The ME-262 wings were swept as a design compromise to correct the center of gravity because the jet engines were heavier than expected. They were not swept for aerodynamic advantage, and the minor sweep affords little, if any aerodynamic advantage.

If you're in a me-262 and turning you did something wrong. 262 had energy over p-51. You could easily out climb the 51. You dictated the fight.

Someone fire up Aces of the pacific with the 1946 expansion pack and fly a Japanese Kikka against the P-80 and settle this!!

I once built a 1:48 scale komet

I taped it to a bottle rocket and sent it skyward


It was pretty realistic

On a dive it won't matter. If you are turning yes, deflection would be hard. But why fight your enemy on their terms?

You misread, 50mm, not 50caliber


Me 262 A-1a/U4

If the Germans didn't halt the jet fighter program the 262 would have been in skies a lot earlier and it would have been a different ball game. We owe our space program to a German.

Not all fighters were ME-262.  The comment was about the guns and not the fighters.  



 

My dads professor at the Vienna Technical University worked on the ME262. He told my dad that they has so much more setups ready to go including some kind of wired air to air missile that was almost ready for testing.

A statistic that never fails to fill me with awe is that the 8th AF lost more men over NAZI Europe than the Marines lost in the Pacific.  Those skies were pure horror.

If you could HIT anything with it.  262 was optimized for shooting big bombers, not nimble fighters.  A bunch more half-inch sligs is actually a better option to kill fighter-sized crtitters.

Or:  how well did the 37mm Olds cannon in the -63 and -39 work out in air-to-air?  Answer: not worth a damn.

Hard to do that against an adversary that is faster and more manuverable.  Just how do you propose to accomplish that?

My grandpa was a ball turret gunner on a B-17 in the 8th Air Force, he passed when my mom was little but I assume the man clanked when he walked.



The only reason he made it through a full combat tour was because he wasn't cleared for flight duty for the mission where his plane got shot down (no survivors, over Schweinfurt) because he was still in the hospital from a prior raid. That sort of thing had to weigh on him I imagine.



 

my grandfather served in the 8th during the war as well, although he didn't fly.  he wanted to be a bombardier, but apparently didn't pass whatever test was required.  the guy administering the test said "i'm going to make your mother very happy" when he failed him.  

I imagine he did make his mother happy at that.



My grandpa's brother-in-law (grandma's brother) just passed last year and was in the 1st Infantry Division as a rifleman, and whenever he'd talk about WWII he said that as bad as he ever had it he never, ever, no-way-in-hell would have wanted to trade wartime jobs with my grandpa. This was coming from a guy that was in Operations Torch, Husky, Overlord, Hurtgen Forest and the Battle of the Bulge, he came back as a 22 year old with snow white hair and metal in him courtesy of both the French and Germans. So when a guy like that says being in the Army Air Corps on a heavy bomber was a "Not just no, but hell no" sort of thing then it lends some perspective on just how nasty the air war over occupied Europe actually was.



 

My great grandpa trained gunners for B17's during WW2.  I know for sure he had to bail out of a B17 no less than three times because of training accidents.  One of those times was a good bit away from the base and when he bailed out he caught his head on something and it partially scalped him.  He spent the better part of a week wadding through a swamp getting back home.

He said the worst part of the whole experience wasn't the dehydration or even banging his head on the B17 on the way out.  The worst according to him were all the bugs that got in under the flap of skin that was his partially scalped head and he couldn't sleep due to them irritating his head wound.

That was that x-4.     http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruhrstahl_X-4

They deployed them. They were very unreliable and the pilots hated them being hung under the wing. If they couldn't fire them, the rockets slowed them down badly from the extra drag.

The 262 is an orphan airfame. At the end of the war , all development stopped. The Germans got it operational and into combat earlier than it needed to be. It has a very small vertical and rudder, same with the horizontal and elevators. If you lean too far into the ailerons they will snatch the stick out of your hands to full deflection. They did enlarge the tail, but not enough.

Because the engines are so far apart and the small vertical, VMC is about 165 kts. The replicas are flying with CJ610s/J85s and if you use full power on takeoff VMC climbs to about 185 !

The aircraft is extremely pitch sensitive with power changes and you actually rotate and hold the stick forward so as not to over rotate.

The aircraft is most decidedly NOT a fighter. It is a point defense interceptor. Its major advantage is speed. It will NOT survive a turning fight.

