Imagine it’s 1942. The world is on fire. Most fighter pilots are still cranking handles to drop landing gear in cramped cockpits powered by massive, vibrating piston engines. Then, out of a secretive design office in Burbank, California, comes a blueprint that looks like it fell out of a time machine from the 1960s. That was the Lockheed L-133 Starjet. It didn't just push the envelope; it tore the envelope into confetti and threw it out the window.
It’s weird to think about now.
We usually credit the British or the Germans for the dawn of the jet age. You’ve got the Gloster Meteor and the Messerschmitt Me 262 taking all the glory in the history books. But the Lockheed L-133 Starjet was actually on the drawing boards as a fully fleshed-out concept before the U.S. even had a working jet engine. It was sleek. It was stainless steel. It had canards—those little "extra" wings near the nose that modern fighters like the Eurofighter Typhoon use today.
Honestly, the Army Air Forces just wasn't ready for it.
The Genius of Hall Hibbard and Nathan Price
The L-133 wasn't some backyard project. It was the brainchild of Hall Hibbard, Lockheed's chief engineer, and a brilliant, somewhat eccentric engine designer named Nathan Price. These guys weren't looking to iterate. They wanted to leapfrog everything in the sky. While everyone else was trying to figure out how to make propellers spin faster without exploding, Hibbard and Price were obsessing over axial-flow turbojets.
Specifically, the L-1000 engine.
This engine was the heart of the Lockheed L-133 Starjet. Most early jets used centrifugal compressors—basically big, round fans that flung air outward. They were simple but fat and draggy. Price wanted an axial-flow design, where air moves straight through the engine. It's much more efficient and allows for a needle-thin fuselage. If they had pulled it off, the L-133 would have been hitting speeds over 600 mph when the fastest props were struggling to touch 450 mph.
That's a massive gap.
Design Features That Were Decades Ahead of Their Time
If you look at a 3D render of the L-133 today, you’ll notice the "canard" layout immediately. This was decades before "fly-by-wire" computers made unstable planes easy to fly. Hibbard believed the canards would provide better lift and maneuverability at high speeds.
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The wings were incredibly thin. To handle the heat and stress of near-sonic speeds, Lockheed planned to build the airframe out of stainless steel. Think about that for a second. This was a time when wood and fabric were still common in aircraft construction.
The armament was equally insane.
Lockheed proposed four 20mm cannons in the nose. In 1942, most American fighters were still carrying .50 caliber machine guns. The L-133 would have shredded anything in the sky with a single burst. It was designed to be an interceptor, something that could scramble, climb like a rocket, and delete enemy bombers before they even saw it coming.
Why the Pentagon Said No
So, why don't we see Lockheed L-133 Starjet displays in every museum?
Bureaucracy and risk.
The War Department looked at the proposal and basically blinked. They were in the middle of a global conflict and needed planes now. The L-133 was too radical. It required a totally new engine that didn't exist yet, a new type of metallurgy, and an aerodynamic configuration that hadn't been proven.
The Army Air Forces basically told Lockheed to put the L-133 in a drawer and focus on something more "practical." That practical project eventually became the P-80 Shooting Star. The P-80 was a great plane, sure, but it used a British-derived centrifugal engine and a conventional tail. It was safe. The L-133 was a revolution, and the military didn't have the stomach for a revolution in the middle of a world war.
It's a classic case of the "better" being the enemy of the "good enough."
The L-1000 Engine: The Missing Link
We have to talk about the engine again because it's where the whole project lived or died. Nathan Price’s L-1000 was supposed to be a twin-spool turbojet. For the non-gearheads: that's incredibly sophisticated. It even featured a primitive version of an afterburner, which they called "after-burning" or "reheating" at the time.
If the L-1000 had received the funding it needed, the U.S. might have entered the jet age two years earlier. Instead, the project was starved of cash. By the time the military got serious about jets, they went with General Electric and Allison because they had more industrial muscle to mass-produce simpler designs.
The Legacy of a Ghost Plane
Even though it never flew, the Lockheed L-133 Starjet changed everything.
The data Lockheed gathered during the design phase didn't just vanish. It fed directly into the Skunk Works—Lockheed’s legendary secret design bureau led by Kelly Johnson. The DNA of the L-133 can be seen in the F-104 Starfighter and even the SR-71 Blackbird. The obsession with high-speed aerodynamics, heat-resistant materials, and axial-flow engines all started with those 1942 blueprints.
It's sorta tragic.
You have this masterpiece of engineering that gets sidelined because it's too far ahead of the curve. It's a reminder that technological progress isn't a straight line. It's a series of jumps, and sometimes the biggest jumpers land in the dirt because the ground isn't ready for them yet.
Actionable Insights for Aviation Enthusiasts and Historians
If you're looking to dive deeper into the history of the Lockheed L-133 Starjet, there are a few specific things you can do to find the "real" story beyond the surface-level Wikipedia summaries:
- Search for the L-1000 Engine Patents: Many of Nathan Price's original designs are archived in the U.S. Patent Office. Searching for "Nathan C. Price turbojet patent" will show you the actual internal workings of the engine that was supposed to power the Starjet.
- Visit the Lockheed Martin Archives: While much is classified, many early "L-series" design studies have been declassified and are available through aviation historical societies like the American Aviation Historical Society (AAHS).
- Compare the L-133 to the XP-80: Look at the transition from the L-133 to the XP-80. You’ll see exactly where Kelly Johnson simplified the design to make it "producible" for the military. It’s a masterclass in compromise.
- Study the "Stainless Steel" Problem: Look up the Bristol 188, a later British jet that actually used the stainless steel construction the L-133 proposed. It’ll give you an idea of the massive technical hurdles Lockheed would have faced in 1943.
The Lockheed L-133 Starjet remains the greatest "what if" of World War II aviation. It wasn't just a plane; it was a vision of a future that took another twenty years to actually arrive.