Nazis deploy He 162 in 1942 rather than 1944

[T. A. Gardner]

\But if we assume that jet engine technology was available three years earlier, that technology would be available for both sides. So the RAF would have the DH Vampire, a far superior design to the He162 with the US on its heels with the F86.

Not F86, the P80 would be flying over Germany in masses. The F86 would not have been built without the Me P.1011.

The He 162 was not the big apple for air war. Difficult to fly, and not sufficient resources for training the pilots properly.

Who says? In my alternative time line American and British engineers were able to study the swept wing of an Me262 flown by a test pilot defecting with a set of test data...

British and US engineers were already studying swept wings. German data was just added to what they already knew. If the Germans got jets into action earlier, the US then Britain would have followed suit in short order. Both could have also pushed production forward to some extent on their later war "super" piston engine fighters.

[At ease]

British and US engineers were already studying swept wings. German data was just added to what they already knew. If the Germans got jets into action earlier, the US then Britain would have followed suit in short order. Both could have also pushed production forward to some extent on their later war "super" piston engine fighters.

Britain was not.

Well, not until the Fedden Mission of June 1945.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fedden_Mission

USA:

Swept Wings and the B-47 Bomber

[.....]

While Boeing was working on this design, World War II continued to rage in Europe. During the war, Nazi Germany conducted much advanced scientific research in many fields. Although the Germans did not achieve great breakthroughs in radar or atomic weapons, they did develop impressive aeronautical vehicles, including the world's first operational jet fighter, the Messerschmitt Me 262, and the first long range ballistic missile, the A4 (more popularly known as the V-2). As the war was winding down, the commanding general of the U.S. Army Air Forces, General Henry H. "Hap" Arnold, asked the famed aerodynamicist Theodor von Karman to lead a group of top scientists and engineers to Germany to learn about its technological advances.

In the spring of 1945, these engineers went to Europe. They followed closely behind the combat troops, so that they could be the first to discover the German technology, which they wanted to obtain before the Russians did. One of the people in this group was Boeing's chief aerodynamicist, George Schairer, who at the time was working at the Pentagon and was not connected to Boeing's Model 424 effort. Shortly before he left the United States, Schairer became aware of a proposal for "wing sweepback," which involved angling the wings back from their connection at the fuselage instead of extending them straight out.


Swept-back wings were not a new idea. Even before World War I they had occasionally been used as a way to shift an airplane's centre of gravity to solve balance problems. W. Starling Burgess had used triangular fins attached to the upper wing on his 1910 biplane to give it inherent lateral stability. In 1939 a German engineer named Ludwig Bölkow and Dr. Albert Betz tested swept wing models for airplane manufacturer Messerschmitt in a wind tunnel. The tests demonstrated that such-wings would allow airplanes to reach higher speeds. The results of these tests led the company to continue testing on swept-back wings throughout the war. When Schairer arrived at the Aeronautical Research Institute in Brunswick, Germany, he discovered these studies. Other research on wing sweepback was also conducted by the German companies Arado and Junkers.

In the United States, NACA engineer Robert Jones had discovered the concept of swept-back wings in January 1945, conducted wind tunnel tests in March, and published his results in May. But it took confirmation from the Germans before anyone went ahead with the idea. Once the German results proved that the benefits were real, Schairer immediately wrote a letter to Boeing about the results and provided a calculation for a wing with 29 degrees of sweep that clearly demonstrated the potential benefits.

[.....]

http://www.century-of-flight.freeola.co ... Bomber.htm



[/quote]

[T. A. Gardner]

The point was that it wouldn't take German research for the Allies to adopt swept wings. They were doing the research on their own as well.

[At ease]

The point is that your post was incorrect.

Nothing new here.

