At dawn on August 27, 1939 — four days before Germany invaded Poland and the Second World War began — test pilot Erich Warsitz climbed into a small, unremarkable-looking aircraft at the Heinkel airfield in Rostock-Marienehe and opened a throttle connected to an engine with no propeller. The Heinkel He 178 lifted off, flew a short circuit, and landed. The piston age of aviation was over.

No government official was present. No newsreel cameras were rolling. The world had no idea what had just happened in a German field on an August morning. But the turbojet engine — roaring rather than pounding, continuous rather than reciprocating, elegant in its physics rather than brute in its mechanism — had just flown for the first time. Aviation would never go back.

Two Men, Two Engines, Two Countries

The turbojet engine was invented independently, almost simultaneously, by two men who never collaborated and barely knew of each other: Frank Whittle in Britain and Hans von Ohain in Germany. The story of how two engineers on opposite sides of a coming war arrived at the same revolutionary idea within a few years of each other is one of aviation’s most remarkable coincidences — or perhaps not a coincidence at all. The physics of propulsion had been understood since Newton. The question was simply whether the metallurgy and manufacturing precision had advanced enough to make a practical engine. By the mid-1930s, they had.

Frank Whittle filed his patent for a turbojet engine in January 1930, while still a student at the RAF College at Cranwell. The Air Ministry read his patent and decided the idea was impractical. His patent lapsed in 1935 when the renewal fee wasn’t paid. He finally got private funding in 1936 and ran his first test engine in April 1937. The British government, which had dismissed his ideas seven years earlier, suddenly became very interested.

Hans von Ohain, working at Heinkel’s private facilities, ran his first test engine in September 1937. His engine flew first — in the He 178 in August 1939 — but Whittle’s engine, more robustly engineered, would ultimately prove more influential. The Gloster E.28/39, powered by Whittle’s W.1 engine, first flew in May 1941. British jet engine technology was shared with the United States in 1941, and it was a developed Whittle design that powered the first American jet aircraft, the Bell XP-59, in October 1942.

The Me 262: Combat Changes Everything

Germany fielded the first operational jet combat aircraft: the Messerschmitt Me 262, which entered service in 1944. It was 100 miles per hour faster than any Allied piston-engine fighter. Its four 30mm cannon could destroy a B-17 bomber with a single short burst. Allied pilots who encountered it reported that it appeared to accelerate faster than their aircraft could dive. It was, technologically, a generation ahead of everything else in the sky.

It arrived too late to change the war’s outcome. Production was hampered by Allied bombing, material shortages, and Hitler’s insistence that it be used as a bomber rather than a fighter. Of the 1,430 Me 262s produced, fewer than 300 saw combat. But the aircraft set the template: every jet fighter ever built since has been a descendant of its basic configuration — swept wings, podded engines, high-altitude performance that made piston-engine aircraft irrelevant.

The World That Whittle and von Ohain Made

When the war ended in 1945, every major air power had jet fighters in development or service. The piston engine, which had defined aviation for 40 years, was obsolete. Within a decade, jet airliners would begin replacing propeller-driven transports. Within two decades, the Boeing 707 would make mass transatlantic air travel possible. Within three decades, the first wide-body jets would make flying cheap enough for ordinary people to afford.

None of it would have happened without that morning in Rostock-Marienehe — four days before the world went to war, with no audience, no celebration, and no sense of what the little propellerless aircraft climbing away from the runway actually meant. Erich Warsitz knew. He later wrote: “I realised I was flying in a new world.” He was right. It just took a few years for the rest of the world to catch up.

Sources: John Golley, Whittle: The True Story (1987); Hans von Ohain memoir (1980); Wikipedia, “Heinkel He 178”, “Messerschmitt Me 262”