50 free Jet Engines trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Jet engines trivia for aviation geeks, engineering students, plane spotters and anyone who has stared out of a window seat wondering how the thing works. The quiz covers the race to invent the turbojet - Frank Whittle's 1930 patent and the £5 renewal fee he could not afford, Hans von Ohain's hydrogen-fuelled test engine, the Heinkel He 178's six-minute first flight in August 1939, the Me 262 and Gloster Meteor entering service within months of each other in 1944. Then it gets technical without getting cruel: what a bypass ratio means, why turbofans beat turbojets at airliner speeds, what an afterburner burns, why ramjets have no moving parts and scramjets barely work, the Brayton cycle, the first production turbofan and the monster GE90 and GE9X on Boeing's 777s. There are also questions on the de Havilland Comet, Concorde's Olympus engines, the V-1's pulsejet, the X-43A's Mach 9.6 and how reliable modern engines have become. Expect a range from easy to genuinely nerdy. Every answer has been checked against a reference page and each question shows its source once you have answered.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which RAF officer submitted the first patent for a turbojet engine in January 1930?
Frank Whittle
He was a 22-year-old Cranwell graduate whose thesis had sketched the idea; the Air Ministry showed little interest and development crawled.
Q 02Which German engineer began building a rival turbojet in 1935 that became the first to fly?
Hans von Ohain
The two inventors met in 1966 and became touring friends.
Q 03What was the world's first aircraft to fly purely on turbojet power, on 27 August 1939?
Heinkel He 178
Test pilot Erich Warsitz flew it for six minutes from Rostock-Marienehe; Nazi officials Udet and Milch were unimpressed by its 598 km/h top speed.
Q 04What was the world's first operational jet fighter, powered by Junkers Jumo 004 engines?
Messerschmitt Me 262
Nicknamed Schwalbe (Swallow), it entered service in April 1944, three months before the RAF's first jet; Hitler had insisted it be reworked as a bomber.
Q 05Which British jet fighter was the only Allied jet aircraft to see combat in the Second World War?
Gloster Meteor
It entered RAF service in July 1944 and was first used against German flying bombs, scoring its first two 'kills' on 4 August.
Q 06What was Whittle's problem in January 1935 that caused his original jet engine patent to lapse?
He could not afford the £5 renewal fee
The Air Ministry refused to pay it for him; months later old Cranwell friends helped him set up his own company.
Q 07What was the name of the company Whittle formed with two retired RAF servicemen to build his engine?
Power Jets Ltd
With help from British Thomson-Houston the first prototype ran on 12 April 1937; the firm was nationalised in 1944, prompting Whittle's second breakdown.
Q 08What was the first British aircraft to fly with a turbojet, on 15 May 1941?
Gloster E.28/39
It used a Power Jets engine; the Meteor that followed entered service in July 1944.
Q 09What was the first US-built jet aircraft, built around a copy of a donated British engine?
Bell P-59 Airacomet
The British handed over an engine in 1941, which General Electric copied as the J31; the plane was underpowered and only 18 prototypes and test aircraft were built.
Q 10Which Austrian engineer at Junkers gave the Jumo 004 its axial-flow compressor?
Anselm Franz
After the war the Allies studied captured German engines closely, and their legacy is visible in nearly every fixed-wing jet since.
Q 11What is the name of the thermodynamic process gas-turbine jet engines operate on?
The Brayton cycle
A compressor feeds a combustor, a turbine extracts power to drive the compressor, and the leftover energy exits as a jet through the nozzle.
Q 12What extra component distinguishes a turbofan from a turbojet?
A large fan that pushes air around the core
The bypass air makes turbofans far more efficient at airliner speeds, which is why they dominate medium and long-haul flying.
Q 13If a turbofan has a bypass ratio of 6, what does that mean?
Q 21Which German weapon of the Second World War was propelled by the Argus As 109-014 pulsejet?
