greetings this is Greg in this video I'll be discussing the focal wolf ta 152 h1 this plane was capable of incredible speed at very high altitude and used some interesting technology to do it before I go any farther I want to say there are very few pictures of these planes from the war there were not a lot of these built and by the later stages of the war it was difficult to get food or medicine in Germany you can imagine the issues with trying to get film after the war the Allies were primarily focused on German jet and rocket technology and thus very few pictures were taken of captured ta 152s therefore I'm apologizing in advance for the low number of pictures in this presentation and the fact that not all of the pictures will be of the variant being discussed let's get started by looking at just how fast the TA 152 is I'm gonna focus on the TA 152 h1 model which was the high altitude variant and probably the only variant to actually reach production unless I specifically say otherwise I'm referring to this model the h1 data on ta 152 production is a bit sketchy on that subject original source material for the plane is a bit scarce thankfully there's enough to compare speeds and cover a lot of the design factors but as you'll see in some cases I'll have to use my opinions to fill in the gaps so let's start with something that is an official source document the lines on this graph are giving us speed throughout the altitude range I put blue arrows here to point out the earlier FW 190 a-8 and a nine speeds we're not covering these in this video but take note that they both have a significant decrease in performance starting at about sixty two hundred meters or about 20,000 feet and by ten thousand meters which is about thirty two thousand eight hundred feet they're out of steam I'm going to try and make an effort to use both meters and feet in this episode a lot of my subscribers and patreon love the metric system and I get it it's an easy system to use anyway the 190 a series performance loss at high altitude was a problem because us bombers were coming in at 25,000 feet their escorts were often at 30,000 the Germans had the reasonable expectation that the next generation of u.s. bombers meaning of course b-29s would be coming in much higher and faster of course b-29s never bombed Germany but it wasn't an unreasonable concern thus the need for a high-altitude fighter was apparent focal Wolf's answer was the TA 152 h1 its performance is shown here on the chart with the red arrow the other line there is for the 152 C model which C is in Charlie which was the low and medium altitude variant so let's follow the 152 H line up from the bottom and see what's going on here then we'll take a little closer look at the tech involved starting at the bottom and I'll circle the points in blue to make this easier to follow we have the planes maximum speed at sea level which is 577 kph or 358 miles per hour that's not bad but it's not stellar for a late war fighter as the plane climbs the speed goes up because as you know the air gets thinner and the air resistance decreases for a given true airspeed at 2000 meters about 6500 feet the plane is doing 622 kph or 386 miles per hour at this point the superchargers first speed can no longer maintain manifold pressure power starts to drop off hence the speed stops increasing until we reach 2700 meters about 80 900 feet at which point the second speed is engaged note that the aircraft flight manual says to engage this speed at 2500 meters plus or minus 200 so we're simply going by the chart here but be aware there is some pilot discretion on when to engage these things using the second speed we're starting to get somewhere at 7000 meters were doing 698 kph or 433 miles per hour that's not enough to make the TA 152 the fastest plane in the sky but at this altitude it's at least very competitive now it's 7,000 meters plus or minus 500 feet we can engage the third supercharger speed this is at about 23,000 feet a third speed was very rare in World War two fighters but the TA 152 has won this third speed enables us to reach 733 kph or 454 miles per hour at 9,500 meters at this altitude the only fighter capable of outrunning the TA 152 was the p-47 M m/s and Mike and it couldn't do it for very long due to its water methanol supply and limitation I'm excluding Jets here we'll talk a little bit more about those later at 454 miles per hour the TA 152 was faster at this altitude than any p-51 Spitfire or Tempest that saw combat during the war as we climb higher in our ta 152 speed will start to drop off as even our third speed has to run out of breath eventually however at 11,500 metres or 37 thousand seven hundred feet that's really high we can trigger the first stage of our G m1 system which we'll be going over in more detail later this gives us a boost in speed of 35 kph that gives us 735 kph or 456 miles per hour at this altitude at 12,500 metres 41,000 feet we can engage the second stage of G m1 and reach 752 kph or 466 miles per hour note I often read the maximum speed of this plane