ME-262: The World's First Jet Fighter

hello everybody welcome back to side projects this is one that could really be on our sister channel mega projects i'm not sure why i put it here i guess i just felt like it the dare suggested this so this is the me262 the world's first jet fighter let's jump in [Music] aeronautics was perhaps the most revolutionary innovation that humanity has ever created the impact cannot be understated whether transport warfare and many more things besides were irrevocably changed by the advent of flight even more incredible however is the speed at which aviation evolved and developed think about it someone born in 1900 lived through the wright brothers then the great war biplanes then world war ii prop planes then post-war jet planes in just 50 years humans went from not flying at all to flying supersonics that's jet aircraft level fast today we have for you the plane that pioneered the transition from propeller engines to jet engines the second revolution in aviation the meshmit me262 the world's first operational jet fighter [Music] our story begins in ancient egypt it really does some clever guy called hero of alexandra created the aylapar a rudimentary steam turbine powered by jets of steam exiting the engine this guy lived in the first century a.d by the way so humans have known about jet power for a really long time yet just like steam power it wasn't until the industrial age that the concept could be harnessed to its full potential skipping ahead just a little bit to the 1900s we came to two individuals who basically single-handedly invented the jet engine the britain frank whistle and the german hans von alhane frank whissel an raf cadet began formally working on his designs for a jet engine in the late 1920s submitting a patent which was accepted in 1932. his work could eventually result in the gloucester meteor the only ally jet aircraft to see combat operations in world war ii meanwhile over in germany von norhane was working on his own version of the technology likely helped along somewhat by whittle's work into the subject side note here on the side projects channel these two met each other after the war and actually became good buddies it's quite strange but that's cool anyway how did their engines work and well also what's a jet engine a jet engine is powered by a jet but we'll get into a little bit more detail here are the primary principles behind jet power cold air is taken into the engine from the front or also known as the intake genius this air is then compressed within the engine through a series of compressors again clever naming this is essentially a combination of rotating and stationary fans that pressurize the air and also heat it up this is important for the next stage where the air then mixes with fuel inside a combustion chamber pushing the temperature of the air even higher and causing it to expand this air then passes through a turbine which cools the air down a little bit before it's expelled through the back of the engine creating a jet of hot air that propels the plane forward that's the concept at least but getting it to work is a little bit tough the primary issue with these early engines was heat jet engines take air from around 10 degrees celsius that's 50 fahrenheit and heated up to around 450 degrees celsius which is 842 fahrenheit germany had significant material difficulties during the war which limited their options for heat resistant metals what's more the engines had issues with vibration essentially every time you turned it on it would actively try to tear itself apart which you know isn't brilliant when you're trying to get an aircraft to fly for this as well as political reasons even though a workable prototype was in use as early as 1939 with the heinkel he-178 the research on jet engines was continually pushed back in germany at one point the engineering team was reduced to just 35 people but the research it did plod on and on and in 1941 the first test flight of the me-262 was performed using an emergency propeller engine because both of the jet engines had failed in mid-flight but at least they'd planned ahead engine reliability was just one of several problems that the me262 had so let's go over a few more shall we one problem with the me262 came from a very unexpected place the landing gear the me262 used a so-called conventional landing gear that's two wheels forward on the wings and one wheel back on the tail with the plane angled upwards this was the standard for prop planes at the time yet for a jet powered plane this causes a bit of a major problem if you mount the jet engine on the wings of your plane and then angle those wings towards the ground well you can see where we're going in these early prototypes the exhaust of the jet engines deflected off the runway creating massive amounts of turbulence on the tail of the plane and negating the effects of the elevators the parts of the plane usually located on the tail that help it move up or down basically this means that the plane can't get off the runway which again is another important thing that you want with a plane the test pilot solved this problem by tapping the brakes at takeoff speed lifting the tail out of the turbulence some prototypes later the engineers swapped the landing gear design from a conventional arrangement to forward one back to a tricycle arrangement one forward two back you'll notice that pretty much every propeller plane from world war ii photos or footage uses a conventional landing gear arrangement while every modern jet fighter looks a bit like a tricycle and now well now you know why the aforementioned engine problems were eventually solved by using some super expensive materials which corrected the problem but given that they