Titanium use on WW2 Aircraft??

Thanks fellas, yes Peter , I just wanted to hear it from some other chaps, new it wasn t true Darrell

Titanium on WW2 planes, I don’t think so…

There was no use of titanium on any series production article before the late 1940’s. They figured out how to produce it commercially only shortly after the war (Kroll, Gilbert), and then it took a little to get aerospace-grade material.

But there was a WW2 use of titanium: Smoke screens. Most of the stuff was from the Tawahus mine in upstate NY.

And the F-100 was indeed the first “thing” to use titanium. Then it took off rather fast, with compressor discs for jet engines (Pratt, GE, Westinghouse), the B-52, Boeing Dash-8, A3J Vigilante, the Titan, &c.
Wyman-Gordon was one of the leading companies back then. They also did a lot of work on the YF-12/SR-71.

I hadn’t heard of titanium in largescale aircraft applications until the NAA
F-100 in the mid 50s. At one time, that program used a fair share of the metal used in the United States.
Bill Gunston wrote in Early Supersonic Fighters of the West in 1953-54, NAA used 80% of the sheet titanium produced in the U.S.A.

Nowdays it seems to be everywhere, including “designer” applications like my Breitling where (I hope) its high temperature properties are not needed.

Considering just how hard it is to manufacture and machine Ti, I sincerly doubt it. IIRC, it wasn’t until the immediate post war period that a economically viable means of refining it was created, and longer still before the kinks were worked out of the machining process.

Matt