at 41,000 feet as 759 kph which is 472 miles per hour I can't find an original source with that number it's probably out there in any case I do think it's realistic I am sure that due to quality control issues each plane very to bid and testing and a lot can be changed with the MW 50 or gm1 systems to gain a little bit more speed in any case the chart we're using for this video is the one you see here but if you really want to consider the plain 7 kph faster that's fine I'll compare these speeds with allied fighters a little later in this video and you'll see that 7 kph just won't matter let's take a look at the TA 152 H one's engine now if this is the first video you've seen on this channel you might want to watch some other ones before this all put some suggestions in the description I'm assuming at this point that the viewer understands supercharger stages supercharger speeds water-methanol injection and has some idea what induced drag is if not that's okay but this video isn't the best place to start as I'm not going to cover those things in detail for the 152 h1 the engine is the Yonkers uomo 213 e e is an echo it has 35 litres of displacement which by late-war standards was not unusually large would have been large in 1941 for a liquid-cooled v12 but not by this point for example the daimler-benz DB 605 which was used in most of the later 109s had 35.7 litres the rolls-royce griffon had 36.7 and the big boy of the bunch the Daimler Benz DB 603 had a massive 44.5 2 litres so that 35 litres wasn't that much in comparative terms the TA 152 s designer Kurt tank really wanted the big DB 603 engine and it was used in some prototypes so we'll get to it but the uomo 213 II was the engine used in the 152 H models the 213 only has three valves per cylinder two intake and one exhaust this was a comparative drawback as the DB engines as well as Merlin's Allison's many others had four valves per cylinder but the TA 152 you had to make do with three there was an effort to upgrade the you mo 213 to a four valve design but it wasn't finished before the war ended now it may appear based on the number of exhaust ports when you look at pictures of the motor that the uomo 213 does have two exhaust valves per cylinder however this is because the on this engine the exhaust valve stem is blocking the port exit not ideal for flow and the euchre's designers simply split the port in two to go around the valve stem you can clearly see that in some cutaway pictures the 213 did have some pluses it was able to Rev a bit higher than other engines as high as 30 300 rpm most aircraft v12 of the day had rpm limits between twenty-eight hundred and three thousand so that's a plus and although this next point is very hard to quantify or even really back up I do have the impression that the uomo was a tougher engine than the DB 605 used in late-model 109s in short the uomo 213 was a fine engine but not stellar its main advantage over the daimler-benz engine was that it was available and sometimes that's what really matters to make up for this they combined it with several power adding features first we have the supercharger itself it's a two-stage unit which means that it has one larger supercharger impeller feeding a smaller impeller which feeds the engine it's essentially a supercharged supercharger on a supercharged engine two-stage systems were very effective and this is an area where the Germans had been behind the u.s. had two stage systems years earlier and the British had it on the Spitfire mark 9 and subsequent models the two stages really helped breathe life into the UMO 213 I do think the supercharger impellers were a highly efficient design I'm basing that opinion on the fact that the NACA report on the older supercharger impeller in the earlier you mo to 11 they found that this older design engine had an impeller with inefficiencies equal or efficiencies maybe equal to that of the latest u.s. designs so I think it's safe to assume that the two 13s were at least that good next we have an after cooler commonly called an intercooler this does two things first it cools the air charge increasing the density giving more power second it reduced the tendency to knock thus allowing more manifold pressure with the given level of fuel quality meaning octane again this was an area where the Germans had been behind the curve the u.s. Wildcat and all subsequent US Navy fighters had intercoolers so did the p38 and p-47 and Merlin powered p-51 so this wasn't new but charged coolers were not common in German fighters so the TA 152 s dual stages and aftercooler really brought it up to current standards not really ahead of them for example the p-51s Merlin has configured the same way dual stages and an after core next they added a three-speed supercharger drive and this did put it ahead of the allied systems at least most of them typical v12 powered fighters in the European theater had one or two speeds you may remember from the chart earlier that third speed really helps keep power and thus performance up at higher altitudes so we have a great