A jet P-51 Mustang?

[Guest ericthered1975]

Look at this! Did You know this rare and unusual version of the P-51 Mustang? The link below has some photos and a question: this version entered service or combat? To see all the pictures and answer the question above, please visit the link below and leave your comment.

 

Aviação em Floripa: P-51 Mustang a jato

 

Best Regards!

 

 

[turboplanner]

Jato pods became popular for a short time in the 1950's, but really weren't logisically practical.

 

Some were turbines, some were solid fuel rockets.

 

They were great for getting a heavy bomber off the ground from its base, but if it was to land somewhere else, which is part of an advancing combat situation, all the ground support had to move with it.

 

Better to fit bigger engines in the first place, or make payloads more efficient, and so lighter.

 

 

[Bats]

I think that first image was something other than JATO, I've seen it explained as fitting two ramjets (either off V1's or copies of) to increase the Mustang's top speed. The story I saw said that they did increase peak speed, but created so much drag when not operating as to be a liability. Asymmetric ignition would have been interesting ;) Ramjets need high speed airflow to operate and would thus not be much use accelerating an aircraft from a standstill for take-off.

 

 

[onetrack]

This might explain the first P-51 pic better ...

 

US Army Air Force - Jet Powered Mustang

 

The pulse jet fitted to the Mustang for trials was a copy of the pulse jet fitted to the Nazi V-1 Flying Bomb.

 

The Americans took the engine back to the U.S. and reverse-engineered it, it was also produced by Ford as the PJ-31-1.

 

More info about the R&D work on the pulse jet engine in the link below, it was labelled "Project Squid" in 1947.

 

The research was pretty intensive and centred around fuel types, and the search for materials and metals that possessed superior properties to the run-of-the-mill known materials, that would withstand the temperatures and pressures inside a rocket-fuelled engine.

 

A lot of this research was no doubt of great benefit to the later, American space programme.

 

http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf&AD=ADA952980

 

 

[onetrack]

Below is a link to a webpage showing some blokes who built a replica of the Fieseler V-1 pulse-jet engine and a video of them running it.

 

What I found fascinating, is the story of how they found a complete and operational V-1 bomb (complete with Fieseler motor), buried in a bunker in SE Germany - but it was only found in 1990!!

 

V-1 Pulse-Jet Engine Runs at the Military Aviation Museum