were super expensive production of the engines didn't ramp up until 1944 when it was becoming clear that germany was more or less guaranteed to lose the war and what's more these jet engines were far from perfect there were a lot of consequences because of wartime measures originally these engines were going to use even more strategic materials but germany just didn't have enough of them to meet demand so they did the best they could in designing the engine to work without them frank whittle remember him he was the british guy at the beginning he wrote in his final assessment of british jet engines versus german jet engines that it was in the quality of high temperature materials that the difference between german and british engines was most marked aside from the design problems the me262 had some other drawbacks from a strategic perspective first it turns out that jet planes really expensive currency conversion from world war ii to today is pretty tricky for german currency but a rough answer would be that a unit for the me2 was 87 400 reichsmark which at the time was about 21 000 or about 300 000 in today's money but do take that with a pinch of salt it's also tough to find unicos for other planes of the time but it's safe to say that this plane was a lot more expensive there's another problem and that's fuel if you're familiar with world war ii you know that germany suffered from fuel shortages throughout the war and the me262 consumed double the fuel of a conventional prop lane all of this begs the question then if it's more expensive to make it consumes more fuel and needs its own special landing gear set up to not throw a tantrum on the runway is this plane two three or ten times better than a regular plane well with the end of the war in sight germans we're about to find out the operational history of the emmy 262 begins in april of 1944 when a test air wing was created with the intention to train luftwaffe pilots to fly it in july rf reconnaissance aircraft was damaged by an me262 in what was probably the first aerial combat of a jet fighter in history but adapting this new technology under wartime conditions proved difficult and early combat saw only a slight edge in favor of the jets this improved over time with one air unit making claims of 19 allied aircraft down with six losses a major combat operation in march of 1945 by yag desvader maybe seven the first air unit in the world to include all jet fighters saw 12 bombers and one fighter shot down for the loss of three mes that's a good ratio but in terms of scale it was rather meaningless the allied air wing consisted of 1221 bombers and 632 escorting fighters so the m262 it wasn't a miracle weapon that would have single-handedly changed the outcome of the war but in isolation it was certainly a powerful plane it was easily faster than the propeller planes that the allies were using and it proved impossible to catch if the pilot decided to disengage it became something of a parallel to the allies in the pacific theater where the more maneuverable japanese zero had been countered by pilots simply gunning it and speeding away the emmy 262 pilots being faced with slower but comparatively more nimble propeller planes essentially did the same thing since fighting the planes in the air proved difficult the allies decided to base their countermeasures on destroying the planes when they were their most vulnerable when they were either grounded taking off or landing this was supposedly how chuck yeager a lieutenant for the u.s army air force and later first human to break the sound barrier achieved his first downing of an ma262 he said of the event the first time i ever saw a jet i shot it down chuck yeager bit of a badass other than that the allies mostly felt comfortable ignoring the aircraft while they used sheer numbers to overwhelm the german defenses with only 1400 produced in total during the war it was never going to save hitler in total the emmy 262 claims a count of anywhere from 200 to 562 allied aircraft downed affirming the numbers is difficult due to the loss of german documents towards the end of the war but we can make a safe guess that the plane was at the very least effective even if it's developed a bit of a myth around its effectiveness and although the me262 didn't make much of a mark on world war ii it would define the era that came after it [Music] after the war ended the allies proceeded to seize a huge amount of german technology for their own research and development one of those technologies was the still intact me262s and the allies shipped them back to britain and america to study the designs the british found that the me262 was faster and provided more visibility than the gloucester meteor although the engines were less reliable america also had a jet prototype of their own the p80 shooting star and they used innovations from the me262 in future jet aircraft production the f-86 sabre was the eventual result with several designs borrowed from the 262. the table was built to counter the soviet mig-15 also partly built with reverse-engineered me-262 technology both of these fighters would famously see dog fights with each other during the korean war overshadowing the propeller planes that also participated it was clear from this point on that prop planes would no longer be the mainstay of air forces around the world the age of the jet aircraft had arrived and just like many many innovations that were initially built for military purposes this technology would soon find a civilian use in the form of the passenger

Channel: Sideprojects

Views: 228,580

Keywords: megaprojects, construction, engineering, projects

Id: adodyBjzOek

Length: 11min 32sec (692 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 10 2020