supercharger system but performance will of course be limited by the relatively low octane German fuel I don't want to turn this into a fuel seminar but at this point in the war the Germans had two main types of fuel for use in piston engine fighters they were B 4 and C 3 the C 3 being the higher of the two I've talked about this more extensively in videos before now to put it mildly there were some issues with supply and being able to use B 4 was probably an advantage the TA 152 h1 actually uses the lower octane for fuel however with the MW 50 methanol water injection system there is so much anti-knock protection that it was able to run enough manifold pressure to generate 2050 horsepower and that's an impressive number for a v12 running on 87 octane fuel I couldn't find too many specifics on the MW 50 system as it was set up in this plane but it's very clear that unlike other German planes the TA 152 MW 50 system was designed in from the start it wasn't an afterthought the tank is located in the wing just inboard of the fuel tank some sources say that it's in the left wing only I couldn't verify that either way in any case it had a lot of capacity and could run at full power with the MW 50 spraying for 30 minutes continuously I should mention and I'm just thinking of this now the DB 603 and this is a little bit of an unfair comparison okay because the DB 603 as used in the ta 152 was never really fully developed but apparently it could only spray MW 50 for 10 minutes at a time still 30 minutes but 10 minutes and then you'd have to wait for the temperatures to come back down and then 10 minutes again and by all the documentation I found that limitation doesn't exist for the humo so that could be an advantage for the uomo but again you know we're comparing a version that reached production to a version that didn't so in any case 30 minutes that's a long time for comparison the p-51d and p-47 D both had 5-minute limitations for war emergency power I'll get into that a bit more later all this is great so far a dual stage triple speed supercharger the ability to run at high power using MW 50 for 30 minutes however as the aircraft climbs eventually even this supercharger system is going to run out of breath and at that point the MW 50 won't help much because the high levels of manifold pressure needed to really take advantage of it just won't be available the solution was the GM 1 which Stan for Goering mixture one I'm not really sure what Hermann Goering is involvement was in this I guess I'm not a hundred percent sure it's named after Hermann Goering but in any case that's what it stands for this is what we would now call a nitrous oxide system here's the idea if we could simply spray one hundred percent oxygen into the engine we could then add the proper amount of fuel and add power and in fact this has been done but outside of a laboratory it's totally impractical which is why it hasn't been done in a production airplane there are two main problems there well there are more than two but I'm covering these two the first one is storage this is easy to understand an oxygen tank doesn't hold all that much think of how big the tanks are that supply one individual breathing either a scuba tank a bottle of medical oxygen aviation oxygen whatever a 2,000 horsepower engine would delete correction would deplete such a tank in seconds the required storage tank size for an engine boosted with pure oxygen would be too large the second problem and this one isn't a big deal but the pressure in the tank will decrease as the oxygen is used thus a regulator is needed to ensure the quantity of flow remains constant this is easy when it's a person breathing but it's more difficult when it's a 2,000 horsepower engine because the rate of the pressure drop in the bottle is going to be tremendous injecting nitrous oxide solves these and other problems first of all when you compress this gas it turns into a liquid that liquid is dense thus you can get a lot of nitrous oxide into a relatively small bottle it's going to turn back into a gas when released into the supercharger intake which in this application is where they spray it but the ability to store it as a liquid is a huge plus yes I know there's such a thing as liquid oxygen I'm sure so I'm sure somebody's gonna bring that up but that's cryogenic rocket ship stuff and it doesn't really apply here because it's never been used in a production airplane let alone a World War two fighter another well a production piston engine airplane I should say another bonus of nitrous oxide is it doesn't need a regulator as it leaves the storage tank vapor forms above the liquid and keeps the pressure in the tank essentially constant so tank pressure will be the same with a full bottle or when it's down by 80% or whatever thus using nitrous oxide allows us to add in oxygen since that's what nitrous oxide is by definition nitrogen and oxygen but without the drawbacks of using pure oxygen now these systems are very simple there's an 85 litre storage tank behind the cockpit when activated nitrous