Thermojet

These engines are reasonably inefficient because of the comparatively poor power-to-weight ratios of piston engines when compared to gas turbines. In fact, when such engines have been constructed, the aircraft designers would have achieved better results had they simply mounted a propellor on the engine instead. Nevertheless, the concept actually works and has been demonstrated in a number of different aircraft.

Thermojet research was abandoned at the end of World War II as the turbojet was demonstrably a far more practical solution to jet power.

• The first application of the thermojet principle was by Henri Coanda in his Coanda-1910 aeroplane (1910).

• It was next explored by Secondo Campini in the early 1930s, although it was not until 1940 that an aircraft (the Campini Caproni CC.2) would fly powered by his engine.

• NACA engineer Eastman Jacobs was actively pursuing thermojet research in the early 1940s for a project that came to be known as Jake's jeep but which was never completed as turbojet technology overtook it.

• Japanese engineers developed the Tsu-11 engine to power Ohka kamikaze aircraft as an alternative to the rocket engines that these aircraft were then using.

• The Soviet Mikoyan-Gurevich I-250 (N) designed in 1944 used a piston engine to drive both a propeller at the nose of the plane, and a compressor leading to a jet exhaust at the tail.

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