Me262 vs. P-80

P-80 v Me-262?


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I was just looking at the German expected production numbers of the jets.

I doubt the Luftwaffe had a training program in place to allow enough time to get pilots in the cockpits that were minimally qualified for it.
 

Numbers wold speak for themselves...if they were correct.

You are, like all tendencious people do, comparing the best of a type with the worst of anhoter type.
The P-80A didn't perform all that well, in those ages, it was very unreliable with many engine troubles and max speed was only 792Km/h

It then improved with time but so whold the Me
 

WOULDA SHOULDA COULDA
 

The planes were built for quite diferent porpoises.
The P-80 was still prety much on tests, but intended as an escort fighter. The Me-262 was designed as a bomber killer.
The fact is that both aircrafts are quite hard to maneuver at high speeds since their relatively weak engines wold led to great speed loss.

The specs are all wrong, the P-80A WW2 series performances were:
P-80A
engines: J33-GE11 or J33-A-9 centrifugal flow turbojet at 3850lbst
max speed:
sea level: 558 mph
40.000ft : 492 mph
climb rate : 4580 ft/min (in fact 20.000 ft in 5.5 min)
max ceiling:45.000 ft
range : 780m combat; 1440m max
weapons: 6 .50 cal MGs

ME-262A1:
Engines 2xJumo 004B 1984 lbst totaling 3968lbst , axial flow turbojet
(the axial-flow type performs better as air-speed and altitude increases)
max speed:
sea level : +/- 540 mph
20.000ft : 540 mph
climb rate: 1200m/min (3937 ft/min)
max ceiling: 37.729 ft
range : 650 m
weapons:
Me-262A1a : 4 MK-108 30mm cannon
Me-262A1a/U1 : 2 MK-103 30mm cannon, 2 MK-108, 2 MG-151 20mm
Me-262A-1b : 4 MK-108 , 24 R4/M 55mm rockets
(soon wold be armed with Ruhrstahl/Kramer X-4 wire guided AA missiles)

----
Has for the guns, Me-262s were flown by top german aces, like many P-52 pilots discovered, the Mk-108 cold kill a P-51 with just one shot at it.
And german pilots soon mastered that art.

The early version P-80 was regarded by pilots as a flying dead-trap, many good pilots, WW-II veterans died in it.
----
to finalize, if the war went on, the germans had far better machines than the Me-262 like the:
Ho-229 (607 mph, stealth, wold be armed with the X-4 missile +4 MK-108)
He-162 (562 mph, 2 MG 151, wold be armed with MK-108)
Focke-Wulf Ta-183 Huckebein (the planed replacement/complement for the Me-262)
speed: 596 mph (expected)
weapons : 4x MK-108
The war ended before initial flights but after the war this design was used in several contries:
russia : MIG-15
sweden: J29 Tunnan
Argentina: Kurt Tank's Pulqui II
all of them were far superior fighters.
The fact is, the germans lost the war because of Hitler megalomaniac ideias, not because they didn't had the "right stuff"
 
balburdio said:
The fact is, the germans lost the war because of Hitler megalomaniac ideias, not because they didn't had the "right stuff"

Agree - my point is the P-80 did improve and would of improved much quicker had the war lasted longer. All the mods that went into the "B" and "C" models were ready to be implemented in 1945, the government didn't want any disruption in the production line. Into the "C" models and into the T-33 the aircraft served well, it was reliable and easy to fly.

The statement that many pilots died while flying the early P-80 is not really true. We know about Bong and Tony LeVeir had a compressor wheel come apart on one he was flying, but the P-80 was no more deadly than any other early jet, it fact i believe it was more reliable. What killed pilots in early jets were the fact that they were hard to spool up (engine thrust) and hard to slow down. Many pilots (German, British and American) were killed during takeoff and landing because of this, you had to always be 30 seconds ahead of the aircraft as opposed to high performance WW2 piston engine aircraft
 
The Go-229 wasn't stealth. And the X-4 wouldn't be capable of anti-fighter duty, it's cable guided and the mother-ship has to be on a stable run for at least ten seconds before breaking away.
 
And the Ho-229 and Ta-183 stats are all well and good, but there was no fuel to power them or ammo to arm them. Ta-152's and He-162's were already experiencing this at the wars end and they were already in minor production.
 
Plus the Ta-183 and the Ho-229 are still speculation since they did not actually fly. The 229 flew as a glider but not under jet power. I personally believe the believed performance for these 2 aircraft to be reasonalbe and believable but we will never know.
 
Adler, the Go 229 did actually fly with jet power, it actually crashed because of engine flame out during landing approach. There are posts in other threads, I also remember to have posted pictures of the 229 taxying but I don't remember where ...
 
plan_D said:
The Go-229 wasn't stealth. And the X-4 wouldn't be capable of anti-fighter duty, it's cable guided and the mother-ship has to be on a stable run for at least ten seconds before breaking away.

Actualy it was, by then, almost ABSOLUTELY stealth!, since most WW2 radars were incapable of picking up things like birds.
And the radar cross section of the HO-229 was lower than the F-117 one(a much larger aircraft).

The plane was made of a special kind of plywood and covered with a radar absorbing paint (that suposedly state of the art technology is in fact old news, and like many other things it's a german WW2 invention).

Fightersweren't realy the main problem for germany. Alone they coldn't win no war. Bombers cold!
A transonic fighter JG armed with X-4 missiles cold wipe out an entire bomber formation before the fighter escort cold even react.

As for the 10 seconds rule, get real! The X-4 had a speed of 325m/s so in 10 seconds it cold travel 3250m, thats almost maximum range.
The only problem with the X-4 was the manual guidance, requiring a second crew member to operate the weapon. So only 2 seaters were adequate to use the weapon, the single seaters wold escort the bomber killers
 

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