How do I know these things ?



I'm not a pilot on it but I have flown it from the back a little and have about 9 hours in it bringing it back from California to Houston.

Because its a two seat it doesn't have much range. 200 nautical per leg ! And NO one better fudge or it's going to get very expensive, very fast !

I believe  they called that 50 a stinger

"War is the continuation of politics by other means." - Carl von Clausewitz.  From a purely military standpoint, it can be argued whether the daylight strategic bombing was the best use of resources.  However, I would argue that the best people to ask would be the Germans.  They expended tremendous amounts of effort and materiel to try to stop the bombing offensive.  They dedicated tens of thousands of military personnel, hundreds of thousands of laborers, millions of tons of ordnance; thousands of planes and guns, and lots of time from factories and the General Staff to trying to stop the heavy bomber offensive.  Although we paid a painful price for our over-optimism and failure to prepare early in the war, by the end, it was the round-the-clock bombing throughout Germany that let everybody know, despite NAZI propaganda, that the Allies had already won and that it was useless to create a Resistance against Allied rear areas.  

The massive efforts the Germans took against our daylight bombing led directly to the success of Overlord.  We would not have achieved air dominance over the invasion area.  British night bombing and the fighter sweeps which were the primary features of 1943 and earlier did not create the attrition of German tactical air.  That was an effect of two main things.  First, "precision" bombing.  Sure, not as successful as promised, but fuel infrastructure in Occupied Europe was destroyed by daylight bombing, despite the cost.  Second, daylight bombing forced the German tactical aircraft to fight (politically if nothing else) which enabled us to destroy them, unlike fighter sweeps where they could just run away.  Fuel scarcity and air dominance allowed us to dictate operations for most of the rest of the war, saving lives and time..  

We could afford to lose that equipment more than the Germans could...and those 20K troops were going to die either on the ground or in the air.  Might as well get a political effect out of them too.

Well said.

Imagine the Messerschmitt P.1101 being fully developed and taking to the skies, or the Arado E.583

The Hurricane wasn't solely an early war aircraft.  It stayed in production, albeit as a ground pounder, until 1944.

ETA: P.80 beats the 262.  P80 is faster, more maneuverable, and while the 262 has a very heavy cannon armament of 4x 30mm Mk108s, they are low velocity weapons meant to destroy bombers.  The P80's battery of 6x .50 caliber MGs is the superior anti-fighter weapon.

P-80, easily.

Is that a full size replica?

One of three in the world flying. Not so much a replica as reversed engineered from the example now restored and residing in the NMNA at Pensacola.

On paper. The day and night rotations were designed to wear down the defenses and the people.  No way will I debate the effectiveness of THAT aspect. But since strategic bombing was basically still in the experimental stage, I doubt anyone's expectations were too high.

TC

Weren't the 262s used in combat near the very end of the war?  Seems like I remember a History channel episode talking about Allied pilot reactions to what they could do.

Chuck Yeager flew both of them.  Here is an excerpt from his auto-biography (great book btw):


Page 84 (~1947)

"..., but I did manage to get a few interesting jobs.  One of them was comparison testing between the Shooting Star and a captured German Me-262 jet fighter.  I was among the first Mustang pilots to shoot one down in the war, so I was fascinated to discover that the 262 and the Shooting Star performed identically --the same range, top speed, acceleration, and rate of climb.  We had four P-80s in Europe in 1945, but they never did tangle with the 262."

Based on this I'd say they were pretty much equal and the better pilot would more than likely come out on top.

They were building some  4 to 6k aircraft per month right up to the end

 

I'm not sure anybody else is more qualified than he is to make a comparison.  

A friend of mine shot down a Yak I believe in his F51

 

Anyone want to research James Glessner for me, the kill is well known as there is a model available of hi Mustang.

Are they still making those?  How much is a copy?

Not that many, but they were still producing them. Real problem was the lack of experienced pilots.

And fuel.....I think even pilots were more available than fuel....

And many Americans believe the Germans were the only ones building Jets during WW2.

And that Americans didn't get jet aircraft until we captured German scientists.

History isn't a strong suit for many Americans so that shouldn't come as much of a shock.



It's the same with rocketry, you'll find more people (although still an unfortunately small percentage of the population) who knows who Von Braun is but who will stare blankly if you mention Goddard. Even though Von Braun stated that Goddard's research directly influenced his own designs.