Almost in time. He-162.

[Shortround6]

The A6M was NOT a light fighter. It was lighter than the F4F but is was the heaviest fighter the Japanese Navy was buying for the first few years of the war.

The Me-109 was NOT a light fighter when it was designed. It weighed close to what most other first line fighters did at the time. It worked "fine" as a short endurance interceptor in later years but was lacking in many of the capabilities of the P-38 and P-47.

" The F-16 worked just fine vs MiG23s and MiG25s" is a real hoot. Sure it did

the Mig 23 first flew in June of 1967 and went into service in 1970. The Mig 25 first flew in 1964 and went into service in 1970. The F-16 first flew in 1974 and went into service in 1978.

Want to tell me how well the F-16 did against the two Russian planes in the 8 years from 1970 to 1978??

And I suppose the Americans made absolutely NO ADVANCES on propulsion/electronics/aerodynamics/flight control in the years between the Russian planes being designed and the F-16 being designed?

you Know, like the engine in the F-16 weighing 3085lbs for about 15,000lbs thrust (dry) compared to the Mig-25s over 5000lb engines of about the same power*?

*Dry means no after burner in this case.

By the way, just how many Mig 25s did the F-16 shoot down?

 

[Vincenzo]

i'm adding to Sr6 list that MiG-23 was not a heavy fighter

 

[Jack_Hill]

Shortround6 said :
"as far as sticking more
powerful engines in the
He 162 goes, it could be
done."
Pardon me for getting
back to thread but :
I can very easily imagine a very light turbojet fighter, with only 800kg thrust and a pair of MK 151-20 downing anything flying in the 1945 european skyes.
I can also imagine a motivated allied pilot downing this little fast jet.
As far as i know, flags does not score kills.
Ps : what F16, an interresting a/c anyway, have to do with He 162 thread ?

 

[Shortround6]

Pardon me for getting
back to thread but :
I can very easily imagine a very light turbojet fighter, with only 800kg thrust and a pair of MK 151-20 downing anything flying in the 1945 downing anything flying in the 1945 european skyes .

No problem getting back to the thread, while it is quite possible for a very light turbojet fighter with a pair of MK 151-20 downing anything flying in the 1945 european skyes, it is also quite possible (and in fact quite likely) for said fighter NOT to bring down a B-17 with such an armament despite damaging it. This is one reason the the Germans were sifting to the MK 108 cannon.

Ps : what F16, an interresting a/c anyway, have to do with He 162 thread ?

Mr Bender brought it in as an example of a "light fighter" equaling the same generation heavy fighter. Except his examples don't hold water.

 

[Jack_Hill]

Shortround6,
I try, as well as you, to be fair and open minded.
Can any 500+mph fighter pilot having good firing solution, motivated in downing a bomber,equiped with well placed,accurate,flat trajectory, high rof 2X2cm cannons do very much more than simply hurts her ?
Don't misunderstand me, i do not wish such a fate for any bomber crew. Not at all.
But,again, i ask this question : was He 162 a bomber interceptor or a promising fighter/escort interceptor ?

 

[Shortround6]

The question, from the German point of view is that their research (rightly or wrongly) showed them that it took 15-20 20mm hits to bring down a B-17 on the average. Other research the Germans did (again right or wrong?) told them that on average a pilot (average, not expert) hit with about 2% of rounds fired. So it took 750-1000 rounds FIRED to bring down a B-17. This means on average 3-4 He 162s to bring down ONE B-17 IF they can empty ALL their ammo at one plane (repeated passes on the same plane?)

The 30mm cannon need 3-4 hits to bring down a B-17, or 150-200 rounds fired if the chances of hitting were the same. The He 162 with 30mm cannon carried 100 rounds for both guns (50rpg) making the likelyhood of a single (or pair) of He 162/s bring down a bomber much better.

While fighters need many few hits to bring them down they are also much harder to hit, smaller target/moving faster and maneuvering (unless bounced?). The MG 151/20 fires about 12 rounds a sec, so 24 rounds a second for two guns. IF the 2% hit rate holds true it would take our average pilot about 4 seconds firing time to get two hits on the target.

The high closing speeds of the jet aircraft usually meant short firing times.

The He 162 was an interesting aircraft and might have been a dangerous opponent if flown by good pilots. However it was under armed for the job they wanted it to do. Either bomber buster or escort fighter buster.

 

[Jack_Hill]

My friend, i love datas for what they worth.
Yes, we can count weight of ammos reaching target.
At any range.
In french, (or Greek) it's called a Sophism.
You know, like : cats have two ears, humans have two ears too, so humans are cats.
Then : 20mm HE shell is so much impotent that not any allied bomber, or even fighter a/c could ever had been shot down until "magic" MK 108.
Then, shooting 5 times same hole at 10 meters is statisticly impossible.
But not indeed, i do that twice or thrice a week.
And my 6 years old son do too, sometimes...
Do you have statistics about that ?

 

[Shortround6]

Several points.