The V-1 flying bomb
A pulsejet burns in pulses and can run while stationary; the buzzing note earned the V-1 its 'doodlebug' nickname.
Q 22What does an afterburner do?
Burns extra fuel in the exhaust to reheat the turbine gases
Fuel consumption is typically four times that of the main engine, so it is used almost only on supersonic aircraft - Concorde and the Tu-144 included.
Q 23Which engine powered Concorde, one of the last major applications of a pure turbojet?
Six times more air passes around the core than through it
Low-bypass military engines sit around 2:1 or less; the first production turbofan had a bypass ratio of just 0.3.
Q 14What was the world's first production turbofan engine?
Rolls-Royce Conway
Its bypass ratio of 0.3 is similar to the modern GE F404 fighter engine; the TF39 for the C-5 Galaxy was the first production high-bypass design.
Q 15Which aircraft was the first production high-bypass turbofan, the GE TF39, designed to power?
Lockheed C-5 Galaxy
The first experimental high-bypass engine, the AVCO-Lycoming PLF1A-2, ran in February 1962 with a 6:1 bypass ratio.
Q 16Which 1990s engine's 115,000 lbf of thrust is contrasted with a de Havilland Ghost's 5,000?
General Electric GE90
Reliability improved even more dramatically, from 40 in-flight shutdowns per 100,000 engine hours to fewer than one.
Q 17The General Electric GE9X was developed exclusively for which airliner?
Boeing 777X
It first ran in April 2016, uses ceramic matrix composites in the combustor and turbine, and is rated at 110,000 lbf.
Q 18What is the simplest type of air-breathing jet engine, having no moving parts in the engine proper?
The ramjet
It relies on the vehicle's forward speed to compress air in the inlet, so it cannot produce thrust from a standstill.
Q 19What is the defining feature of a scramjet?
Air stays supersonic through the combustor
Very few have flown; the X-51A Waverider cruised at Mach 5 for about 200 seconds in 2010.
Q 20What top speed did NASA's X-43A hypersonic test vehicle briefly reach on its final 2004 test flight?
Mach 9.6
It was the first thrust-producing supersonic-combustion vehicle with full aerodynamic control surfaces to fly.
Rolls-Royce/Snecma Olympus 593
At Mach 2 the intake did 63% of the compression and the engine only 8%; Concorde and the Tu-144 were the only airliners with afterburners.
Q 24What was the world's first commercial jet airliner, which entered service in 1952?
De Havilland Comet
Its four Ghost turbojets were buried in the wing roots; three crashes within a year grounded it and handed the market to Boeing.
Q 25What phenomenon, poorly understood at the time, was found to have caused two of the early Comet crashes?
Metal fatigue
Stress concentrated around square cut-outs for the ADF antennas; the redesigned Comet 4 flew until 1981 and its Nimrod derivative until 2011.
Q 26Which Englishman was granted the first patent for a stationary gas turbine, in 1791?
John Barber
The first gas turbine to run self-sustaining was built only in 1903 by the Norwegian engineer Aegidius Elling.
Q 27Who filed the first patent for a gas-turbine aircraft engine, an unbuilt axial-flow turbojet, in 1921?
Maxime Guillaume
It would have needed compressor technology far beyond the era; A. A. Griffith's 1926 paper on turbine design made practical axial compressors possible.
Q 28Which Spanish engineer patented a jet engine in 1935, then was executed by Francoist troops as the Civil War began?
Virgilio Leret Ruiz
His widow Carlota O'Neill smuggled the hidden plans to the British embassy in Madrid after her release from prison.
Q 29Which Hungarian engineer designed the world's first turboprop, patenting the idea in 1929?
György Jendrassik
His Cs-1 engine, predicted to give 1,000 bhp, was tested at the Ganz Works in Budapest around 1940.
Q 30What was the world's first turbofan, which ran only on a test bed in May 1943?
Daimler-Benz DB 670
Designated 109-007 by the German air ministry, it was abandoned with its problems unsolved as the war went badly.