[Sheldrake]

There is a claim that the night fighter ace John Cunningham test flew a prototype DH Vampire over Normandy on 9th June 1944 looking for combat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cunn ... F_officer)

In March 1944 Cunningham relinquished command of 85 Squadron. He was appointed group captain in command of Night Operations at No. 11 Group RAF. At 26 he was one of the youngest to hold that rank. Air Marshal Roderick Hill asked him to report to de Havilland in company with Adolph Malan. They were to test-fly the de Havilland Vampire. Cunningham commented that the machine would make an ideal night fighter. Although he was not familiar with the workings of the de Havilland Goblin turbojet, he recommended that if the cockpit was extended to allow for a navigator and the fuel tanks were enlarged, the type could make a formidable interceptor. While test-flying, Cunningham and Rawnsley carried out a sortie over Normandy from RAF Uxbridge. They overflew the British sector on the 9 June 1944 as the Battle for Caen began. They were vectored onto enemy aircraft but were unable to hold their contacts.[78]

The quoted source is:
Golley, John (1999). John "Cat's-Eyes" Cunningham: The Aviation Legend. Shrewsbury: Airlife Publishing. ISBN 978-1-84037-059-1.

Is this the first Allied jet operation in NW Europe? Even the prototypes were armed. IF they were vectored onto contacts this must be a combat mission....

If the Me262 could be available earlier so might the DH Vampire

[T. A. Gardner]

Well, it certainly is possible that two of three prototypes (LZ548, MP838, orLZ551) could have been flown on such a mission as all three existed and were flying prior to D-Day. As a single seat fighter without radar and other night fighting aids it would have been nearly impossible for the pilot to be successfully vectored into an intercept at night. The flights at night could have been ordered simply as a precaution against enemy observation of this type in flight too.

The first prototype, LZ548, flew for the first time on September 26, 1943.

[Huszar666]

Morning,

The whole idea falls apart by the lack of need.

No new weapon will be seriously considered or asked for if there is no need for said weapon.
For the He 162 (and it was a shit aircraft to begin with) being available in numbers in 1942, you will have to see a need for it back in 1940! But back in 1940 there was simply no need for a jet-interceptor. Remember: 1940 the LW was flying around with the Bf 109E, with the Bf 109F and the early Fw 190 in developement for 1941. That was enough of a technological step, since the 109E was still on par (or better) than everything flying around on the other side. The 109-concept was not stressed to its limits till the late G-series/K, and the 190 haven't even reached its limit in wartime.
1940 there was simply no need for an overly fast interceptor, what the LW had to deal with at that time was small-scale daylight attacks and marginally effective nighttime raids by the RAF BC. For that, you simply don't need a fast jet interceptor. You need not-so-fast interceptors with heavy armament. For that, the LW had the Bf 110 and later the Ju 88C/G, Me 210 and the Do 217N/J.
The He 162 would be only needed against esorted daytime attacks by massed heavy bombers. The 8th Air Force flew its first mission in August 1942, and heavily escorted attacks against Germany proper didn't happen until late 1943 (if I remember correctly). The heavily armed Zerstörer (yeah, Me 410 with 50mm rules!) were sufficient against that, until the USAAF managed to send escort fighters well into Germany. In late 1943 or thereabouts.

So, there was simply abolutely no need for a jet interceptor until about late 1943. Look and see, Me 262, Me 163 and He 162 development gained speed (or started) around that time.

If you want to have jet fighters in late 1942 to mid 1943, buy up a lot of MiG-15/17, steal a time machine and send them back.

The idea with guided missiles back in 1942-1944 is just soooooo funny. Less than a hundred fighters armed with 2 misslies each against a wave of 500+ four engines? Have you reviewed all the wars till around the late 70s? Guided misslies performed piss poor for around 30 years after ww2! Why do you think even today's top fighters carry cannon armament around? 80 years after the war?

[T. A. Gardner]

The idea with guided missiles back in 1942-1944 is just soooooo funny. Less than a hundred fighters armed with 2 misslies each against a wave of 500+ four engines? Have you reviewed all the wars till around the late 70s? Guided misslies performed piss poor for around 30 years after ww2! Why do you think even today's top fighters carry cannon armament around? 80 years after the war?