1. I did put in the word/s "on Average" an number of times. Certainly a number of planes, including B-17s were shot down by a single 20mm hit but not so often that a good ordnance officer would depend on it. When dealing with hundreds of bombers and hundreds of interceptors on a single raid going with what works "on average" is about all you can do.

2. I don't really hold the MK 108 in that high a regard. It was good for bomber busting but had some serious limitations for other work.

3. Your last comments "Then, shooting 5 times same hole at 10 meters is statisticly impossible.
But not indeed, i do that twice or thrice a week.
And my 6 years old son do too, sometimes...
Do you have statistics about that ?"

If you really can do that with a .22 caliber rifle you are a certainty to win a medal at the next Olympics. And your 6 year old son is a candidate for the Olympic shooting team.

Please define "same hole" ? bullet holes overlap so there is one large multi lobed hole in the target ( actually not all that hard from certain positions) as in firing five .222-223inch diameter bullets into a "hole" .40-.45 inches across out side edge to outside edge?

OR putting FIVE .222-.223 inch diameter bullets into a hole that measures just .222-.223 across out side edge to outside edge.

 

[Gixxerman]

Meanwhile the perfected He-162C would be in service before the end of 1945.

As with all the end-war new LW planes I'd love to know what 'perfected' is meant to mean here.
It certainly can't be a properly flight-tested series of prototypes as so little flying was done towards the end.
Even the Me262 (possibly the last to see anything of some sort of semblance of proper testing which, as one would expect, went on for YEARS) can hardly be said to have received the proper time resources to working out its kinks. So much was done 'on the job'.

Just because they might have briefly flown a preceeding sub-type or prototype that is nothing like the same as being 'perfected'.
As interesting as the He162 was it can hardly be said to have been properly tested even in its first A varients, nevermind the barely sketched later ones.


(and as for the effectiveness of potential German fighter armament surely the fact that the quality of manufacture was falling through the floor in 1944 -45 that they were reduced to using poor substitutes for explosives seriously degrades the performance anyone might reasonably expect?)

 

[fastmongrel]

If Germany had been able to get sufficent supplies of Unobtanium ore the perfected supersonic He 162 with twin revolver cannon and fire and forget AAMs would have won the war. As it was it would have been an excellent way of killing scores of young Germans.

 

[Gixxerman]

As it was it would have been an excellent way of killing scores of young Germans.

Yes indeed.
Hundreds if not thousands (if they had had their way).
It should never be forgotten that at the centre the height of this 'Volksjager' nazi insanity was to start strapping children into a (then) modern jet after the most rudimentary instruction (and necessarily little flying training time, as German increasingly swarmed with allied fighters) be expected stand a chance take on overwhelming numbers of the increasingly experienced allied aircrew.
It would have been (yet more) callous sheer wanton cruel murder.

 

[tyrodtom]

I've wondered about this German research on how many hits it took of each particular shell it took to bring down a aircraft.

Did they watch gun camera films? The gun camera films i've seen aren't good enough to see all the gunstrikes.
Did they examine wreckage ? That, in a lot of cases is just smoking holes in the ground.

I don't even see how they can determine how many shells hit the target in real combat. I've got a feeling it was just the German version of the SWAG method.

 

[Shortround6]

Maybe it was the German version of the SWAG method, but since they were (before 1945) the only country being attacked by 4 engine bombers in hundreds of aircraft per attack I would say they had an interest in what was the best way to stop them. maybe their study was flawed or the methodology flawed, I don't know. But I haven't seen the results of any other study, they may very well exist. I don't know how much test firing was done on captured airframes on test ranges either. British shot up a few of their own Blenheims on test ranges to test weapons effectiveness and to test protection.

From Tony Williams books it appears that is what the Germans believed (for what ever reasons) and they were planing weapons procurement and armament fits based on those beliefs. They could be wrong but I would like something more than the idea that the armament of somebodies favorite late war fighter may not be up to the job it needed to do.

 

[delcyros]

According to the Baubeschreibung 8-162, which is laying in front of me,
the 20 and 30 minutes endurance rating are calculated as remaining netto cruise time, not as total endurance.
that means fuel required to warming up the engine, taxiing, take off, acceleration and climb to altitude is already accounted for as well as a slightly higher specific fuel consumption but no 10 minutes reserve. 20 ( 30) minutes is the remaining cruise flight time at altitude with 820 km/h (max sustainable cruise speed). Not much, though.

hope this helps

 

[Jack_Hill]

Hi Shortround6
I 100% agree with points 1 and 2.
You are perfectly right and i said it before, honest, competent and fair.
Yes my son do multilobed 1 hole at his best.
By now...
But when speaking about 5 shots, one hole, i mean 5 shots with single, perfect round hole.
And no, i'm very far from being an olympic champion, just an amateur shooter for 35 years now, getting a bit old, with vision getting poorer and poorer....
No, we don't practice 10 meters shooting using .222 or .223.
I do not want to destroy my old barn and i do not want to take the risk of hurting anyone using such (expensive) powerfull ammunitions just for plinking...
We use a 25 year old 4.5mm compressed air Feinwerkbau.
But, though now a pretty old, small caliber gun, the more i shoot her, the more i find her accurate, yet still capable of straight killing an adult 5kg muskrat.
I guess caliber is not all.
How you make use of a weapon may be more important.
An exemple could be the P 51, P 47 etc...highly efficient .50 weaponnery wich, multiplied by 6 or 8 and properly aimed, could down anything flying too.

