Posted on 01/13/2006 8:14:42 AM PST by pabianice
A replica of one of Germany's greatest technological triumphs late in World War II, the Messerschmitt Me.262 fighter jet, has left American soil and reached Germany after U.S. State Department officials delayed it 60 days because they saw it as a weapon of war.
The four 30 mm replica cannons aboard lack a firing mechanism and still wouldn't fire if they had one. The aircraft now has arrived in Germany where it will be reassembled by the Messerschmitt Foundation aircraft collection and flown once again.
The replica project has been taken over by a group of retired Boeing engineers operating in Everett, Washington, as Legend Flyers. The aircraft are for sale by Air Assets International/Warbird Recovery in Colorado. Messerschmitt granted five additional serial numbers. Two have been built, with three to go.
More info at
http://www.stormbirds.com/project/
(apologies in advance if these don't post as links).
If you'd like to 'fly' one online, try Aces High at
http://www.hitechcreations.com
Maybe your dad thought the P-51 keeping the FW-190's off his plane was the best?
Right, that's a real threat to an F-16...
Two problems, the Germans couldn't make enough of them to make a difference and the ME-262 flew so fast that they had to slow down in order to shoot at the B-17's. When they slowed down the US piston aircraft were able to defend against them. As a result, the main tactic was to zoom past the B-17's at 500 mph with cannons blazind and hope you hit something.
You'd find some argument with the B-24 crowd. It was harder to fly but apparently better able to defend itself.
Check it out.
Actually the payload of the B-17 by the time it was being used in numbers in 1943-44 was nothing special; it really was a medium bomber, not a heavy bomber. Contemporary AC like the British Lancaster and Halifax carried a LOT more bombs.
The first ever jet combat was a Gloucester Meteor against one of these 262's. The Meteor won, but be very glad that Hitler delayed jet research for about two years. I don't think Germany would have won the war with earlier jets, but the defensive advantage of fast short-time-of-flight fighter jets would have extended the war by about two years IMO.
State Department...
another govt agency that needs an enema.
Didn't think there was any jet to jet combat in WWII. The Meteors were stuck in the UK intercepting V1s and didn't have the range to reach Germany, anyway. Is there a link to this?
There actually were more B-24s bombing Germany than B-17s.
The B-17 had the greatest Public Relations campaign of any aircraft in history...in the early war it was thus horrendously overrated, particularly against ships.
Very early in the war it was erroneously believed and widely reported in the press that a B-17 out of the Phillipines had sunk the Battleship Hiei. Things were going badly for the US then so everyone just latched on to the good news and weren't skeptical.
And for quite some time after the battle, the media and general public were under the impression that the Japanese carriers at Midway had been destroyed by Army Air Corps B-17s, not Navy dive bombers.
TA-152. Perhaps you meant tp post a different designation.
Airacobra was prop driven.
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