Me-262 development

[cardboard_killer]

[80 years ago today] "• Due to several catastrophic failures of the BMW turbojets being used, the Me-262 airframe is being tested with a conventional Junkers Jumo engine in the nose. It will be more than a year until the aircraft flies with reliable jet engines."

 

[unlikely_spider]

[cardboard_killer]

[80 years ago today] "An Me 262 fighter prototype is fitted with BMW 003 turbojet engines and flown at Rechlin Airfield north of Berlin. This is the plane's first test flight with its intended jet engines, and it does not go well. Shortly after takeoff, the compressor blades in the jet engine shatter, leaving the Me 262 powerless. However, fortunately for test pilot Fritz Wendel, the prototype still is equipped with a traditional propeller Junkers Jumo 210 G engine in the nose. He switches that on and lands safely. This mishap effectively ends the BMW engine as the one to be used on the plane. The engineers, fortunately, have another jet engine in development, the Junkers Jumo 004 A."

[cardboard_killer]

[80 years ago today] "• The Messerschmitt-262 makes its first successful flight with jet engines. This aircraft (3rd prototype) is a taildragger and several take-off runs have to be aborted due to jet wash deflecting off the runway and destabilizing the tail. A tricycle landing gear arrangement will be used in future.

 

- The previous BMW turbojets had severe problems and have been replaced with Junkers Jumos. The first prototype had been powered by a turboprop while testing single BMW engines and the airframe. The decision had been made to retain the turboprop when testing twin engines which saved the aircraft after both BMWs failed in flight.

Me-262 V1 at top in 1941 and V3 after today's flight

 

• The Messerschmitt-309 has its first flight. Intended as a high altitude replacement for the Bf-109, its performance is slightly better than the 109G, but not enough to disrupt existing production.

 

Me-309 prototype"

 

From Adam Tooze's book Wages of Destruction

 

Quote

 

But it is also one of the weapons most surrounded by self-serving post-war mythology. After the war, Ernst Heinkel, Willy Messerschmitt and the chief of Germany’s fighter forces Adolf Galland colluded in the construction of a highly one-sided account of the Me 262’s history, designed to celebrate the genius of German technology, whilst at the same time demonstrating the incompetence of the Nazi leadership. In their account, popularized in best-selling biographies and television interviews, it was the meddling of Hitler, Goering and Milch that robbed Galland and his valiant fighter pilots of a weapon with which they might have protected Germany against the merciless onslaught of the bombers. This was a myth that appealed to numerous themes in post-war German political culture: regret at the chance of a victory wasted, the consolation provided by the supposed superiority of ‘German technology’, the self-righteous commemoration of the horror of Allied bombing. But contrary to legend, all the evidence, in fact, suggests that the Reich Air Ministry seized the opportunity of jet power with every possible speed.

 

What prevented the Me 262 from exercising a decisive influence on the air war was not incompetence and conservatism, but the debilitating material limitations of the German war economy. As soon as Heinkel tested the first jet-powered prototype in August 1939, both Messerschmitt and Heinkel immediately began developing combat aircraft. Indeed, so actively were these options pursued that they cast a pall of technological uncertainty over the entire piston-engined development programme in the early 1940s. The first designs for the Me 262 were brought to Hitler’s attention in the summer of 1942 and he immediately gave it his enthusiastic backing. By the end of May 1943, after further testing, the Air Ministry committed itself definitively to pushing the aircraft into mass-production and began to exert severe pressure on Messerschmitt to devote all its resources to the project.

 

If there was any obstacle to accelerated production at this point, it came from Messerschmitt. After the war Willy Messerschmitt and Ernst Heinkel liked to suggest to their audience that the Me 262 was ‘ready’ in 1943, or even in 1942. But this is grossly misleading. In any aircraft development programme, the step from prototype to series production is preceded by literally thousands of hours of testing. This is then followed by experimental series production. Only after completing this indispensable learning process is it safe to invest heavily in mass-production facilities. In 1943 Messerschmitt was still recovering from the disaster it had experienced with the over-hasty series production of the Me 210. Instead of forcing the Me 262 into mass-production, Messerschmitt therefore offered the Air Ministry an entire portfolio of designs, including a conventional piston-engined replacement for the Me 109 fighter (the Me 309) Indeed, Messerschmitt intrigued with Speer throughout 1943 to obstruct Milch’s efforts to concentrate all available resources on the mass-production of the jet.

 

The main technical problems, in any case, concerned not the airframe but the engines, the truly revolutionary element of the design. Even if prototypes were being successfully tested, the world’s first operational jet engine was still far from ready for mass-production. Given the enormous technological obstacles that had to be overcome, not only in mass-producing an entirely new kind of propulsion system, but doing so whilst economizing on high-performance alloy metals, this is hardly surprising. Despite the extraordinary pace of the development work the Junkers-Jumo jet engine was not ready even for limited series production before the summer of 1944.

 

 

 

[AndyJWest]

14 minutes ago, cardboard_killer said:

...The first prototype had been powered by a turboprop while testing single BMW engines and the airframe...

 

A piston engine (Junkers Jumo 210) not a turboprop.