Jet Age
(1940 to nowadays)
What happened?
The Jet Age is a period in aviation history. The advent of aircraft powered by turbine engines brought about a social change. Jet aircraft could fly much higher, faster, and farther than older propeller-driven aircraft. Transcontinental and intercontinental travel became significantly faster and easier. The planes could fly non-stop or had to make fewer stopovers. Large jet aircraft could also carry more passengers than aircraft with suction engines.
Airfares fell so that a greater number of socioeconomic classes could afford to travel outside their country. The airspace was dominated by jets. The turbine-driven propeller engines offered improvements.
The 1957 Tu-114 was able to match the speed and capacity of jets. Its use was restricted to the military after 1976. The Concorde supersonic transport airliner in 1976 would also bring about social changes. The aircraft never became a commercial success. A fatal crash near Paris in 2000 and other factors led to the cessation of Concorde flights in 2003.
Boeing, Lockheed, and McDonnel Douglas had been planning to develop supersonic transport models since the 1960s. Various development, cost and other practical reasons caused the projects to stop.
Concorde Jet Rotor
± 1976 to ± 2003
The Concorde became the first supersonic commercial airliner in history on January 1, 1976. The Space Age design announced the arrival of the future. The joint project between British and French engineers fulfilled a decades-old dream of faster passenger transport.
Only 20 aircraft were built. These magnificent planes flew for almost 30 years at altitudes (18 kilometers) twice higher than their subsonic counterparts. They flew (max. 1920 km/h) twice the speed of sound. Ticket prices were twice that of their most expensive rivals. However, the gains were not high enough to save the Concorde as it reached the end of its technical life. The last Concorde flight took place on October 24, 2003.
Our example is a fragment of a flown high-pressure compressor vane, an integral part of the four turbojet engines that allowed Concorde to travel above Mach 2. The Olympus 593 Mk 610 was produced by the British Rolls Royce and Snecma Moteurs of France. They supplied the most powerful transport certified engines in the world at the time of their introduction.
The original titanium blade was cut into long, thin slices using a high-energy cutting plotter. The slice was polished by hand. Then it was cut into the “delta wing”, which refers to the shape of the aircraft. The fragment is very sharp.