The near wall jet produced by directing a uniform axisymmetric jet of air normally onto a large flat plate has been investigated experimentally and theoretically for four jets in the Mach number range 1·64–2·77. Detailed measurements of the surface pressure and shadowgraph and surface flow pictures are presented. The results show that the mechanism which mainly determines the supersonic near wall jet is the jet-edge expansion and its reflexions from the sonic line and the wall-jet boundaries. The near wall jet is found to consist of an alternating series of expansion and recompression regions whose strengths depend on the jet Mach number and decay with distance. At Mach numbers of 2·4 and above, shock waves are observed in the first recompression region and at a Mach number of 2·77 the boundary layer separates locally. Further out, viscous effects become increasingly important and a constant-pressure shear flow is established at a distance which increases with jet Mach number. The application of the method of characteristics in an approximate manner reproduces a number of the features of the near wall jet which are observed experimentally.

Pressure distributions obtained in the shock layer show that a stagnation bubble can occur and that its occurrence depends on factors such as the flow upstream of the nozzle. The wall-jet region is found to be largely independent of whether or not a bubble occurs in the shock layer.