Whittle, Sir Frank
Whittle, Sir Frank (1907–96). Born in Coventry, Frank Whittle, inventor of the jet engine, began his career as an apprentice with the Royal Air Force at RAF College, Cranwell. While still a student he developed the idea of the gas turbine or ‘jet’ engine, but was discouraged by the technical and administrative difficulties in Britain in the 1920s. But from 1934–6 the RAF seconded him to Peterhouse, Cambridge, where he took 1st class honours in Mechanical Engineering. In the lead-up to the Second World War he was assigned to a special project to develop the engine, and despite shortage of materials and much official incomprehension was brilliantly successful. His team produced a viable gas turbine and installed it in an aeroplane to create the first British jet fighter in the closing stages of the war. Other inventors, in Germany and Italy, had been working on similar lines but it was Whittle's expertise which was taken up in Britain and the USA to produce the radically new generation of jet aircraft after the war. Whittle lived the last 20 years of his life in the USA, was awarded the OM in 1986, and at a thanksgiving service in Westminster Abbey in November 1996 was saluted by a fly-past of six jets.
R. Angus Buchanan
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