Students see engine in 'plane' sight
Air Force members display jet engine, show former working parts
BY JENNIFER AMATO Staff Writer

JENNIFER AMATO Air Force personnel Master Sgt. Michael Ridge, left, and Airman First Class Colin T. Renahan brought a jet engine to the North Brunswick Township High School on May 21.

NORTH BRUNSWICK - Members of the United States Air Force brought a jet engine to North Brunswick Township High School on May 21.

Students from Bob Goldman's and RogerWeiss' integrated science classes got to physically touch the 5-and-a-half-footlong, 450-pound engine, which is about 40 years old and came from a T-38 trainer jet.

Airman 1st Class Colin T. Renahan, a KC 135 crew chief from Piscataway, said there are four or five different sections to the engine, depending on the model, which are most easily described as "suck, squeeze, bang, blow": the air is sucked in through a fan, is then compressed, then the combustion ignites the fuel and creates pressure and then the exhaust blows out.

To check if the engine is working properly, Master Sgt.Michael Ridge, a 20-year veteran of the Air Force who worked on ballistic missiles and is currently a recruiter, said the engine is either fired up while taxiing, or a special machine runs while the engine is fired up and running on full throttle without producing any thrust.

Ridge also said the difference between jet fuel and gasoline is that gasoline has vapors. Instead, a little sprinkler inside the jet engine spins and vaporizes the fuel before it is ignited, and then the motor begins to run. The engine then goes from 50 to 700 degrees

Ridge also said the afterburn is caused from the hot exhaust.

"When you start pushing things tighter together, it starts generating more pressure and a lot more heat," he said.

He also said the planes are made so they can be refueled while moving. "You could go around the world without touching down," he noted.

He then spoke of the now-decommissioned SR 71 Blackbird, which still holds all of the speed and altitude records. It could travel three times the speed of sound, at around 2,100 mph, and could make it around the world in five hours.

The SR 71 was originally used by the CIA as a spy plane, and could fly at an altitude of 100,000 feet in order to take aerial photographs.

The jet engine presentation and information were related to the physics portion of the school's science curriculum, as Goldman

explained Newton's Second Law of Motion, which states a relationship between

an object's mass, acceleration and force, and Newton's Third Law, which states that every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

"It builds up as much pressure up front to push out as much pressure out back to move the plane forward," Ridge said.

The engine, as well other current and former military aircraft presentations and demonstrations, will be featured at the 2008 McGuire Air Expo at the 305th Air Mobility Wing at McGuire Air Force Base in Wrightstown 9 a.m.-6 p.m. May 31 and June 1. For more information, visit www.mcguireairexpo.info or call 609-754- 1919.