from that system sprays into the supercharger Inlet at that point the pressure drop turns it back into a gas it goes through the supercharger it goes through the intercooler and into the engine and yes you can spray nitrous oxide through an intercooler because it's in a gaseous form I actually talked to an expert on nitrous oxide from a vendor that makes those systems and he said absolutely no problem just don't spray fuel through it which makes a lot of sense extra fuel is added to support the nitrous oxide in a meter a metered amount later on downstream in the case of the TA 152 h1 there are at least two stages of nitrous oxide it's conceivable that maybe there were three stages I specifically Wikipedia references three stages of nitrous but I don't know what plane they're saying that that was used on in any case I have to say the specifics on this plane are in short supply there are no TA 152 s I can go look at there's only one in the world the Smithsonian has it it's not on display the pilot manual for the plane is terrible furthermore it's for the earlier h0 version and the test data for the plane is minimal thus I have to fill in some blanks here the TA 152 has at least two stages of gm1 I believe each stage has 120 horsepower so really not all that much we can see those clearly on the performance charts the stages that is however it may have had three stages typically they provide like a 120 horsepower per stage but you know they could change nozzle sizes and and make them add more up to whatever the engine could structurally handle it's very difficult to say exactly what they had in operations but two stages at 120 horsepower each is supported by what little documentation we have it appears that these stages were manually triggered meaning they could be triggered at lower altitudes lower than shown on the chart perhaps that would have damaged the motor shorten its life maybe it would be fine I just don't know in any case it's possible that these planes could have been set up for quite a bit more power than the published levels we normally see that just about covers the engine stuff in summary we have a mediocre engine with 35 litres of displacement however it's force-fed with an advanced dual stage three-speed supercharger blowing through an after cooler which is further supplemented by a good MW 50 system and at least two stages of gm1 aka nitrous oxide I should clarify what I meant by mediocre the uomo 213 was a bit heavy and it didn't have four valves per cylinder and it had that issue with the valve stem block in the exhaust port however it appears that it was tough furthermore as I said it could run higher rpm and many other engines in its class and that helped it make power a bit so it certainly wasn't bad but I do think that the DB 603 if prepared with the same features would have been better especially since it has a variable speed supercharger tried next we have to discuss the wing the 152 h1 model has a high aspect ratio wing pretty sure the highest aspect ratio wing of any world war ii fighter what is that and why does that matter well aspect ratio is the length of the wing in relation to the average cord the cord line being the line from the leading edge to the trailing edge of the wing since most wings on fighter planes are tapered we take an average sometimes you see an airplane with a constant court wing and that's usually done to lower suction cost because every rib is basically the same thing in any case most fighters don't have particularly high aspect ratio wings we normally see these on sale planes or planes that need a lot of loiter time like maritime patrol aircraft however they offer advantages for flights at low indicated air speeds and that's very important for high altitude plate that's why we see such a wing on the u-2 spy plane at high altitudes the indicated airspeed is very low for a given true airspeed as many of our viewers know induced drag is very high at low indicated air speeds a high aspect ratio requires a lower angle of attack at a given speed thus has less induced drag than a similar design low aspect ratio wing thus the high aspect ratio wing on the TA 152 h1 is designed to minimize drag thus maximize speed at very high altitudes at the expense of parasite drag at the high indicated air speeds it can reach at low altitudes this is the primary reason the TA 152 h1 is not particularly fast at low altitude by late-war standards but up high it's extremely fast one drawback to a high aspect ratio wing is that it can be weak that's just common sense looking at it I don't think this was a problem for the TA 152 though because they used steel spars all the sources I have found say that the steel spar was used due to shortages of aluminum maybe that's true I guess maybe it probably is but I haven't seen an original source document saying that an alternative explanation is that to have enough strength to pull high G loads with this aspect ratio they needed steel spars in any case the maximum G limits and dive speeds of the TA 152 are comparable to other German fighters