01 · The engine
A giant fan, driven by a jet engine at its core
This is a turbofan. Almost every airliner flying today hangs two or four of them under its wings.
An interactive lesson
How a jet engine works
Suck, squeeze, bang, blow. Scroll to take one apart.
02 · Cut it open
Air in at the front, fire in the middle, thrust out of the back
Slice it down the middle and the layout is simple. Everything is arranged along one line, in the order the air meets it.
03 · Two shafts
One shaft spins inside the other
The inner shaft joins the fan to the turbine at the very back. The outer one joins the main compressor to its own turbine and turns about four times faster.
04 · Suck
The fan pulls in a huge mass of air
Over a tonne every second at take-off. Most of it never enters the core. It goes around, through the bypass duct, and makes most of the thrust.
05 · Squeeze
Ring after ring of blades packs the air 40 times tighter
Squeezing heats it to around 600 °C before any fuel has been added.
06 · Bang
Fuel burns without stopping
The gas leaves at more than 1,500 °C. That is hotter than the melting point of the turbine blades it is about to hit.
07 · Blow
Hot gas spins the turbines, then blasts out of the back
The blades survive with cooling air and heat-resistant coatings. The turbines drive the compressor and the fan, so the engine keeps itself running.
08 · All at once
Suck, squeeze, bang, blow: all happening at the same time
Pull the engine apart and every piece has one job in that chain. The push backwards on the air is a push forwards on the aircraft.
Part two
What the engines power
Thrust is only the start. Follow the same four engines through one landing.
09 · More than thrust
Four engines power everything else on board
Each one also turns a generator and a hydraulic pump, and gives up some of its compressed air. Lights, controls, wheels and the air in the cabin all run on that.
10 · The air you breathe
Cabin air comes from the compressors
Outside it is about −55 °C and too thin to breathe. Air bled from the engines is cooled in the belly, piped in along the ceiling, and let out at the back at just the rate that holds the pressure.
11 · Wheels down
Hydraulic pressure swings ten wheels into the wind
Pumps on the engines keep oil at about 200 times atmospheric pressure. It opens the doors, swings the legs down and locks them, in about fifteen seconds.
12 · A different wing
Slats and flaps reshape the wing to fly slowly
A wing made for 900 km/h cannot hold the aircraft up at landing speed. Slats slide forward, flaps slide back and down, and the wing becomes bigger and more curved.
13 · Touchdown
About 260 km/h, on eight tyres
The engines are at idle. The main wheels touch first, spin up from nothing in a puff of smoke, and the nose is lowered after them.
14 · Stopping
Spoilers kill the lift, reversers throw the air forwards
Panels flip up on the wing so the weight sits on the wheels and the brakes can bite. The engines' cowls slide back and the fan air is turned to push against the motion.
15 · Walking pace
Half a minute from flying to taxiing
Every step of it ran on power taken from the engines: air, oil pressure, electricity and, at the end, their thrust turned around.
Behind it
How it was made
It began as a recreation of a thirty-second demo and grew into a short course on how an airliner works. Everything above is drawn live in your browser: there is no video on this page.
No model files
The engine, the aircraft, the cabin and the runway are built from code as the page loads: surfaces of revolution, twisted blades, extruded sections. The only pictures are a photograph of the sky and the livery artwork.
One trick for every cutaway
Each wall is a closed shell. A clipping plane slices it, and a second copy of the shell draws only its inside faces in flat orange. Wherever the cut passes through metal, you see a section.
A script, not a recording
Both films are functions of time and nothing else. The same code plays them, scrubs them, and lets your scrolling drive them, so the story and the films can never drift apart.
Numbers you can trust the shape of
Gauges, graphs and cards run on a small model of a large airliner engine. The figures are typical and rounded, not one real engine: right in size and in how they move together.
Concept after the Turbofan Explorer demo by @techartist_. Built with Three.js and Vite, working with Claude Code; look development with Claude Design. Sky: Belfast Sunset (Pure Sky) by Dimitrios Savva and Jarod Guest, Poly Haven, CC0.