9 Weirdest Aircraft Engines Ever Built Explained

Nine aircraft engines that somebody actually built - and the real engineering reason each one failed. Twenty-eight cylinders in four stacked rows. A jet with a piston engine where the turbine should be. Forty-two cylinders that never flew and ended up in a boat. A helicopter that burns fuel at the tips of its rotor blades. And a jet engine with a live nuclear reactor where the flame should be. Every failure here is a different kind of failure - a tolerance the factory couldn't hold, a fuel that dissolved the people handling it, a design that was simply finished too late to matter. CHAPTERS 0:00 The Corncob - Pratt & Whitney R-4360 Wasp Major 1:23 The Fake First Jet - Caproni Campini N.1 2:42 The H - Napier Sabre 4:11 The Big One - Yakovlev M-501 5:39 The Screamer - Kuznetsov NK-12 6:47 The Buzz - Argus As 014 pulsejet 8:13 The Burning Tips - Hiller YH-32 Hornet 9:41 The One That Dissolved Its Pilots - Walter HWK 109-509 11:06 The Reactor - General Electric HTRE 12:35 Send it to the scrapyard A note on two things people get wrong, because this channel would rather be right than quick: The NB-36H really did fly with a working reactor on board, but that reactor never powered the aircraft. The engine that genuinely ran on nuclear heat ran on a test rig on the ground. The V-1's pulsejet could run perfectly well standing still. What it could not do was make enough thrust to launch itself, which is why it went up a ramp on a steam catapult. Illustrations in this video are AI-generated reconstructions built from sourced technical descriptions of each engine. Supporting footage via Pexels. #engineering #aviation #aircraftengines