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. It would have had no engine. The United States had so thoroughly forsworn jet engine development that it lagged behind even Italy, to say nothing of Germany and Britain.
It was not for lack of trying. In the late 1930s, Lockheed had started work on an axial-flow turbojet called the L-1000. 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. 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.
British 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. In the fall of 1940, in the midst of the Battle of Britain, the British sent to the 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. The ostensible purpose was to persuade the neutral U.S. to turn its production capability toward manufacturing this emerging technology. 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 inherit their weapons technology.
In April 1941, General Henry H. “Hap” Arnold learned of the Whittle-powered Gloster E.28/39 prototype, the first Allied jet to fly, during a secret tour of
