America's First Jet Fighter

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Today on Far Future Horizons we present an episode from the acclaimed documentary series Planes that Never Flew– America’s First Jet Fighter.

In America’s First Jet Fighter, the series examines the Lockheed L-133, the first attempt by an American company to build a jet-powered fighter, begun in 1939 by Lockheed but later cancelled due to lack of interest.



The Lockheed aviation company was the first in the United States to start work on a jet-powered aircraft, the L-133 design started in 1939 as a number of “Paper Projects” by engineers Clarence “Kelly” Johnson, Willis Hawkins and Hall J Hibbard. By 1940 preliminary work on a company financed jet fighter had been started, which progressed to several different versions on the drawing board. In the meantime Lockheed were working on an axial-flow L-1000 turbojet engine of their own design, which was intended to power the culmination of the jet fighter project, the Model L-133-02-01.




Planes that Never Flew is available on DVD from Amazon.co.uk. Planes That Never Flew is a Discovery Channel documentary series about experimental aircraft projects that never flew. Over four one-hour episodes, the series examined the history behind aborted projects to build two jet fighters, a supersonic transport (SST), and a nuclear powered long range bomber.

Planes That Never Flew – America’s First Jet Fighter

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