Actually, it is a workable idea when you consider what is being attempted. You are firing a simple beam riding missile at a non-maneuvering target going about 200 mph, maybe a bit more. The target is large (4 engine bomber) and all you have to do is sufficiently damage it to cause it to fall out of formation and then be individually picked off if it isn't shot down.

If you have a missile with working guidance that can go say 550 mph that's a closing rate of 500 feet per second on the bomber. All you need do is line up on the bomber at 1500 to 2000 feet, then let one missile go then the next a second to two later. They're already heading more or less towards the target and only have to ride the radar beam into it. Using a proximity fuze would be best, but if you put say a 150 to 200 lbs. fragmentation warhead on each missile with command detonation by radio link, your chances of taking down the selected bomber are pretty good. Those war heads are on the order of ten times as powerful as any flak round. The whole missile might weigh in at around 500 to 600 lbs. meaning something like an FW 190 could easily carry two plus the necessary radar. Take most of the cannon off the plane as it doesn't need them now to compensate for the weight and give you more room for the guidance equipment.
All the missile really has to do to get close to the bomber is fly a steady course with minor corrections.

The Germans already had a working system of servos for such a missile and they had a radio control system using CLOS available. Substitute the circuitry to allow the missile to ride a radar beam (a conical scan continuous wave radar would work here and the Germans had the knowledge to build that from existing sets). The biggest issue would be making the whole thing reliable.

The US by 1945 was that far along with AAM's and their main problem was reliability. They could see in testing that the missile could track and hit a slow-moving large bomber that was not maneuvering (JB-3 Tiamat, AAM-1 Firebird, and Gorgon II) when the missile worked. The problem was that like one in three actually worked, the others failed from various reliability problems from electronics to motors and everything in between.

That's why you use two or more per bomber to ensure at least one gets close enough to take it down. Such a missile would be worthless against a maneuvering target, and even one that was moving much faster, but against a slow 4-engine bomber of the mid WW 2 period, it could have worked.

[ThatZenoGuy]

For the He 162 (and it was a shit aircraft to begin with)

I disagree with this statement, the 162 was by no means a perfect aircraft, but for the price of building one, it was a bargain.

Superior performance to pretty much everything in the skies, 2 20mm cannons is more than enough to take out fighters and even harm bombers, it runs on cheap-as-chips jet fuel, jet engines themselves are actually cheaper than world-class piston engines of the day, its easy enough to fly, etc.

The only serious issue is of course the fact that they randomly fell apart, but that has nothing to do with the design, but rather the lack of resources, namely good wood-glue.

There should be plenty of such glue in '42, and the high demand for it would result in more production facilities to make redundancies.

[At ease]

The world's most experienced test pilot, Capt. Eric "Winkle" Brown R.I.P.(400+ different aircraft in his logbook IIRC) thought highly of the He 162.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Brown_(pilot)

After flying it in 1945 and later, he was an enthusiastic supporter of the design and the level of performance that it was able to show.

He considered that it would have been a very capable opponent to Allied aircraft.

Of course, he recognised and publicly acknowledged the "shortcuts" adopted as expedients towards easier/faster production methods, and the difficulties to be faced by inexperienced pilots learning to fly it, but in his capable hands he could see the potential if it had had the opportunity to be developed properly.

Air Enthusiast magazine(forerunner of sister publication Air International magazine) printed a "Viewed from the Cockpit" article in June 1972 written by 'Winkle" giving full details of the He 162.

It is entitled: "Mastering Heinkel's Minimus".

It was most illuminating, and included "chapter and verse" of his impressions of it based on his actual flights.

Personal attack removed by moderator.

Of course, it is mere fantasy that the HE162 could have been deployed much earlier than it had been compared to OTL, due to the lack of availability of production jet engines, although the airframe itself would not have presented any difficulty.

EDIT: Fortunately, I have just remembered where I recorded a partial copy of the article.

I will post the material when I have time.