How do jumbo jets work

The compressor is made with many blades attached to a shaft. The blades spin at high speed and compress or squeeze the air. The compressed air is then sprayed with fuel and an electric spark lights the mixture. The burning gases expand and blast out through the nozzle, at the back of the engine. As the jets of gas shoot backward, the engine and the aircraft are thrust forward.

As the hot air is going to the nozzle, it passes through another group of blades called the turbine. The turbine is attached to the same shaft as the compressor. Spinning the turbine causes the compressor to spin. The image below shows how the air flows through the engine. The air goes through the core of the engine as well as around the core. This causes some of the air to be very hot and some to be cooler.

The cooler air then mixes with the hot air at the engine exit area. Thrust is the forward force that pushes the engine and, therefore, the airplane forward. Sir Isaac Newton discovered that for "every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. The engine takes in a large volume of air. The air is heated and compressed and slowed down. The air is forced through many spinning blades. By mixing this air with jet fuel, the temperature of the air can be as high as three thousand degrees.

The power of the air is used to turn the turbine. Finally, when the air leaves, it pushes backward out of the engine. This causes the plane to move forward. Parts of a Jet Engine. Fan - The fan is the first component in a turbofan. The large spinning fan sucks in large quantities of air. Most blades of the fan are made of titanium. It then speeds this air up and splits it into two parts. One part continues through the "core" or center of the engine, where it is acted upon by the other engine components.

The second part "bypasses" the core of the engine. It goes through a duct that surrounds the core to the back of the engine where it produces much of the force that propels the airplane forward. This cooler air helps to quiet the engine as well as adding thrust to the engine.

Compressor - The compressor is the first component in the engine core. The compressor is made up of fans with many blades and attached to a shaft.

The compressor squeezes the air that enters it into progressively smaller areas, resulting in an increase in the air pressure. This results in an increase in the energy potential of the air.

The squashed air is forced into the combustion chamber. Combustor - In the combustor the air is mixed with fuel and then ignited. There are as many as 20 nozzles to spray fuel into the airstream. The mixture of air and fuel catches fire. This provides a high temperature, high-energy airflow. The fuel burns with the oxygen in the compressed air, producing hot expanding gases. The inside of the combustor is often made of ceramic materials to provide a heat-resistant chamber.

Turbine - The high-energy airflow coming out of the combustor goes into the turbine, causing the turbine blades to rotate.

The turbines are linked by a shaft to turn the blades in the compressor and to spin the intake fan at the front. This rotation takes some energy from the high-energy flow that is used to drive the fan and the compressor.

Flatter and higher ceilings, straighter walls, and partitions between several large but separate groups of passenger seats will make for a distinct break from the long tubular effect of the interior of today's jet transports. Help Login. Search by keyword. Congress U. Presidency U. All Rights Reserved. Jumbo Jets: New Travel Era. Air Transportation. Airline Industry Turbulence. Airline Safety. Domestic Drones. Future of the Airlines. Future of the Airline Industry. We may receive compensation when you click on links to those products.

Terms apply to the offers listed on this page. For an explanation of our Advertising Policy, visit this page. When you board a plane, you might have noticed that little swirl, or white hash, in the very middle of the engine, slowly turning like an optical illusion. Behind that swirl is probably the most complex piece of engineering ever designed: One of the jet engines powering your aircraft.

They can go for thousands of hours — 60, hours — dependent only on air and fuel. I spoke with Dr. He also runs a gas-turbine research facility at the university. Speich is a mechanical engineer who has been with Pratt for 45 years; he cut his teeth working on early computer models of jet engines and on the PW, the successor to the first engine Pratt designed for the Boeing More about that later.

Jet engines work fundamentally by drawing in air, lots of air, mixing it with fuel and expelling the resulting gases out the back at great speed. That moves the engine forward by reaction, as well as the airplane attached to it. In fact, most of the thrust generated by a modern jet engine comes simply by moving an incredible volume of air, all at once, very quickly.

The fan blades at the front are a slave to the core of the engine — and that core makes those fans do all the heavy lifting. These days, jets instead use turbofans, which push almost all of the air they ingest around the engine core. The biggest jetliners in service today have extremely high-bypass engines, where there is a high ratio between the air accelerated through the engine — bypassing the core — and the air going into the core of the engine itself. The huge diameter of those engines, such as those on Boeing s, is due to the need to have a giant fan at the front.

Civilian turbojets stopped flying with Concorde, which even used something found only on supersonic fighters and bombers: afterburners — literally injecting fuel into the exhaust to create a huge thrust boost — to help accelerate on takeoff and, later in the flight, to break the sound barrier. The theory put into practice with turbofans is something called propulsive efficiency.

It is much more efficient to move a large volume of air at relatively slower speeds than to move a small volume of air at higher speeds. Attia repeated this maxim to me by rote memory. Turbojet engines, like those on the Concorde, did not have any bypass at all, which made them very expensive to operate. To make that jet roar, the engines had to burn a lot of fuel. The fan at the front sucks in air.

The air that entered the core moves through a series of small, spinning blades attached to a shaft called the compressor. The act of spinning the air causes torque, which causes the air to speed up and increases its pressure. Next, the rapidly expanding, hot gas mixture passes through another set of fan blades called the turbine. These gases are caught by small blades on the turbine, causing the turbine to spin. The spinning turbine turns a shaft that makes the compressors spin and turns the fan at the very front.

A key takeaway: the whole point of the engine core is to turn the fan at the front — not to provide most of the thrust itself.

That turbine shaft spins around 20, RPM — which is really, really fast. So, how much air is needed to provide enough forward movement to get the wings working , and to generate lift?

A typical jet engine will ingest some 1, kilograms of air per second. Air density at sea level is about 1.