Ju-88, fact or legend

[BiffF15]

Greg,
The ride quality of an Eagle at low altitude / high speed is rough. I have seen it so bad at summer time Red Flag that you couldn't read the instruments / displays, and gauges come loose and slide out (tachs are about 12-15" long). When that happens, you push it back in and keep going!
Cheers,
Biff

 

[DerAdlerIstGelandet]

Greg,
The ride quality of an Eagle at low altitude / high speed is rough. I have seen it so bad at summer time Red Flag that you couldn't read the instruments / displays, and gauges come loose and slide out (tachs are about 12-15" long). When that happens, you push it back in and keep going!
Cheers,
Biff

That's why I like winter flying better...

Yeah I know the lil single engine planes I fly are not the same.

 

[wuzak]

The fact is the Ju 88 was a legend!

 

[GregP]

Love to see and hear one flying. Maybe somtime someone will let the "fly them!" crowd come in and get measurements to build one.

 

[stona]

The fact is the Ju 88 was a legend!

Another of the few types being produced in 1939 still being produced in 1945. You don't build something like 15,000 of an aircraft which is no good
Cheers
Steve

 

[GregP]

Not in the aircraft industry, anyway ... you'd never sell them all ... leading to other financial issues.

 

[Shortround6]

Another of the few types being produced in 1939 still being produced in 1945. You don't build something like 15,000 of an aircraft which is no good
Cheers
Steve

You have to be careful using length of production or length of service as indicators of how good an airplane was. The JU 88 was a very good airplane at a lot of things. But the He 111 was produced 1935/36 to 1946/47 and served until the 1970s, last seeing combat in 1957/58. That doesn't really mean it was better than the JU-88

 

[stona]

I agree with your premise, BUT, if you break down the data, no He 111s were produced in the final quarter of 1944, whereas more than 300 Ju 88s were produced in the first quarter of 1945 (despite all the odds stacked against any aircraft production). Also none of those 300+ Ju 88s were bombers
Cheers
Steve

 

[Shortround6]

Spanish built He 111s in 1945/46 and ???
The He 111 was an export success!!!!


In reality what some of the impoverished nations of Europe did in the aftermath of WW II as far as using or building/selling aircraft and parts has very little bearing on how good a design was and an awful lot to do with what production facilities/tooling and parts were left in any particular country in 1945.

 

[MiTasol]

Just curious. Found a source saying the Ju-88 was "largely" designed by two Americans who specialised in stressed skin-construction.
Is this true?

Reminds me of Howard Hughes claim the Mitsubishi A6M was a copy of the Hughes racer

Junkers were building stressed skin aircraft from 1915

To quote Wiki "The prototype aircraft, named the Blechesel (Tin or Sheet-metal Donkey), was completed in very late 1915 after the outbreak of the war. This aircraft is significant in that it was the first flyable aircraft to utilize an all-metal "total structural" design. Contemporary aircraft were built around wooden frames constructed in a rib-and-stringer fashion, reinforced with wires, and covered with a stretched fabric. The J 1 was a semi-monocoque design, using steel ribs and sheeting that formed both the stringers and the skin."

 

[Graeme]

This is what prompted me to ask...

 

[stona]

There were two engineers on the team that developed the Ju 88 from Kampfzerstorer to Scnellbomber who might be considered 'American'.
Alfred Gassner (Grassner?) was an Austrian who had designed aircraft in Austria during WWI but who had been working in the USA for several years on designs for Fokker and Fairchild. He was a US citizen.
W.H. Evers. I don't know much about him, but the 'H' is for Heinrich, which isn't a terribly Anglo-Saxon name. He too had been working in the US, someone might be able to establish if he was a citizen or not.
In any case these two men formed part of a much larger team at JFW dedicated to the EF 59, eventually designated Ju 88 by the RLM.

Junkers did of course have long standing expertise in stressed skin construction. It was something that impressed Canadian Beverly Shenstone (later chief aerodynamicist on the Spitfire) when he worked for Junkers in 1929/30.
Gassner certainly had some expertise in stressed skin construction. Evers remains an unknown.
After the Ju 88 project Gassner returned to the US and Fairchild, some sources suggest that Evers stayed with Junkers. I think in modern terms that they were employed as consultants. Evers obviously chose to extend this, taking full time employment at Junkers, whereas Gassner saw better possibilities in a return to the US where he enjoyed considerable success until his death in 1958.

Cheers

Steve

Edit:
Men like these had transferable skills. Nationality really has little to do with it. Shenstone worked for Junkers and very nearly recruited his old friend Lippisch for Supermarine. Gustav Lachmann famously worked for Handley Page, much to the consternation of the British security services. There would be any number of other examples covering many nationalities for someone with the time to take a close look at interwar cooperation. It makes the nationalistic premises in another thread I saw recently look rather inane.

 

[swampyankee]

Aeronautics was much more of an international endeavor between WW1 and WW2 than after the war. While there weren't any international collaborations, there were conferences like the 1935 Volta Conference in Rome. There was also some immigrants to both the US from Germany and the former Austrian Empire, such as von Karman, Munk, von Mises,

 

[XBe02Drvr]

That's why I like winter flying better...

Yeah I know the lil single engine planes I fly are not the same.

Adler must be a flatland flier! In my years of instructing on breezy days in northland hillcountry, I nearly always came back with the G meter showing positive and negative peaks much higher than anything actually observed in flight. I generally carried my own personal G meter whenever stalls, steep turns, spins or any of the prescribed "commercial maneuvers" were in the lesson plan.
Practicing a 720 steep spiral around a point in a Beech Sierra one day, we flew into a mountain wave that instantly turned our 1100 ft/min descent into a 2000 '/min CLIMB, and we saw the G read 2.9, but the peak needle read 4.1 (and -.9!). Power (mostly) off, gear and flaps down, diving at Vfe, we were still going up at over 1k '/min. Gained 4800 ft before we could fly out of it. This was only one of a number of such wintry occurances.
Peak recorded G is always higher than what you see in flight.
Cheers.
Wes

 

[DerAdlerIstGelandet]

Yeap I fly in the flat midwest. The extreme hot humid summers are pretty turbulent, especially between 3500 and 5000 ft.

 

[XBe02Drvr]

Yeap I fly in the flat midwest. The extreme hot humid summers are pretty turbulent, especially between 3500 and 5000 ft.

And how! I learned to fly at NAS Memphis with cross countries into Arkansas, Missouri, and Mississippi in the summertime. Lucky to still have the fillings in my teeth and my lunch in my stomach!
Cheers,
Wes