Quote:
Originally Posted by CaptainMattJ.
The ME-262 was revolutionary in it's jet propulsion technology, and was all around a good fighter with unmatched speed and fantastic armament, though it's impact on the war was too late and it's use was limited by Hitler's vision of it being a bomber rather than a fighter.
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Once they'd gotten around the little nuances like the engines spontaneously detonating if they got a little too hot or if you advanced the throttle too quickly. She was not a great dogfighter either, and attacking bombers was difficult because of the closing speed, with R4M rockets it became a bit easier but like many WWII German weapon projects (thank God) it was too little too late. If you ran into P-51s in a 262, your major advantage was (naturally) speed and avoidance, because if you got drawn into a turning battle, you'd had it. For the Allies though, the 262 was a sod to actually catch once the Luftwaffe figured out how to use it, no prop fighter could keep up with it and if the Luftwaffe pilot didn't want to engage in a dogfight then all you could hope to do was flush them away from the bombers. That's why the Allies put so much into identifying 262 bases and hitting them as much as possible to try to catch the 262s at their weakest moment...landing.
I think the most important thing to come from the 262 was the wing design. Dr Adolf Busemanns theories on swept wing designs and supersonic drag and compression would become common building practice for jet aircraft right up to the present day. When you compare the 262s wings with the Gloster Meteor and the P-80, you can see Busemanns work.
He is one of those people who did a lot for modern aviation but whose name is often forgotten. Indeed, I hadn't heard of him until relatively recently when I read a book dealing with British post-war jet designs and how the design of aircraft like the Hawker P.1052 which would later become the Hawker Hunter. Likewise in America, the F-86 was redesigned during its development stage when a flight engineer who could read German read Busemanns reports into swept wing designs, unfortunately for Korean war pilots, the F-86 design was kicked into the long grass until the Soviet MiG-15 which had been designed from captured examples of Busemanns designs, burst onto the scene and outperformed all the straight winged jet fighters in the threatre which were then relegated to ground attack by the swept wing F-86.