Argus As 014
1940s German pulsejet aircraft engine
The Argus As 014 (designated 109-014 by the RLM) was a pulsejet engine used on the German V-1 flying bomb of World War II, and the first model of pulsejet engine placed in mass production. License manufacture of the As 014 was carried out in Japan in the latter stages of World War II, as the Kawanishi Maru Ka10 for the Kawanishi Baika kamikaze jet.
The United States reverse-engineered the design for the Ford PJ31 powering the Republic-Ford JB-2 cruise missile and the experimental USAAF-developed JB-4 television-guided bomb.
Development
The origins of the Argus As 014 lie in 1928, when Munich inventor Paul Schmidt began work on a new design of pulse jet engine. Schmidt received a patent on his design in 1931 and received support from the German Air Ministry in 1933. In 1934, along with Professor Georg Madelung, Schmidt proposed a "flying bomb" to be powered by his pulse jet to the Ministry and received a development contract the following year. In 1938 he demonstrated a pulse jet–powered pilotless bomber, but the project was shelved by the Air Ministry as the prototype lacked range and accuracy and was expensive to construct. That same year, however, the Argus Company began work on a flying bomb using Schmidt's engine. Schmidt later joined Argus in 1940.
Design
A model of simplicity and low cost, the engine was made from a sheet of mild steel rolled into a tube.
The public source identifies “Argus As 014” as 1940s German pulsejet aircraft engine. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Argus, 1940s and German.
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This entry incorporates text from “Argus As 014” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.