Imagine a fighter aircraft that cannot take off. It has no way to move under its own power on the runway, no way to build up speed, no way to leave the ground at all. To fly it, you must bolt it to the roof of an airliner, haul it up to altitude, and drop it — and only then, as the air rushes through its hollow body, does the engine come alive.
This was the Leduc, one of the strangest flying machines France ever built, and one of the first aircraft in the world to fly on the raw power of a ramjet alone. Stranger still was the seating arrangement: the pilot lay flat on his stomach, sealed inside a glass nose cone in the very centre of the engine’s air intake, staring out as the airflow howled past him toward the flame.
It was the obsession of one stubborn engineer, René Leduc — and for a brief moment in the 1950s, it looked like the future of flight.
• Flugzeug: Leduc 0.10 — among the first aircraft to fly on ramjet power alone
• Designer: René Leduc; ein funktionierendes Staustrahltriebwerk, das 1936 im Breguet-Werk vorgeführt wurde.
• Das Problem: Ein Staustrahltriebwerk erzeugt im Stillstand keinen Schub, daher konnte das Flugzeug nicht abheben.
• Die Lösung: wurde auf einem Passagierflugzeug aus Sud-Est Languedoc in die Höhe getragen und in großer Höhe ausgeklinkt.
• Erster Flug mit Staustrahltriebwerk: 21. April 1949 über Toulouse (~680 km/h bei halber Leistung)
• Der Pilot: Er lag bäuchlings in einer verglasten Nasenkapsel, genau in der Mitte des Lufteinlasses.
• Endgültige Fassung: Die Leduc 0.22 mit Pfeilflügeln erreichte 1957 Mach 1,15, bevor das Projekt 1958 abgebrochen wurde.
Ein Ofenrohr mit Flügeln
The ramjet is the simplest jet engine imaginable: no compressor, no turbine, barely any moving parts. It is little more than a shaped tube that uses its own forward speed to ram air inside, where fuel is added and burned. The idea was patented by another Frenchman, René Lorin, back in 1913 — but it had a fatal catch. A ramjet only produces thrust once it is already moving fast through the air. Sitting still on a runway, it does precisely nothing.
René Leduc spent decades wrestling with that paradox. He secured a small government grant in 1933, demonstrated a working ramjet by 1936, and won a contract to build an actual aircraft around it — only for the Second World War to intervene. His prototype was hidden from the occupying Germans, nearly destroyed in a bombing raid, and not flown until years after the war.
Das Flugzeug, das abgeworfen werden musste, um fliegen zu können
Da die Leduc 0.10 nicht starten konnte, montierte Leduc sie kurzerhand auf einem Gerüst über einem viermotorigen Languedoc-Passagierflugzeug. Die zusammengesetzte Maschine sollte gemeinsam steigen; das kleine Staustrahlflugzeug wurde dann ausgeklinkt und glitt, bis es schnell genug war, um sein Triebwerk zu zünden. Am 21. April 1949 wurde über Toulouse das Staustrahltriebwerk erstmals im Flug gezündet, und die Leduc stieg und manövrierte vollständig aus eigener Kraft und erreichte bei Halbgas eine Geschwindigkeit von rund 680 km/h. Das Prinzip war auf die kühnste Art und Weise bewiesen worden.
Fliegen aus dem Inneren des Triebwerks
Weil der gesamte Rumpf War the ramjet, there was nowhere ordinary to put a cockpit. Leduc’s solution was as bold as the aircraft: the pilot reclined face-down inside a double-walled nose, sealed in a glazed pod at the centre of the intake, with the incoming air flowing around him in a ring. Forward visibility was almost nil, and bailing out was a nightmare no one wished to contemplate — but it flew.
Jagd nach Mach 2
The experiments grew more ambitious. The Leduc 0.21 flew more than 250 times and approached Mach 0.95. Then came Leduc’s masterpiece, the 0.22: a swept-wing interceptor that finally solved the take-off problem by adding a SNECMA Atar turbojet for the runway, keeping the ramjet for high speed. A jettisonable nose gave the pilot an escape pod at last. In December 1957 it reached Mach 1.15, and it flew more than 140 times — until it was gutted by a fire while taxiing.
Das zukünftige Frankreich wandte sich ab von
The Leduc did not fail on its merits. France was pouring money into the wars in Indochina and Algeria, and a far more conventional aircraft had appeared: the Dassault Mirage, which reached beyond Mach 2 on an ordinary afterburning turbojet, with none of the ramjet’s awkwardness. In February 1958 the government cancelled the Leduc programme, and René Leduc never designed another aircraft. His flying stovepipes went to museums — a brilliant dead end from a man history has been too quick to forget.
Quellen: PlaneHistoria (Vegim Krelani); Wikipedia (Leduc 0.10; Leduc 0.21; Leduc 0.22); Musée de l'air et de l'espace. Daten und Geschwindigkeiten werden wie berichtet angegeben; die Quellen weichen in einigen Details geringfügig voneinander ab.
Verwandte Fragen
Was war der Leduc 0,10?
The Leduc 0.10 was a French experimental aircraft and one of the first in the world to fly on ramjet power alone. Because a ramjet produces no thrust at a standstill, it could not take off by itself — it was carried aloft on top of a Sud-Est Languedoc airliner and released at altitude. Its first ramjet-powered flight came on 21 April 1949 over Toulouse, reaching about 680 km/h on half power.
Was ist ein Staustrahltriebwerk und wie funktioniert es?
A ramjet is the simplest jet engine imaginable: no compressor, no turbine, and barely any moving parts. It is essentially a shaped tube that uses its own forward speed to ram air inside, where fuel is added and burned. The idea was patented by Frenchman René Lorin in 1913, but it has a fatal catch — it produces no thrust until it is already moving fast.
Warum konnte die Leduc nicht von selbst abheben?
Because its ramjet engine only generates thrust once the aircraft is already moving quickly through the air. Sitting still on a runway it produced nothing, so the Leduc had to be bolted to a gantry on top of a four-engined Languedoc airliner, hauled up to altitude, and dropped — only then did its engine come alive.
Wer war René Leduc?
René Leduc was a stubbornly determined French engineer who spent decades pursuing ramjet flight. He secured a small government grant in 1933, demonstrated a working ramjet by 1936, and won a contract to build an aircraft around it. His prototype was hidden from the occupying Germans during the Second World War and did not fly under ramjet power until 1949.
Wo saß der Pilot in der Leduc?
The pilot lay flat on his stomach, sealed inside a glazed nose pod positioned in the dead centre of the engine’s air intake, with the airflow rushing past him toward the combustion zone behind. A handful of other experimental designs tried prone piloting too, such as the Northrop XP-79.
Wie schnell flog die Leduc?
The final version, the swept-wing Leduc 0.22, reached Mach 1.15 in 1957. The programme was cancelled the following year, in 1958, ending René Leduc’s dream of a pure-ramjet fighter after nearly three decades of work.
Wurden auch von anderen Flugzeugen Staustrahltriebwerke verwendet?
Yes — France in particular kept experimenting. The Nord 1500 Griffon combined a turbojet with a ramjet and flew past Mach 2, while Germany’s wartime Focke-Wulf Triebflügel Das Konzept sieht Staustrahltriebwerke an den Spitzen rotierender Flügel vor.
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