Jet Vortex

The intake of a jet engine is like an unimaginably powerful vacuum cleaner, can snatch surprisingly heavy things right off the runway. Pliers, wrenches, cigarette lighters, coins and nails have all been found in jet innards, and even the least of these can sometimes do serious damage. So far, no jet airliner has suffered engine failure from this cause, but one such disaster would be too many.

Last week Ryan Reporter, house organ of Ryan Aeronautical Co., reported a solution worked out by the Douglas Aircraft Co. for use on the new DC-8 Jetliner. Loose objects on the ground are not inhaled directly by the great flood of air passing through an engine, Douglas engineers found. Instead, a vortex like a small tornado forms below and just ahead of the engine's intake. If anything loose is within its reach, the vortex lifts it up like a house in a Kansas twister. Then the main air stream grabs it and hurls it into the engine's maw.

The Douglas solution: small streams of air were diverted from the engine's compressors and shot downward and forward. The air jets hit the runway, blow away the converging air that would feed a vortex. No vortex forms, and indigestible objects stay on the ground.

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