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if he is going to compare english planes to everyone else s, I'll put in my .02. I have worked on a Tiger Moth and a couple of Spitfires as well as flying in both the Moth and Spitfire as well as working on a 51, P-38, P-47, Ha-1112, PT-17, AT-6.
While they are nice looking planes, both are a pain to work on when compared to the comparable US plane, The Moth is more akin to a WWI plane than the planes it was training the pilots for and is one of the slowest planes I have flown, we were overtaken by a cessna 150. It lacked differential ailerons, and had a rudder like a barn door, both the Moth and Spitfire cockpits were very cramped with little to no shoulder room. Compared to a likes of a P-40, P-51, there is none, those planes have room to move and stretch some and a P-47 has room for a dance floor.
In the Spitfire, the canopy rails were touching my shoulders, had I been wearing heavy flying gear, I would have been pinched in place, where as the P-40 and P-51 canopy rails are much lower and much wider apart.
The engines overheated, so you may get more time by keeping the revs low. 10 hrs was max and many much less. Many just failed the engine was so far behind in R&D.
Whatever the performance level of the German jet engine, one thing is for sure- they were first to have one.
They were not. British jets were working on static test beds before German jets. They could have put one in a plane, flew for 5 mins and and said, "look we are the first". They never having wanting to perfect the design, which they did. The Meteor was a complete new design of jet plane from engine to fuselage.
I dispelling a myth. The French eventually through R&D got the German jet to work after 8 years. By then it was way behind UK, USSR & US jet engines. The Soviets dismissed the engine for fighter planes.
German jets were far from fully developed with the engine way off compared to British jet engines. They lasted 10 hours before burn up. The Meteor was the first proper fully developed jet plane introduced. The 262 was slightly faster than the Meteor F3, but far more unreliable. The British would never put into the sky such an undeveloped plane as the me262. The British could have had a jet fighter operational in 1941, but it would have been as bad as the me262. The Germans advanced R&D on jets after they interrogated captured British RAF men. They learned the British were advanced in jet technology and flying prototype planes.
The cobbled together Me262 started claiming kills on 26 July 1944, the Meteor claimed its first V1 kill on 4 August 1944. But the Meteor was a proper fully developed jet plane, not a thrown together desperate effort as the me262 was.
Given the lower-quality steels used in the Juno 004B engine, these engines typically only had a service life of some 10-25 hours. It had a sluggish throttle response. Worse, it was fairly easy to inject too much fuel into the engine by throttling up too quickly, allowing heat to build up before the cooling air could remove it. This led to softening of the turbine blades, and was a major cause for engine failures. The engine could only be wing mounted.
Both the 262 and British Meteor jet were introduced in July 1944. The F3 Meteor was a far superior version introduced in Dec 1944. Meteors were used in training against US bombers so they could develop counter measures for the 262 and used against V1 flying bombs. It was moved to Belgium and Holland and its biggest problem was allied flak as they thought it was a me262.
I can never see the fuss about the 262. It was not a wonder plane at all as many perceive it to be. Allied air power was so strong that the Meteor was not used over Nazi controlled territory for fear it may get into their hands. If the Meteor was pitted against the 262, its wonder plane reputation would not exist.
The Meteor turned into the highly successful Canberra bomber. Design started about 1944. Once the precursor, the Meteor, was proven the aim was a serious in-production fighter and bomber, the fighter, Meteor, came first as the Allies had thousands of effective piston bombers. The Canberra used the basics of the Meteor and up-scaled. The result was a near perfect prototype plane that rolled out into production, that eventually could fly at over 72,000 feet. It was made under licence by Martin in the USA. The British were way ahead of everyone else in jet technology during WW2 and after. The Canberra was last used by the RAF operationally only few years ago. They are used today, even the Martin version, for other roles all over the world.
The British turbo jet was patented in 1930. The patent details entered the public domain 1931. The German Embassy in London despatched copies of the patent to Germany in 1932. Copies of the patent were sent to Goettingen, Heinkel, Junkers, Brunswick and elsewhere. Von Ohain was a student at Goettingen (Aerodynamic Research Division) 1934/5. Von Ohain begins to study the possible application of the internal combustion jet to aeronautics in 1934. Herbert Wagner at Junkers and Ohain at Heinkel begin turbo jet development in April 1936. The 'popular' belief that von Ohain invented the turbo jet has been generated in America and is unsound history.
Von Ohain invented a unique form of internal combustion turbine. Heinkel employed him to develop this for jet propulsion. After five years, the project was abandoned and Ohain was put to work on turbo jets designed by other engineers. Von Ohain only claimed to have 'invented' the turbo jet about 25 years after the end of World War II when Wagner et al were safely out of the way. He may have been encouraged in this by his fellow German-Americans and also by Americans who are uncomfortable with the impact of the British invention.
