needed a fighter with another 100 mph of airspeed-and quickly. (The Gloster Meteor did shoot down V-1 buzz bombs but never a manned aircraft.) The U.S. intelligence revealed that Messerschmitt was preparing an airplane that would become the only jet to see air-to-air combat during World War II: the Me-262. The company could play with jets after the war. Yet the War Department told Lockheed to lay off pursuing jet technology any further and to put its effort into building and improving the P-38 Lightning.

Lockheed’s L-133, again designed largely by Nathan Price, was an exotic blended-wing/body canard with slotted flaps and low-drag twin engines mounted inside the fuselage. After all, the company had already created, at least on paper, the earliest American jet fighter, to be powered by the L-1000 engine. Lockheed had been lobbying hard for the contract to build that airplane. In its early form, two of them would power America’s very first jet, the Bell XP-59. Army Air Corps officer with a briefcase of Whittle W.1 blueprints handcuffed to his wrist flew from England to Lynn, Mass., where the General Electric Company, already well-versed in turbine technology through its turbochargers, set to work building what would ultimately be called the J33 turbojet engine. He was stunned, though he was already aware of the German jet genesis. “Hap” Arnold learned of the Whittle-powered Gloster E.28/39 prototype, the first Allied jet to fly, during a secret tour of the British aircraft industry. Lockheed’s first jet aircraft design, the futuristic L-133, never left the drawing board. But an unspoken motivation was that after Dunkirk the British feared they might well lose the war and if that happened they wanted the U.S. to turn its production capability toward manufacturing this emerging technology. The ostensible purpose was to persuade the neutral U.S. all of its jet engine, radar and proximity-fuze research, as part of the Tizard Mission, named for British radar pioneer Henry Tizard. In the fall of 1940, in the midst of the Battle of Britain, the British sent to the U.S. Price had already invented a cabin-pressure regulator for the Boeing 307 that made airliner pressurization practical, and he was credited with making the Lockheed P-38’s turbocharging system a success.īritish designer Frank Whittle had invented the jet engine (in parallel with the German Hans von Ohain), and by the time the P-80 was envisioned, the only Allied turbojets in limited production were the Whittle W.1 and de Havilland’s Halford H-1, a cleaned-up version of the W.1. It was designed by Nathan Price, a creative Lockheed engineer who, not surprisingly, would go on to contribute heavily (and anonymously) to the P-80 design.

In the late 1930s, Lockheed had started work on an axial-flow turbojet called the L-1000. The United States had so thoroughly forsworn jet engine development that it lagged behind even Italy, to say nothing of Germany and Britain. In 1943 it took just 143 days for Lockheed designer Clarence“Kelly” Johnson and his elite team of 128 Skunk Works engineers and fabricators to create the P-80 Shooting Star. But had it not been for the British, all they would have displayed on rollout day was the world’s fastest glider. Shooting Star: How Lockheed's P-80 Paved the Way for Future American Fighters Close

Piston aircraft air combat maneuvers