Our crown of thorns was designing and building the powerful engine’s inlets—the key to the engine’s thrust and its ability to reach blistering speeds. This became the single most complex and vexing engineering problem of the entire project. Our engines needed tremendous volumes of air at very high pressures to be efficient, so Dave Campbell and I invented movable cones that controlled the velocity and pressure of the air as it entered the engines. These spike-shaped cones acted as an air throttle and actually produced 70 percent of the airplane’s total thrust. Getting those cones to function
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