The most promising of the German axials, the Junkers Jumo 004 Junkers Jumo 004 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. and BMW 003, ran into serious compressor and vibration problems and, although the Junkers Jumo 004 had reached production by the end of 1943 and was being produced at the impressive rate of 1000/month by mid-1944, it continued to prove troublesome in service (in the Me 262 www.vectorsite.net/avme262.html ) having a service life of approx 10 hours. This was partly due to the inferior materials which had to be used but inherent design faults in the compressor created stall and remained a major problem.
The superiority of the Whittle design is the efficiency of the air flow. He determined early that the engine didn't need most of the air coming through the intake. The W1 ducted as much as 80% of the air around the compressor. That air is added back into the stream after the combustion chamber raising the air pressure. The result is less compressor stall and higher exhaust pressure. That gave a net increase in thrust without adding weight.
Of all the competing designs of the era, the Whittle W1 is still the basis for modern jet engines. From Stealth fighters to Boeing 787s, the high bypass turbo jet is still the engine of choice.
British compressor design was superior in WW2, hence the superior engine. It is safe to say Whittle invented the jet engine as we know it today. The first jet as we know it, was run by Whittle in 1937, before Ohain in Germany. The Germans put one in a plane first to claim a first, which flew for a few minutes with disappointing performance. The performance was so bad they cut R&D. The performance was inferior to a motorjet: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorjet
The Italian motorjet flew in 1940 and was highly reliable. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caproni_Campini_N.1
I'm disappointed that you failed to perceive that my criticism is at one of your belittlers or detractors. Anyway, the Gloster Meteor may have been okay, but it doesn't seem to be an inspired design, say, as the the De-Havilland Mosquito is. And it wasn't developed with the passion that could have rendered it sleeker, faster or more manoeuverable. My favourite British jet plane is the Hawker Sea Hawk. But John Logie Baird's television-system was an embarrassment, which is so much so that it could have set the world back. However, the wartime-Germans though stymied by disappointing or unreliable engines in some submarines, piston- or jet-planes, do seem to have designed the craft with a passion that enabled them to perform remarkably competitively
The German jet program needs to be analyzed in comparison to piston engine aircraft of the day, other jet engine programs, german military needs, german materials availability, time constraints and actual military performance.
Easy to criticize from a lazy-boy chair decades later.
I'm disappointed that you failed to perceive that my criticism is at one of your belittlers or detractors.
Apologies
About Baird's TV work. He was the first to demonstrate colour TV and experimented with very large TV screens. He was offered a fortune to work for US outfit but turned it down. He always maintained his semi-mechanical system was more reliable. He had a point as those early TVs were always conking.
Baird made many contributions to the field of electronic television after mechanical systems had taken a back seat. In 1939, he showed colour television using a cathode ray tube in front of which revolved a disc fitted with colour filters, a method taken up by CBS and RCA in the United States. In 1941, he patented and demonstrated a system of three-dimensional television at a definition of 500 lines. On 16 August 1944, he gave the world's first demonstration of a fully electronic colour television display. His 600-line colour system used triple interlacing, using six scans to build each picture. In 1943, the Hankey Committee was appointed to oversee the resumption of television broadcasts after the war. Baird persuaded them to make plans to adopt his proposed 1000-line Telechrome electronic colour system as the new post-war broadcast standard. The picture quality on this system would have been comparable to today's HDTV (High Definition Television). The Hankey Committee's plan lost all momentum partly due to the challenges of postwar reconstruction. The monochrome 405-line standard remained in place until 1985 in some areas, and it was three decades until the introduction of the 625-line system in 1964 and (PAL) colour in 1967. A demonstration of large screen three-dimensional television by the BBC was reported in March 2008, over 60 years after Baird's demonstration.
Legacy
Baird's mechanical scanning did not cease with the development of electronic systems. Improved versions of mechanical scanning survive today in long wavelength infra-red cameras used for military purposes, principally to provide night vision capability for fighter pilots. The picture from the camera is typically superimposed on the pilot's forward view by displaying it in the head up display. They have also found a use in airborne police helicopters providing, not only night vision, but the ability to detect heat sources (such as people) during the day. These systems do not use the disc of lenses that Baird used, but instead use discs of prisms to scan the image onto a cooled infra-red detector. Electronic pick up tubes are unsuitable for this application because there is no suitable target material with a sensitivity to long wavelength infra red light. Further, the glass bulb is opaque to such wavelengths.
Gloster Meteor was operational until the 1980s in some countries. The Canberra until nearly 2000. No one copied the outdated 262 at all. By 1944 technology the Meteor was ahead. Its engine was a fully functioning, well developed, reliable unit.
Remember watching a documentary on PBS about I think Nazi Mega-weapons. Showed one underground German jet fighter plant during the war where fighters were manufactured in a bunker. After completion they were transported out via an outside elevator built into the side of a hill. Atop the hill a short air strip was constructed so when the aircraft made it to the top it could be flown away by the pilot. Quite interesting.
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