JATO: Jet Assisted Takeoff of Carrier Aircraft ~ 1945 US Navy Training Film MN-2403

more at http://quickfound.net/

Originally a public domain film, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and one-pass brightness-contrast-color correction & mild video noise reduction applied.

The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JATO

Wikipedia license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

JATO (acronym for jet-assisted take-off), is a type of assisted take-off for helping overloaded aircraft into the air by providing additional thrust in the form of small rockets. The term JATO is used interchangeably with the (more specific) term RATO, for rocket-assisted take-off (or, in RAF parlance, RATOG, for rocket-assisted take-off gear)...

In early 1939, the National Academy of Sciences in the United States provided $1,000 to Theodore von Kármán and the Rocket Research Group (including Jack Parsons, Frank Malina, Edward Forman and Apollo M. O. Smith) at the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology (GALCIT) to research rocket-assisted take-off of aircraft. This JATO research was the first rocket research to receive financial assistance from the U.S. government since World War I when Robert H. Goddard had an Army contract to develop solid fuel rocket weapons. In late 1941 von Kármán and his team attached several 50-pound thrust, solid fuel... JATOs to a light Ercoupe plane, and Army Captain Homer Boushey took off on test runs. On the last run they removed the propeller, attached six JATO units under the wings, and Boushey was thrust into the air for a short flight, the first American to fly by rocket power only. Both armed services used solid fuel JATO during the war...

In the late 1950s, zero-length launch experimental programs for launching fighter aircraft were carried out by the United States Air Force, the German Bundeswehr's Luftwaffe and the Soviet VVS using high-thrust, short-burn duration booster designs of similar appearance and function. The USAF used a modified Republic F-84, designated EF-84G, which used the MGM-1 Matador cruise missile's Aerojet General-designed, 240 kN (26 short ton) thrust-level solid fuel booster of two second thrust duration. The Soviet VVS used a modified MiG-19 fighter, designated SM-30, launched from a special launcher, and using a nearly identical solid-fueled rocket booster design to that of the EF-84G, but of a much more powerful, 600 kN (64 short ton) thrust level. The F-100 and F-104 were also used for zero-length launch experiments, with similarly powerful drop-away booster units to the Soviets' SM-30 experiments.

Also in the 1950s the JATO Junior was an attempt by Aerojet Engineering to introduce smaller JATO units to small commercial aircraft, but was blocked by the U.S. Navy Bureau of Aeronautics. Aerojet claimed that the smaller JATO bottle, delivering 250 pounds of thrust for 12 seconds could help a light private plane, that normally requires almost 900 feet of runway to clear a 50-foot-high obstacle, could do the same with 300 feet of runway with a JATO Jr unit...