THE MIGHTY METEOR

On 5 March it will be the 80th anniversary of the Gloster Meteor’s maiden flight.

- Colin Mayo

The Meteor became Britain’s first jet-engined fighter and the only operational British or Allied jet in World War Two when it went into action with 616 Squadron on 27 July 1944. Coincidentally, the Germans developed a jet fighter at a similar time – the Messerschmitt Me 262 – but the two jets never met in aerial combat.

In 1936, the British engineer Frank Whittle had started developing a jet engine but the project lacked funding. However, research and development became a priority at the outbreak of the war and Whittle’s Power Jets company was funded by the Air Ministry to design a jet-propelled fighter. The company teamed up with the Gloster Aircraft Company and its chief designer, George Carter, to build a serviceable jet plane.

It was Carter who designed the airframe for the first single-engined jet which was powered by a Whittle W1 turbojet. A “proof of concept” jet, the Gloster E.28/39 was duly constructed, and it took to the skies on 15 May 1941; however, it was underpowered. Power Jets had teamed up with Rover to mass-produce the engines but the car manufacturer realised there were design flaws and the two companies fell out. Rolls-Royce eventually stepped in and built a more powerful turbojet.

In a totally new design by Carter, the next jet became a twin-engined aircraft initially powered by two de Havilland Halford H.1 engines and it was this plane, christened the “Meteor”, that made its test flight on 5 March 1943 at RAF Cranwell, Lincolnshire flown by Neil “Michael” Daunt. However, it was the Meteor FI powered by two Rolls-Royce W2B/23 Welland turbojet engines that actually saw active service when 20 were delivered to RAF Culmhead in Somerset for trials.