so the wing strength apparently wasn't a problem these features meaning the engines high-altitude power and the wing design give the 150 to an incredibly high ceiling over 48,000 feet some sources say 40 9,500 feet no allied fighter that saw combat during World War two could reach those altitudes not even close of course that in itself could be considered a drawback that design feature that is why sacrifice performance at 25,000 feet where the fighting was actually taking place in exchange for an increase in performance at 40,000 feet and above well as I alluded to earlier I think that the reason they made that choice was because they didn't know what to expect from the b-29 and they assumed the worst had b-29s been coming over at 35,000 feet and say 350 miles an hour the TA 152 h1s could have loitered two miles above them how to reach of the escorts and when the time was right dive down and take out a bomber in a single pass with the heavy cannon armament it packed 130 millimeter firing through the spinner and a pair of wing mounted 20 millimeters after firing could then zoom back up out of reach of the escorts of course the b-29s performance wasn't quite that good best case it would have been coming over it maybe 30,000 and 300 miles per hour but they never showed up in Germany anyhow now as far as I know that scenario I just described the TA 152 diving on the bomber and shooting it down and zoom climbing back up far as I know that never actually happened I just think that was the thought process of the design team of course that design team was smart enough not to bet the entire pod on this idea which is why other variants of the TA 152 have a lower aspect ratio wing more optimized for low and medium altitudes it's very apparent when you see a TA 152 C model for example the wings are noticeably shorter the TA 152 h1 has another feature to help it fight at high altitudes and it's a feature that was not commonplace not unheard of but not commonplace in 1944 1945 and that's the pressurized air is thin up high and at 40,000 feet it's really thin in the Second World War most planes were unpressurized so pilots and other crew members wore oxygen masks at higher altitudes this is the useful consciousness chart from the pilots handbook of aeronautical knowledge notice the huge difference in time in useful consciousness between 25,000 feet and 40,000 feet in the event that the pilots oxygen mask or an oxygen system component would fail it's likely that from 25,000 feet the pilot would successfully perform an emergency descent because he would remain conscious long enough to do that from 40,000 feet survival is becoming pretty unlikely in my opinion this is the reason that the TA 152 and a few other world war ii fighters that are intended for use at very high altitudes have pressurized cockpits this way you're not betting the life of the pilot and the airplane on a single $0.10 component in the oxygen system and there's several of those here's a page from the ta 152 h0 pilot manual now I don't speak German but I translated it and we'll go over it now if any of you German speakers want to add to this in the comments section please do so especially if you're a pilot or generally knowledgeable on aircraft I'll be the first to admit the translating aviation stuff from German is tricky now I'm not trying to translate a here word-for-word but get the actual picture of how to operate it at 4,000 meters which is about 13,000 100 feet the pilot will put on and use the oxygen mask and keep using it when at or above that altitude okay that makes sense it's a little bit higher than the altitude typically used but not a problem the instructions say to open up the oxygen valve and if I'm understanding this correctly to monitor the system for proper operation that's absolutely standard and every plane I've ever been in now this next section says if you need additional oxygen to push with your elbow that sounds strange but here's what I it means most aircraft at least everyone I've flown with an oxygen system are set up so that you don't normally breathe 100% oxygen from the bottle the oxygen oxygen is diluted with ambient air this increases the supply duration however if needed the pilot can select one hundred percent oxygen with no dilution this is highly effective I've seen tired pilots put on the mask hit that switch and it wakes them right up and I've flown with a lot of fighter pilots and some have told me that they switch to 100% oxygen sometimes because it improves their night vision I haven't personally verified that but I'm assuming that the manual is describing an option to trigger 100% oxygen by pushing a switch of some type which is activated with your elbow maybe sheriff or Bismarck or another german-speaking aircraft expert can chime in on this one but that's how it looks to me based on my experience now at 8,000 meters which is about twenty-six thousand two hundred feet it says to begin pressurizing the cockpit this triggers a pump which forces air into the cockpit the cockpit is sealed into a nearly airtight