reading the post about the battle of Kursk got me thinking about this: Suppose the Germans were able to produce huge numbers of jets like the 262 ect.? Try to envision P-80 Shooting Stars and Meteors going at it with Hucenbiens(I think thats how you spell it) and 262!!!! I hate to say it, but the Allies would have been very outclassed the air war could have been alot different right?, the main reason jet development in the west was so good post war was because of caputred german tech., the f-86 is practally a german bird! please elaborate.

Well, a lot of superior aircraft certainly wouldn't have hurt. The Me 262 development is a fascinating and much told story full of really dumb decisions on its use.

One thing about the 262, as fantastic as it was it was still almost experimental when it was in service. The engines had very shoprt lives and it had a very short range that was a hindrance and would surely have been a weakness on the Eastern front.

Also, it was differnt than flying a prop job and needed a fairly experienced pilot. Just like Japan, as the war continued Germany was losing its best pilots.

I think the biggest problem was production. I don't see how they could have produced enough to be able to turn the tide, so to speak.

Might be a case of a superior plane but not enough time to make it truely operational. Maybe if they had another 5 years of development...

Steve

As sniper has said it, the 262 still needed some development. Typical life of it's engines ran around 5 hours ! And it would probably end in a big boom...
Anyway, there were no pilots left to fly them, and no fuel to power them... Also, many new planes were stuck in the countryside because there were no trains or traintracks left to take them to airbases. I'm quite glad about this, because in good hands it was a very potent aircraft.

Because of the range, or lack thereof, of early fighter jets I do not envision many jet-to-jet battles lasting very long or even occuring. Besides, Me262s required Fw 190 escorts when taking off and landing so they wouldn't be shot down by the Mustangs and Thunderbolts. Sure it tore up the sky for the time it was at altitude and attacking bomber formations, but it was sure vulnerable for the majority of time during any one sortie. Lose a fragile engine in that bird, and the plane would become very "ordinary" in flight.

And BTW, I believe the early F-86 is basically a Mustang with swept wings & tail with a jet engine crammed down the middle. Now the MiG-15 is basically a German design...

almost all the new technology in the f-86 was taken form german research,granted there was alot of research done at North American too. Some form of jet combat could have been alot closer than we think, I read in a book about the P-80, that a few were stationed in Italy in late 1945! If the 262 project would have been sped up about a year there might have been a few more.

Sabot is rightnthat jet technology was so new that other than homeland defence the German jets were extremely limited. With the exception of the AR-234s, which bombed England (way too little, way too late!), jets just lacked range. Also stated elswhere, the Germans had to group all their remaining senior pilots into one group to pilot their 262s. Like the Japanese they had failed to plan for a long war and just did not have a robust enough training program to develop enough pilots and no strategic depth to protect their training airfields.

Hitler's governing technique of "divide and conquer" led to too many chiefs, too many cooks in the kitchen", etc, etc. They were lucky to get what they had in the sir.

Just some points from some of the above:




It's true that the Ar 234 had more range than any other operational jet aircraft at the time, however bombing missions weren't conducted over England. The B-1 was the reconnissance version, and it did make overflights. The B-2 was the bomber version, but was restrained to operating only over the Low Countries.

As a point of interest, the Ar 234 carried it's loads externally - drop tanks for the B-1 and bombs for the B-2. When loaded, the maximum speed dropped to only 660km/hr, well within the capabilities of Allied fighters to intercept.




Well, there were Meteors operational in England in July 1944 when 616 Squadron came into being. In fact, the Meteor was the only operational jet to see service for the Allies at all. Due to security concerns, the Meteors were not allowed to operate over the Continent until early 1945 when they were kept as a defence against Me 262s. Combat never ensured however, and the Meteors were mainly used for ground attack.

From memory, only 3 P-80s were sent to Italy, and that was only on a trial basis.




This is a common myth, however it is just that, a myth. The North American team looked at the German resrach on swept wings, however ended up using independent NACA data. In fact R.T. Jones had proposed both swept and delta wing configurations in 1944/45 while working for NACA before the captured German material arrived

Also, the Me 262 had it's wing swept for CoG considerations, not aerodynamic reasons. Sweeping its wing did nothing to aid it in terms of compressability.

The wing is the only part of the F-86 design that had anything to do with German research - the aircraft evolved from the XFJ-1.




I doubt it. Ignoring the lack of pilot experiance on the German side of the equation, many of the German designs were impractical and would not have flown. Note that the Meteor and P-80 did alright against the MiG-15s in Korea, and the MiG-15 was a giant step past the Me 262 and Ta 183.




Not quite. The XFJ-1 was a brand new design, although it did utilise a lot of P-51 technology, especially for the wing. The XFJ-1 became the FJ-1 Fury, with the XP-86 also coming from the FJ-1. Wings were similar, armament and engine were the same but the fuselage was longer and slimmer.

After the wooden mock-up though, redesign was undertaken:

- wings swept and lengthened
- tail swept
- wing mounted spped brakes deleted, moved to rear fuselage
- new engine

All of this resulted in the P-86A, and the rest is history.

Cheers,
Linz

Linz, You're right now that I recall the article I read on teh AR234's. Recce was all they did over England. I saw an FJ-1 at teh NAval Aviation Museum in Pensacola, and it definitely looks nothing like a P51, except for unswept wings.

Ranger