay at Leamington College instead, using the scholarship money to buy books. It was not a happy time at college. His parents struggled to afford clothing for him and so he was often singled out due to his shabby appearance. He did not find many of the subjects he was taught to be of interest and instead went to the local library where aircraft continued to be his passion. He was convinced that just from reading books he had learnt enough to fly the aircraft of the day. At fourteen he made up his mind to join the Royal Air Force as a boy apprentice. The entrance age for this was fifteen and his parents agreed that after his fifteenth birthday he could leave school and apply. He did extremely well in the entrance exam, and looked forward to the day that he would become a pilot. Acquiring the necessary knowledge In January 1923 Whittle reported at RAF Halton as an aircraft apprentice. He lasted two days; only five feet tall and with a small chest measurement, he failed the medical. Six months later, after subjecting himself to an intense physical training programme supported by a special diet, he was rejected again. Undeterred, he applied using a different first name, passed the written examination again and was ordered to Cranwell where he was accepted. He joined a three year course designed to teach him how to repair and maintain the planes of the day. Once there, though, the environment was not what he had hoped. Trained like army cadets, there was strong discipline, parades and long boring hours filing away at chunks of metal. After the first year he specialised as a “rigger/fitter” – someone who worked on the metal frames of the aircraft. This involved a lot of cutting and shaping of sheet metal. Whittle frequently considered desertion but in the end stuck out the three year course. One of the joys which made the hours of boredom and frustration worthwhile to him was membership of the model aircraft society where he carefully built accurate replica planes. This was to provide him with a lucky break. The model society was of much interest to the Commanding Officer, Wing Commander Barton, who often took visitors there while on a tour of the base. Whittle took modelling to an extreme with a large 10ft wingspan model including a two-stroke petrol engine. At the end of the course he was surprised to learn that he was placed sixth out of the 600 apprentices on the course and therefore in line for cadetship – allowing him to go to Cranwell College for officer and pilot training. He appeared to have narrowly missed out though, when it was announced that there would only be five cadets. Whittle went up to London with the other five and scrapped through when the leading candidate failed on medical grounds. Even so, without the strong support of the Wing Commander he would not have made it. So, at the age of 19 in 1926, Whittle became a Leading Aircraftman at the RAF College at Cranwell. This was a dramatic change in class. As an apprentice he carried his own cutlery to the dining hall. As an officer of the RAF he sat down to formal dinners wearing a bow tie and surrounded by an array of gleaming cutlery. The course lasted two years and covered a wide range of topics including meteorology, Air Law, armaments, theory of flight and organisational behaviour. For Whittle, the highlight was flying. He showed a natural talent, landing safely after an engine failure, although he did write off an airplane after landing on a field in the fog to ascertain his position and then crashing into a tree on take-off. Luckily he was unhurt. He soon turned into rather a dare-devil pilot, being apprehended on a few occasions for excessively low- level flying and other escapades. It was around this time he started seeing a local girl – Dorothy Lee. On a few occasions he would take a motorbike and ride from the RAF College to visit her, on one occasion resulting in a crash with a bus after some rather risky antics. Again, luckily, he escaped unhurt. Cadets had to produce a thesis for each of the six terms that made up the two years at college. In his first year Whittle concentrated on armaments, but his fourth thesis, written in 1928 was to change the course of his life. It was entitled “Future developments in aircraft design”. In this thesis Whittle noted that aircraft could, in principle, travel faster at higher altitudes since the atmosphere was thinner and so the resistance caused to a plane was less. However, propellers worked less well at higher altitudes and so could not be used to achieve these higher speeds. Whittle noted that the turbine was one of the most efficient ways of converting fuel into power and predicted that it would eventually be possible to fit a turbine to an aircraft. At this stage his ideas were not well formed but provided the genesis for future developments. Of the few apprentices that were accepted, only about one percent completed the course. Whittle was the exception to the rule, graduating in 1928 at the age of 21, ranked second in his class academically and an "Exceptional to Above Average" pilot. He was now a Pilot-Officer, a long way away from the apprentice who had entered the Air Force five years earlier. Key Facts Born: 1 June 1907, Coventry Died: 9 August 1996, Colombia, Maryland Lived: Mostly in the UK, although moved to the US in later life Education: Leamington College Parents: Moses and Sara Alice Whittle Married: Dorothy Lee, May 1930, divorced 1976, Hazel Hall 1976 Children: Two sons, Francis (1931) and Ian (1934) Employment: • RAF 1923 – 1946 in various roles, but effectively permanently seconded to Power Jets 1936 onwards • BOAC 1948-1952 • Shell 1953 – 1957 • Various academic and teaching posts Tentative first steps Whittle’s first posting in August 1928 was to 111 Fighter Squadron, based in Hornchurch, Essex. This posting suited Whittle much better than the public-school atmosphere that had existed in the last two years. With a small number of colleagues and plenty of free time, Whittle felt at ease and able to pursue his other interests. While flying he continued to develop dare-devil manoeuvres, often based on precise calculations and practice, but terrifying to watch. Occasionally he was reprimanded for these, but this did not stop him continuing to try new ideas. This posting came to an end in September 1929 when he was sent to Wittering as a pupil on a flying instructor course. It was at Wittering, in 1929 that he made the major leap of realising that a turbine could be operated either to provide power to a rotating shaft or to send air out of the back of the engine at speed to provide direct forwards propulsion (see box, below). This latter approach, he realised, held significantly more promise. The turbine A gas turbine is in principle a very simple engine. It has three basic parts. A compressor at the front of the engine takes in air and compresses it, increasing its pressure. In the centre of the engine is a combustion section. Here a steady stream of fuel is ignited and burns in the flow of compressed air. Burning the fuel creates heat which causes the air to try to expand. It does so by escaping through the third part of the engine called the turbine where it causes the blades of the turbine to rotate before escaping out of the nozzle of the engine. A key element is that the turbine is linked to the compressor by a shaft, providing the power needed to compress the air from the engine itself.