Posted on 05/23/2006 8:47:03 AM PDT by yooling
Here's a pretty cool video of one of the reproduction 262's flying at a German air show.
stormbirds.com ...
Your right about that! The original engines smoked like crazy - evidently huge amounts of unburnt fuel. The ME in the film was clean as a whistle.
'nother short story...
I was shooting some video at the Smithsonian Warehouses in Silver Hill and was told I had to find my own way back to the front gate. My director and I wandered past one building near where some aircraft were being refurbished. We stopped to look inside through the window in a door, and saw a cigar-shaped feature sticking out above the rest of the planes in the warehouse. I cracked the door open just a little, and the light from outside just illuminated the writing on the nose of ... Enola Gay.
It was the kind of chilling moment I love. It was a more intimate brush with history than I could ever get in a museum setting.
It looks like the Russians got their jet design from the British, and their atom bomb from America.
I read somewhere that the Nazis had the second greatest outfits in history. Number one is the Catholic Church.
There has been a lot of that.
Lyndon Johnson authorized the sale of precision miniature ball bearing grinding machines to Russia, and the resulting improvement in their ICBM targeting cost us billions to harden our silos.
Jimmy Carter authorized the sale of precision machine tools for making submarine propellers. That cost us billions to regain the ability to track the quieter Russian Subs.
I am sure there are more examples.
I believe Chuck Yeager shot down 2 of these in a P-51.
There were a bunch of these shot down just after takeoff, or while on final approach to landing.
They didn't always go so fast that they couldn't be shot down.
There you'll find links to the other two projects that are underway. They've got two Bf 109 F-4s and an Fw 190 F-8 that are on their way toward becoming airworthy again.
Take me out to the Flugshau.
The MTBO on the engines was somewhere around 10 hours, and they were usually scrapped after 25 hours. Before every single flight, the crews had to carefully spin the compressor blades and listen for scraping; the tolerances were so bad that blades would frequently scrape other parts of the engine and sheer off, causing an engine fire.
As a design, the 262 was phenomenal. It was far superior to the first American jet, the XP-59 Airacomet, and could hold its own against the first wide-production jet, the P-80 (F-80) Shooting Star.
And being a 262 pilot wasn't the worst job in the Luftwaffe. (In fact, the last 262 unit, Jagdverband 44, was basically an "all-star team" of Luftwaffe pilots, led by Adolf Galland.) That probably fell to the Me 163 Komet pilots. Gotta love a rocket-powered plane that could do 600 mph flat out for about four minutes tops, climb to 35,000 feet before the fuel ran out, landed on a single ski like a sailplane...and oh yeah, if you wrecked it, the liquid fuels would DISSOLVE the pilot even if the plane didn't catch fire.
}:-)4
Yep! In 1945 they didn't had afterburners. Since the acceleration of those jets was not that great it was no problem for the American Mustangs to f**k those 262s during their starting and landing phase. Therefore the Luftwaffe tried to deal with this threat with piston fighters (espechially Fw 190) to answer the Mustangs.
Claus Colling is the owner. He's building NEW FW-190's - you can buy one for about 550,000 Euros. He invited my brother and I to his factory in Gammelsdorf a couple years ago. Very nice people and very proud (rightfully so) of the beasts they were building...
Lets not forget that the Brits had the Gloster Meteor in squadron service in July '44. Not sure if this was before or after the ME 262.
Excellent! Thanks!
Proving that Hitler's biggest mistake, as if it needed proving, was his failure to conquer or neutralize Britain before turning his attention to the Soviets.
Even the Soviets were astonished by the amount of damage done to Berlin by allied bombing. Without British bases, the bombing would have been impossible. Without Britain as a combantant, World War II would have followed a whole different course.
Reminding me of what a hot airplane the Mustang was. I was once told by a pilot who flew both the Mustang and the F-50 that the former was far more exciting to fly.
- Never developed a successful long-range heavy bomber before starting war with Russia.
- Turned the Ukrainians against Germany instead of enlisting them to fight Russia.
- Didn't deny Allied access to the Med.
- Committed too many resources to building super weapons, e.g., Tiger IIs, instead of producing more copies of proven designs.
.
Maybe Germany will fight alongside the US in the next World War.
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