The Atomic Airplane
Published on: 2025-06-07 21:16:18
In 1980s, veterans of the Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion program got together and recorded nearly 13 hours of presentations and interviews describing the amazing effort to make a nuclear-powered airplane. The content is mostly focused on the Heat Transfer Reactor Experiments (HTREs) which can still be seen sitting out in the parking lot of the EBR-I museum in Idaho.
Dr. Jake Hecla, Stanton Postdoctoral Fellow at MIT, digitized this material with the help of John Webb. The people who saved this film and got it to Dr. Hecla are Lee Hite and David Carpenter. The late John Webb (W7NWH), Otto Woike, George Pomeroy, and Gunnar Thornton contributed to the development and preservation of this film.
This page contains a full transcript of the recordings with links to the specific timestamps in the films.
Parts 1-4 Parts 5-7
1 Intro
From 1946 through 51, the Fairchild Airplane Company conducted feasibility studies for nuclear propulsion for aircraft, or NEPA. Various cycles, power plants, and
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