condition the canopy is sealed by an inflatable tube think of it as circular weather stripping that inflates like an inner tube in all pressurized aircraft I've flown pressurization is regulated by a valve normally called an outflow valve this valve lets air out thus the air coming in is coming in at a relatively constant rate and the pressurization is controlled by controlling the air flowing out in almost all aircraft and I think that's how it works in the ta 152 the manual says to open a valve I'm guessing it's probably an outflow valve and to check the cockpit pressure occasionally and that it should be 8,000 meters meaning that the air pressure in the cockpit is equal to air pressure at 8,000 meters so they didn't pressurize the cockpit below 8,000 meters that makes sense why put wear and tear on system or run the risk of explosive decompression from Battle Damage like one bullet hole if you don't have to as the aircraft climbs they don't really pressurize it that much a cockpit altitude of 8,000 meters or just over 26,000 feet is really high by most standards but I think the goal here was to only pressurize it enough so that if the oxygen system failed the pilot would still be able to make that emergency descent again I'm interjecting a lot of opinion here because of lack of source documentation but I think I think my opinion is sound I'm anxious to hear what you guys think anyhow the TA 152 sh-1 pressurization system was capable of generating a pressure differential of 5.2 9 psi that's pretty darn good that means it can make the air pressure in the cockpit 5.29 psi higher than outside as a comparative example most modern jet airliners go up to about eight but they have circular fuselages meaning the cross-sections around easier to pressurize a round thing the TA 152 s cockpit is a little bit of an odd shape and among aircraft that aren't round by even modern ones 5.29 is a pretty good number and what it means is it makes the air pressure in the cockpit 5.29 psi higher than outside now that's good enough to hold that 8,000 meter cabin altitude all the way up to the aircraft's incredible 15100 meter which is forty nine thousand five hundred foot ceiling note as I mentioned earlier some sources put the plane's ceiling at forty eight thousand either way it has enough pressurization range to deal with it now let's put the ta 152 s performance chart back up and add in some Allied aircraft for comparison I'll start with the p-51d running one hundred and fifty octane fuel so a best-case late-model p-51 there is an H model p-51 never saw combat during the war now I'll use red dots for the p-51 at sea level it can reach 375 miles per hour or 604 pH easily outrunning the TA 152 h1 down here at 10,000 feet it can reach 416 miles per hour 669 kph at 20,000 feet the tables start to turn the 51 can do 421 miles per hour or 678 kph up at 30,000 feet the Mustang is clearly behind and at 36,000 it's falling farther behind still at 40,000 feet which is 12,000 100 meters I don't have a red dot for it because the Mustang falls off the left side of the chart with the maximum speed of 291 miles per hour or 458 kph p-51d is a very good airplane but it's not optimized for combat at 40,000 feet now what about a late War Spitfire I'm gonna go with a Spitfire 21 with a late war Griffon engine which like the TA 152 h1 runs a dual stage supercharger with three speeds now note not all Griffin's were set up with three speeds I'm using a best-case scenario here I'll use pink dots for this one as you can see at 40,000 feet even the fastest wartime Spitfire I could come up with faster that's at this altitude is a lot slower than the 152 h1 the pink ball at that altitude is about 80 kph behind the focal Wolf's line I want to state that as I put these dots on there my level of precision with Microsoft Paint isn't that good they're intended to all be at the same level you know and and they're you know they're all about right within a few miles per hour but my artistic skills aren't that great moving on the Hawker tempest 5 was very fast but again not optimized for high altitude I I think and I want to talk about this another time it's too big of a topic to get into right now but had the jet age not arrived I think that the tempest sleeve valve engine would have proven to be the way forward I think there would have been 3,000 horsepower 10 by late 1945 in any case although it's not really a high-altitude fighter it's one of the few aircraft to have actually fought the TA 152 thus I feel it belongs here and I'll put it up here in blue as you can see the tempest is very fast down low but by 25,000 while correction by 28,000 feet it's out of this race the last fighter I'm gonna add in is the p-47 M M as in Mike only a hundred and thirty of these were built but they did see combat in Europe this is the fastest p-47 variant and the fastest allied plane to see combat during the war with the possible exception of the British meteor jet fighter kind of depending on how you define combat so let's plot it this time I'll use black this particular thunderbolt