An apprentice with a patent

René Leduc left school at 14 to become an apprentice mechanic, fought in the artillery in the First World War, then studied engineering. Working at Breguet he filed, in 1933, a patent on the thermo-propulsive nozzle, the basis of the ramjet. By 1937 he had started building an aircraft around it, and construction continued semi-secretly at Breguet during the German occupation. The idea caught the attention of Louis Breguet and the Ministry of Aviation, which funded tests of small-scale prototypes.

Launched from a mothership

The result, the Leduc 0.10, was a fuselage that was essentially the engine: the pilot sat in an inner shell while air rushed through the gap around him into the ramjet. Because a ramjet gives no thrust at a standstill, the 0.10 was carried aloft on top of a Languedoc airliner and released. Its first powered flight, over Toulouse on 21 April 1949, was one of the first flights anywhere powered solely by a ramjet. The larger 0.21 made 284 free flights and reached Mach 0.95.

From ramjets to pumps

The final step was the swept-wing 0.22 interceptor, which added a turbojet so it could take off by itself and first flew on 26 December 1956. In 1958 the French Air Force cancelled it for budget reasons. Leduc turned his company to hydraulics as Hydro Leduc, which made pumps for excavators, and ran it until his death in 1968. The 0.22 had been ordered to a 1953 requirement for an interceptor able to take off from a 940-metre grass runway, armed with two air-to-air missiles, in competition with the Nord Gerfaut and Griffon.

人々

• René Leduc · founder, engineer — Born 1898 at Saint-Germain-lès-Corbeil, died 1968 at Istres; ramjet pioneer

記録と初記録

• Leduc 0.10 made one of the first flights powered solely by a ramjet, 21 April 1949
• Leduc 0.10 climbed at 40 m/s, better than the best jet fighters of the time