The first jet flight of the Me 262

On the morning of 18 July 1942, at 8.40 a.m., the third prototype of the Messerschmitt Me 262 fighter, designated V3 and bearing the code PC+UC, took off from the airfield at Leipheim on the Danube, in Bavarian Swabia. At the controls was Messerschmitt’s chief test pilot Fritz Wendel, the same man who in 1939 had set an absolute air speed record in the Me 209 that piston-engined aircraft did not beat until 1969. The aircraft was powered solely by two Junkers Jumo 004 turbojets in an early pre-production version, each with a thrust of about 8 kN. The flight lasted 12 minutes and went without a hitch. In the afternoon Wendel took off a second time, for 13 minutes. It was the Me 262’s first flight without the help of a propeller and the beginning of proper trials of the aircraft that in 1944 became the first mass-produced jet fighter to see combat.

From the P.1065 design to Leipheim

Work on the aircraft began before the war. In 1938–1939 the Reich Air Ministry commissioned Willy Messerschmitt to design a fighter with two jet engines, which BMW and Junkers were still developing. The preliminary design, designated P.1065, was prepared by a team under the engineer Woldemar Voigt. Because the engines turned out to be heavier than expected, the wings were given a slight sweep, which later proved an advantage at high speeds.

The airframe was ready long before the engines. So the first prototype, V1, took to the air on 18 April 1941 with a Junkers Jumo 210 piston engine in the nose, purely to test its flying characteristics. On 25 March 1942 Wendel took off in the same aircraft with experimental BMW 003 jet engines under the wings, keeping the piston engine just in case. This proved wise: just after take-off the compressor blades in both jet engines broke, and Wendel landed pulled along by the propeller alone. Meanwhile the Junkers works, where the Jumo 004 was being designed by Anselm Franz’s team, had supplied more reliable, though still pre-production, units. It was with these that V3 flew.

Trouble with the tailwheel

The first four prototypes had a conventional undercarriage with a tailwheel. In a jet aircraft this proved a serious flaw. During the take-off run the fuselage sat at an angle, and the elevators were in the turbulent air behind the wings. There was also no propeller slipstream, which in piston-engined aircraft flows over the control surfaces. The pilot therefore could not raise the tail in time. Wendel, on the engineers’ advice, solved the problem with a trick: on reaching take-off speed he briefly touched the brakes, the aircraft tipped forward, the tail rose out of the turbulence and the elevators began to bite. The manoeuvre was risky. On 11 August 1942 V3 was badly damaged when a test pilot from the Rechlin test centre failed to master it on take-off. From the fifth prototype onwards the Me 262 was given a nosewheel undercarriage, which became standard.

Germans, British and Americans

The Me 262 was not the first jet aircraft. The world’s first turbojet-powered flight was made on 27 August 1939, a few days before the outbreak of war, by the Heinkel He 178, with an engine designed by Hans von Ohain. Ernst Heinkel’s company then built the twin-engined He 280 fighter, which took to the air under jet power on 30 March 1941, more than a year before the Me 262, and was demonstrated to Ernst Udet, then the Luftwaffe’s head of technical development. On 13 January 1942 an He 280 pilot became the first person in history to save himself with an ejection seat. Heinkel nevertheless lost the contest: in 1943 the ministry dropped the He 280 in favour of Messerschmitt’s design, which had better performance and greater range.

In Britain Frank Whittle had been working on a jet engine since the 1930s. The experimental Gloster E.28/39, powered by his engine, flew on 15 May 1941. The first British jet fighter, the Gloster Meteor, took to the air on 5 March 1943, almost eight months after Wendel’s flight, and reached RAF units in July 1944, almost at the same time as the Me 262. The Americans drew on British experience: General Henry H. Arnold had come across Whittle’s work during a visit to Britain in the spring of 1941, and General Electric built his engine under licence. The first American jet, the Bell XP-59A Airacomet, flew on 1 October 1942. It proved, however, too weak for combat.

The slow road to production

The flight of 18 July did not mean that the Luftwaffe would soon have a new weapon. After Udet’s suicide in November 1941, technical matters were taken over by Erhard Milch, who in 1942 concentrated on increasing production of proven aircraft. The Luftwaffe leadership, headed by Hermann Göring, was still counting on a quick victory by conventional means, and Messerschmitt himself was devoting effort to other projects too, from the troublesome Me 210 to the long-range Me 264, considered as a bomber for the “Amerikabomber” project. Jet engines also required heat-resistant steels alloyed with nickel, chromium and cobalt, which the Reich lacked. The Jumo 004 had to be redesigned to use less scarce materials, and for a long time its service life was a mere ten to a few dozen hours.

The breakthrough came in 1943. On 22 May, at Lechfeld airfield near Augsburg, the Me 262 was flown by the General of Fighters, Adolf Galland, who later wrote that it felt “as if an angel were pushing” and demanded that the aircraft be produced as a fighter. At that point, however, Adolf Hitler intervened. On 26 November 1943, during a demonstration at Insterburg, he asked whether the aircraft could carry bombs, and when Messerschmitt said it could, he decided it should be a “fast bomber” (Schnellbomber) to repel the expected invasion. In May 1944 he issued a categorical order to that effect. Historians disagree on how far this decision delayed the Me 262’s entry into service as a fighter. Some believe by months; others that the actual delay was short, and that the main obstacles remained the engines and the shortage of raw materials.

Place in the war

The Me 262 went into action in the summer of 1944, first with a test unit at Lechfeld, then as a bomber with KG 51 and with Walter Nowotny’s fighter group. At about 870 km/h it was faster than any Allied fighter and caused concern among American bomber commanders. Some 1,430 were built by the end of the war, but rarely were more than a few dozen combat-ready at any one time. There was a shortage of fuel, of trained pilots and of airfields that were not being bombed, and the engines wore out quickly. The Allies exploited the moments when the jets were taking off and landing, and destroyed many of them on the ground. The last elite Me 262 unit was Galland’s Jagdverband 44 of 1945.

The aircraft that flew at Leipheim in July 1942 did not change the course of the air war. It appeared too late and in too small numbers, and the Reich was unable to supply it with fuel and pilots. It did, however, set the direction in which aviation would develop. Swept wings and axial-compressor engines, proven in the Me 262, were studied closely after the war by the Americans, the British and the Russians, and German engineers and documentation found their way to the victorious powers. The era of jet fighters was finally opened by the Korean War, fought by aircraft that had grown out of this experience.