also had some reliability issues which are talked about a lot they were not caused by a flaw with the airplane they were caused by saltwater damage during transport to Europe in other words how they were configured for transport allowed them to get some damage they got it all figured out but it was replaced with the end model and as in November anyway although not in the European theater the 47 M the one we're talking about here is very fast at altitude and can outrun the TA 152 anywhere below 30,000 feet however the G m1 system gives the TA 152 the edge once it's engaged so it's pretty clear that at very high altitudes the TA 152 was the fastest piston-engined plane to see combat during the war the p-47 M is really the only plane that was a threat to it above 30,000 feet I didn't plot the maximum speeds for each airplane because they all occur at different altitudes but I'll mention that the 47 M could do 473 miles per hour at 32,000 feet so in terms of actual maximum it's slightly faster than the TA 152 the big difference here is that per the flight manual the 47 M can't sustain this for in a few minutes the TA 152 h1 can do it for 30 minutes even if the 47 m pi 'let ignores the 5 limitation 5 minute limitation and i have no doubt that he could do that without engine damage but he's going to run out of water methanol way before the TA 152 does I'm sure that somebody will bring up the Allied jets the meteor and the p80 shooting star I'm not putting up those comparisons for several reasons first the p80 came on the scene too late to be a factor here it did fly some reconnaissance missions out of Italy very late in the war but that's about it the meteor flew a number of missions against v1 buzz bombs but was restricted from operating over enemy territory that means its chances of encountering a TA 152 was about equal to that of the PAE basically zero furthermore the subject is complicated because these early Jets were constantly improving deciding which which version to use would lead to endless arguments however I will say that while both Jets have higher top speeds than the TA 152 at least in very late war versions there is an altitude above which the TA 152 is faster than either and the TA 152 as a higher ceiling than both so although the age of the piston engine fighter was really over by this point the final fighter from Foca wolf actually holds its own pretty well at the beginning of the jet age there are a couple more things I want to mention from this chart the performance curve next to the TA 152 H ones line is for the TA 152 CC is in Charlie model this model is using the DB 603 which is why you don't see supercharger stages it's one continuous curve due to the DBS variable supercharger drive mechanism I have a video about that drive mechanism if you're curious the C model also has shorter wings as I mentioned which is better for low and medium altitude performance it does not have the pressurized cockpit the c model prototypes have the supercharger intakes on the left side of the cow due to the different configuration of the DB 603 engine I think the C model had a lot of potential but was never fully developed I don't want to get too far into what-ifs but when you're talking about these late war airplanes it's kind of hard to avoid I think that the C model with an intercooler good MW 50 and GM one would have been very tough to beat down low however it never had all of that not properly setup not even in the prototype stage the h1 model was almost certainly the only variant to reach production nobody knows exactly how many were built but it's certainly fewer than 100 to survived to yet only to survive the war intact and were captured by the Allies one was cut up for scrap it's actually this one here and the other is somewhere at the Smithsonian with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight we know that the h1 probably wasn't the right variant to build at least I don't think so there wasn't much need for it at the end of the war records on this are pretty spotty but it appears that the few times it saw combat it was at lower altitudes ta 152 s shot down between 7 and maybe 10 enemy aircraft total with losses of four of their own certainly not enough to have any impact on the war but considering how outnumbered they were managing to shoot down anything at that point was very impressive I want to thank my subscribers and especially my supporters on patreon without patreon support these videos would be far fewer a number in fact a ta 152 video has been requested by patreon supporters a number of times which is the reason I made it now rather than later at first I was thinking I might be getting the card ahead of the horse here since I haven't put out my 190 series yet and the TA 152 is based on the Dora which is based on the one but I think that the TA 152 has enough unique features that it could be a standalone video anyway hence here we are I'm gonna put up a few of the source documents for speed so you guys can peruse that if you want anyhow that's all for now have a great day you
