Trent, the powerful Rolls-Royce with which perhaps you have traveled without realizing it

Rolls-Royce is a British brand world-famous for its luxury cars, but it gives its name to a much more lucrative business.

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That business is aircraft engines. Rolls-Royce began manufacturing aircraft engines in 1915, during World War I. Its first engine was the Eagle, with a power output of 225 hp and based on the engine used in one of its luxury cars, the Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost. In 1935, one of its most famous engines flew for the first time: the Merlin, used in one of the best fighters of the Second World War, the Supermarine Spitfire, and which after the war ended up equipping the Spanish variant of the Messerschmitt Bf-109, the Hispano Aviación HA-1112 Buchón.

Today, Rolls-Royce is one of the world's largest aircraft engine manufacturers, alongside Pratt & Whitney, General Electric, and CFM International. Although the general public still associates the brand primarily with luxury cars, aviation is undoubtedly the British brand's most successful field. Many people have unknowingly flown with a Rolls-Royce to a wide variety of locations and on a multitude of aircraft.

The British brand has done some very innovative things in this field. In 1944, Rolls-Royce made the first turboprop engine, the RB.50 Trent. It was an engine composed of a Rolls-Royce Derwent Mark II turbojet (used in the United Kingdom's first jet fighter, the Gloster Meteor) coupled with a Rotol propeller. It was a successful concept that is used in many aircraft today.

In 1988 Rolls-Royce revived the Trent name to name a new turbofan engine: the RB-211-524L, first fired on 27 August 1990. The first variant of this engine was the Trent 700, used on the Airbus A330 in 1992. This engine, with a mass of 6,160 kg, is capable of generating a thrust of up to 316 kN.

In 1997, Airbus selected another variant of this Rolls-Royce turbofan engine for its four-engine A340: the Trent 500, which was lighter (4,990 kg) and had a thrust of up to 250 kN. The largest of today's Trent engines is the Trent XWB, which is fitted to the Airbus A350 XWB. It has a mass of 7,277 kg and a thrust of up to 430 kN.

If you're curious to see one of these engines in more detail, today Fly By Wire Aviation has published an interesting video showing a Rolls-Royce Trent 500, the engine of the Airbus A340, which is on display at the Cuatro Vientos Air Museum in Madrid:

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Main photo: Rolls-Royce plc. A Rolls-Royce Trent 700.