The shark-like predator look of the Messerschmitt Me 262, coupled with its capabilities as a combat jet aircraft in World War II, ensure this warplane will be forever fascinating.
Efforts are underway that could see a flying replica of this milestone jet fighter at EAA AirVenture Oshkosh 2025 this summer.
Without diminishing the actual technological advances embraced by the Me 262, it is valid for the sake of accurate history to revisit some of the lore that has grown around this early jet fighter.
Early test examples, when the design still incorporated a tailwheel, had insufficient airflow over the elevators, evidently caused in part by the interaction of the downward jet exhaust deflecting off the runway. This made it necessary to gently tap the wheel brakes to get the jet to rotate to flight attitude where the elevators weren’t blanked, so the jet could take off. The permanent fix was a nosewheel on production aircraft.
The modestly swept wing of the Me 262, far from being a deliberate effort to tame compressibility and coax more speed from the airframe, was actually a compromise made to its design to accommodate development issues with the jet engines. The early concept for the Messerschmitt Me 262 envisioned a straight-wing jet fighter with engines mounted fairly far outboard on the wings.
During the design and development of the fighter, the size and weight of the intended BMW turbojet engines grew. This made the original relationship of wing, fuselage, and engine unsuitable for center of gravity. Relocating the wing would have demanded substantial redesign work, so Messerschmitt swept the outer wing panels 18.5°, a simpler fix. The wing out to the engine was said to be the original straight wing design with an added leading edge fairing.
This placed the heavy engines farther to the rear, moving the center of gravity and center of pressure aft, and within bounds. Production Me 262s flew with Junkers Jumo 004 turbojet engines.
Boeing engineer George Schairer uncovered scientific papers in Germany at war’s end that touted the advantages of swept wings for high speed aircraft, and this discovery proved to be a shortcut for development of such aircraft as the B-47 Stratojet and F-86 Sabre.
Similar research was already conducted in the U.S. at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) by Robert T. Jones. His findings would have gone public shortly anyway, regardless of the discovered German papers. The translation of German swept-wing technology had short-term benefits, but the U.S. ultimately would have achieved similar results from the insights of Robert Jones and the NACA.
The deliberate sweeping of wings for high-speed benefits had a sweet spot of 35°, far greater than that of the Me 262. A proposed Messerschmitt variant with 35° sweep went unbuilt by war’s end.
The contemporaneous American P-80 Shooting Star jet fighter and Britain’s de Havilland Vampire jet both had straight wings — and both exceeded 500 miles per hour.
There is a quirky adaptation from the Me 262’s wing that benefited the North American Aviation F-86 Sabre’s swept wing in the late 1940s. The Sabre evolved a 35° sweep, considered optimal in some of the German studies. But such a drastic sweep caused control problems at high angles of attack. Even the gentler 18.5° sweep of the Me 262 relied on automatic extending leading edge slats to tame this problem. Extended slats modify air flow to allow the wings to operate at a higher angle of attack before entering a stall.
Wright Field shipped a set of Me 262 wings to North American Aviation in California for detailed exploration of the slat operation. As the North American design team wrestled with the new world of swept wing aerodynamics and transonic flight phenomena, they studied the ingenious geometry of motion in the Messerschmitt leading edge slats, and wind-tunnel tested more than 100 variations before achieving the right automatic operation for the F-86.
If jet aircraft developments quickly outpaced the Me 262 in the postwar era, some baseline performance for jet fighter models available by 1945 is illuminating.
Later models of British and American jets had faster speeds and more powerful engines.
The Me 262 engaged in combat as early as July 1944. Its speed and firepower were worrisome for Eighth Air Force strategic bombardment planners.
But persistent Allied attacks on Messerschmitt factories, component suppliers, railroads, and petroleum sources, plus aggressive fighter attacks that sometimes caught the German jets in slower flight during takeoffs or landings, took a toll on operational Me 262s.
The total number of Me 262s available for combat in April 1945 was less than 200 out of more than 1,200 delivered to the Luftwaffe.
American production capacity meant a war of attrition favored the U.S. and Allies in 1945.
The rakish Messerschmitt Me 262 was a startling adversary beginning in the summer of 1944. But its rush into the turbojet future of aviation ultimately saw this pioneering German jet quickly outmoded and superseded by Allied jet aircraft, many of which would fight the next war in Korea several years later.
And that sleek postwar F-86 Sabre with the trend-setting 35° swept wing proved capable of supersonic flight in a shallow dive.
