# Jet Engine > [[PORTAL_Aviation|Aviation]] spine. ## Microsim — queued <p class="wt-pending"><strong>Microsim in the draft queue.</strong> Troy is building the interactive sim for this station by hand; the sourced physics below is complete and citable now.</p> ## Overview A jet engine is a reaction engine that generates thrust by expelling heated gas at high velocity. It runs on the Brayton thermodynamic cycle: air enters through an intake, is compressed by rotating compressors, mixes with fuel in a combustor where it ignites, and then expands through turbines that power the compressors before exiting as a propelling jet — the reaction force on the inside of the engine pushes the aircraft forward by Newton's third law. The two dominant variants are the turbojet, which burns essentially all the compressed air, and the turbofan, which bypasses a share of intake air around the core for far better efficiency at subsonic cruise speeds. Jet propulsion decisively overtook propeller-driven aircraft at high speed and altitude, and remains the basis of virtually all commercial and military aviation above the light end of the fleet. **On the spine:** [[Aircraft]] · [[Helicopter]] · [[Air_traffic_control]] · [[Avionics]]. <!-- SPINEPATH:BEGIN g20 — shortest chain of Wikipedia links between local articles to a Compendium Main article; do not hand-edit inside --> *Connected to the Apex Spine:* Jet engine → [[Aviation|Aviation]] → [[Combustion|Combustion]] — [[WT!Thury_Hydrodynamics_Compendium|Compendium]] section 9, *Combustion*. <!-- SPINEPATH:END --> <!-- FLIGHTLINK:BEGIN g23 — generated from _registry/plans/AVIATION_AVIONICS_SECTIONS.md; do not hand-edit inside --> *Linked from the [[Aviation]] hub, section A8, The jet age.* <!-- FLIGHTLINK:END --> ## Wikipedia : Wikitube **Strict pair:** [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jet_engine) : [Wikitube](https://en.wikitube.io/wiki/Jet_engine) --- *Repopulated 2026-08-05 · text transfer · 0 deletions.*