Types of Aircraft Engines
The aircraft diesel engine or aero diesel has not been widely used as an aircraft engine. Diesel engines were used in airships and were tried in aircraft in the late 1920s and 1930s, but never widely used.
A jet aircraft (or simply jet) is an aircraft (nearly always a fixed-wing aircraft) propelled by jet engines (jet propulsion).
A precooled jet engine is a concept for high speed jet engines that features a cryogenic fuel-cooled heat exchanger immediately after the air intake to precool the air entering the engine.
A pulsejet engine (or pulse jet) is a type of jet engine in which combustion occurs in pulses. A pulsejet engine can be made with few or no moving parts, and is capable of running statically (i.e. it does not need to have air forced into its inlet typically by forward motion).
A reciprocating engine, also often known as a piston engine, is typically a heat engine (although there are also pneumatic and hydraulic reciprocating engines) that uses one or more reciprocating pistons to convert pressure into a rotating motion. This article describes the common features of all types.
A rocket-powered aircraft or rocket plane is an aircraft that uses a rocket engine for propulsion, sometimes in addition to airbreathing jet engines. Rocket planes can achieve much higher speeds than similarly sized jet aircraft, but typically for at most a few minutes of powered operation, followed by a glide.
On multi-engine aircraft, engine positions are numbered from left to right from the point of view of the pilot looking forward, so for example on a four-engine aircraft such as the Boeing 747, engine No. 1 is on the left side, farthest from the fuselage, while engine No. 3 is on the right side nearest to the fuselage.
The Wankel engine is a type of internal combustion engine using an eccentric rotary design to convert pressure into rotating motion. All parts rotate consistently in one direction, as opposed to the common reciprocating piston engine, which has pistons violently changing direction.