An increasing interest in lasers placed on aircrafts for active countermeasures and active imaging is observed. There remain unsolved issues regarding the propagation effects close to the jet engine exhaust and the possibilities of compensating them with adaptive optics. Laser beam propagation experiments parallel to the exhaust of a downscaled jet engine test rig have been performed. The experiments were carried out with nanosecond laser pulses at 1.6 and 3.5 μm wavelength. The laser spots were projected on a screen and the centroid motion were imaged by cameras. Root mean square magnitudes of the beam wander between 50 and 150 μrad were observed for different engine conditions and geometries. The 3.5 μm system had a frame rate of 607 Hz and could partly resolve the time variation of the beam wander. A correlation time (50 %) of 3.5 ms was observed for the beam wander. Deflections of several hundred μrad due to the average gradients in temperature and pressure were also found when the engine was turned on. In addition to beam wander intensity scintillations has been studied.