 

[Shortround6]

Fair enough.

I too, have been doing competitive shooting for over 40 years and the eyes are not what they used to be.

5 shots, exactly in one hole, has been the goal of competitive benchrest shooters (and others) for decades if not over a century. While groups small enough to routinely require a moving backer target (witness) to ensure that 5 shots are indeed fired, as of a few years ago nobody had reported a 5 shot group exactlyin one caliber sized hole. Bench rest competitors (of which I am not one) measure the group sizes as center to center (over all size of group minus the bullet diameter). World records at 100 yds were down to just under .10 of inch a few years ago for center fire rifles. The .22 rimfire, even as used in the Olympics, is far from that standard. In the 90s and early part of the last decade the Bench resters tried branching out to the .22LR and air guns. I have lost track of what is current but after a few years they were giving up on the .22 and were still working on the air guns. The smallest groups at 50meters for the .22 equaled the center to center distance of the center-fire guns at 200yds.

I have don't have any Feinwerkbau air guns but do have some RWS or Diana ones, including the old recoil-less models like the model 75, a bit of a dinosaur now.

I have number of centerfire rifles that will give a one ragged hole 5 shot group at 100yds and on occasion at 200yds.

The point of this is that it may be statistically possible (1 in a gazillion?) for a 5 shot "one hole group" (0.00 in or millimeters center to center) to have happened but as a practical matter, as of a few years ago, such a thing has never been recorded. At least at any distance more than 10 meters or so. You do need good gauges, overlays, and/or dial calipers or micrometers to measure such things though. The Olympics went over to laser scanning for scoring a while back.

 

[Jack_Hill]

Hi Shortround 6.
I'm convinced with : my eventuals "shooting talents" or thousands hours shooting lots of guns at the stand, and elsewhere, does not fascinate anyone. Not even me. We don't use micrometers, lasers or whatever, to check shots.
If it looks round, it's round for us.
I'm not talking about benchresting, or 1500m .50 rifle shooting or even 600+m varminting using exotics/efficient homemade ammos/guns shooting prairy dogs straight between the eyes.
Just talked about 10m (ten meters) using an Fwb300,witch i'm so much used to, having shot her thousands and thousands pellets.
What i was pointing, concerning He-162 weaponery, was that 2 "small", accurate cannons, if well balanced with highest possible rate of fire, firing a very light,modern shell, may be more decisive.
According to He-162 very high speed for its time, allowing very short firing time per attack pass, a statisticly more powerfull weapon, less accurate, heavyer, complicated (troublesome ?) actioned, slower firing, short-barreled, generating high vibrations, then making the lightweighted He 162 a poorer gunplatform than normal could be a real handicap.
According, again, that i do not think He 162 was a suitable aircraft for viermots interception.
I agree (again...) That MG151/20 was NOT a top downer, lacking of very high rof, but times were... 1945...
Yes, statisticly, 20mm rounds weight needed to down a B17 was high.
But, for exemple, less weight was needed to down a B24 or a Lancaster.
3/4 rounds for a fighter (average), maybe more for a P-47.
Not so bad.
And, what about damaging criterias ?
What about, (always a sad and very hard point to think and speak about) crew damages ?
Again, stats concerning shoot/hits ratios,(forgetting the evidence of target size/maneuverability/dive/climb abilities) seams to mean : any very fast/manouverable MG151/20 equiped a/c was in heavy trouble trying to shoot down/straff anything ?
But, it saddly happened, so many times.

 

[chris mcmillin]

Great info on this thread, interesting stuff.

I remember reading a very interesting article about French operation of a small fleet of He162's and they decided that for safety, as in not dying from the inevitable crash occuring after a flame out, was not flying the airplane for more than 20 minutes.
Operating peacetime, testing for jet research, trying to bring back data without human loss, that was the realistic endurance after liftoff.

Really cute jet, I recall a Bob Hoover write-up on it that he recalled it being a great little airplane to bomb down the railroad tracks at high speed. Great visibility, nice cockpit, smooth jet engine, hauled ass. All the good stuff. I felt like I was in it, feeling all that he described. The airplane is small, with a big engine on top. It has low frontal area, no propeller, and tiny wing and tail. The POF airplane has been around in my life since childhood and always did capture my imagination.

Chris...

 

[Gixxerman]

Worth noting that the He 162's BMW 003 jet engine formed the basis of the later French Atar jet engine......and look how that turned out, after several decades developement.

 

[Shortround6]

That was a problem for the Germans ( or anyone else), a good idea or design often needs YEARS of development or improved manufacturing techniques in order to become a usable/profitable product.