Messerschmitt Me 262
The Me 262 was a German twin-jet fighter and fighter-bomber, and the first jet fighter to enter operational service. Designed by Messerschmitt before the Second World War and first flown in 1941 on piston power, it became operational in mid-1944, faster and more heavily armed than any Allied fighter. It came too late to affect the war's outcome, but it opened the jet age in air combat.
Why It Mattered
The Me 262 was the first jet fighter to enter operational service, and it showed that the piston-engined fighter's time was ending. In combat from 1944, it could outrun the best Allied fighters: the Smithsonian puts it some 190 kilometres per hour faster than the P-51 Mustang. It was also more heavily armed than any Allied fighter, with its battery of 30 mm cannon concentrated in the nose. But it reached front-line service only in the war's final phase, and never in the strength its performance deserved; its real effect was on the future, proving that jet fighters could be built and fought in numbers.
Design Notes
Design work began in April 1939, before the war, around a pair of turbojet engines that were not yet ready to power it. The airframe was ready first, so the prototype flew on 18 April 1941 with a single piston engine in its nose; the first flight on jet power alone came in July 1942. Its engines were Junkers Jumo 004 axial-flow turbojets, the first turbojet to be mass-produced, mounted in nacelles slung under the wings; production engines were delivered from mid-1943. The wing's outer panels were swept back 18.5 degrees — a modest angle chosen to restore the aircraft's balance with the heavier engines, not for speed, though it slightly raised the critical Mach number. The first prototypes used a tailwheel undercarriage that left the tail too low for effective take-off; production aircraft switched to a tricycle gear with a nosewheel. Armament was concentrated in the nose — four 30 mm MK 108 cannon — and later aircraft carried racks for 24 R4M air-to-air rockets under the wings.
Operational History
The Me 262 became operational with the Luftwaffe in mid-1944, appearing first in small numbers, including fighter-bombers of Kampfgeschwader 51. Hitler had demanded the interceptor be redesigned as a ground-attack and bomber aircraft; how much that demand delayed the fighter is contested, and the Smithsonian's account treats the slow development of its engines as the larger cause. A pure jet fighter wing, Jagdgeschwader 7, had been formed by January 1945, and in February 1945 Adolf Galland formed Jagdverband 44 from experienced pilots drawn from other units grounded by lack of fuel. Against daylight bomber formations the jets were formidable, diving through the escorts to fire cannon and rocket salvos at close range; German pilots claimed 542 Allied aircraft shot down, a total that is reported rather than confirmed. The Allies countered by attacking the jets on the ground and during take-off and landing, when their speed could not save them. In the end, of 1,443 aircraft completed, only about 300 are believed to have seen combat; the type had reliability problems rooted in wartime materials shortages, and fuel, spares and trained pilots were all in short supply. JG 7 kept its jets flying until the end of the war in May 1945.
Afterlife
After the war, the victorious powers gathered surviving aircraft for study; many captured Me 262s were flight-tested, and the type influenced production designs that followed, among them the F-86 Sabre and the MiG-15. Czechoslovakia also kept the design in production as the Avia S-92: nine single-seaters and three two-seaters were completed and kept flying until 1951. A reported covert supply of S-92s to Israel has never been officially confirmed. The Smithsonian counts only nine original aircraft surviving in museums around the world. The type flies again in reproduction form: since January 2003 the American Me 262 Project has completed reproductions powered by modern General Electric CJ610 engines, one of which was delivered to the Messerschmitt Foundation in Germany and another to the Collings Foundation in the United States.