What would have been the ultimate German jet fighter design to go into service?

[anetos05]

The Germans did have some interesting projects from the Emergency Fighter Program, but which would have served them the best if they had enough resources or time to get them in the air?

 

[GrauGeist]

Early on, the RLM should have recognized the potential of the jet program and backed it instead of treating it as a novelty and political football until the fortunes of war turned against them.
This would have seen the He280 available at a time that the Luftwaffe still had control of Europe's skies and an accelerated jet program ready to counter the Allies.

That being said, the jets would not have saved Germany from the same outcome, but would have most certainly changed the face of aerial warfare.

 

[Admiral Beez]

That being said, the jets would not have saved Germany from the same outcome, but would have most certainly changed the face of aerial warfare.

Agreed. I would have skipped the jet program and put those resources into guided SAMs and radar proximity AA shells.

 

[TM06]

The Germans did have some interesting projects from the Emergency Fighter Program, but which would have served them the best if they had enough resources or time to get them in the air?

As the others have mentioned, there were better things the Krauts could've spent their time on. But in the spirit of the thread, I'll try to give a satisfactory answer to the question anyways.

The frontrunning contender in my opinion would be the Messerschmitt P.1110, with the Focke-Wulf Ta 183 coming second and the Heinkel P.1079 coming third.
Compared to basically everything else in the EFP, the P.1110/I and /II look like actual airplanes (unlike whatever the hell Blohm & Voss were doing). Comparing it to the (theoretical) specs of the other EFP candidates, it does outperform the lot of them. And while I'm usually hesitant to accept specs for non-built aircraft from WW2 Germany, I do think that the P.1110 would be capable of reaching the slated performance claims. At the very least, I'm much more confident in it than almost anything else from the EFP. Granted, that's a bar so low you could trip over it, but it's something at least .

 

[Shortround6]

Agreed. I would have skipped the jet program and put those resources into guided SAMs and radar proximity AA shells.

And still wouldn't have worked.

Granted post war missiles had to faster and longer ranged and development slowed or stopped for a few years after WW II but it took until the 1950s to get working (more than test range firings) missiles. But the big problem was guidance, not propulsion. Getting missiles that were even 20-25% effective took a long, long time. Especially if you wanted missiles that could operate in clouds or darkness.

As far as proximity fuses go, the idea of a fuse that goes off near an airplane dates back to WW I. Sound or light was tried. A number of inventors tried in a number of nations.
For the US/British program there is some debate as to the cost of the whole program but most agree it was among the top 3 expensive programs of the war with the B-29 and the atomic bomb. Exact order is subject to debate. Does Germany have the resources to develop and deploy proximity fuses in very large quantities?
Putting a proximity fuse in a crude ground fired missile was one thing. Fuse is subject to a gentile launch, compared to being fired out of gun. The Missile rotates slowly, if at all compared to the over 60,000rpm (1000revs per second) of a 5in/38.
Getting a small radar transmitter and receiver to operate in such conditions was difficult. The US was happy when they reached a 50% success rate in testing and ordered production while still working on reliability which later got to around 80%. The next trick was getting the the fuse to act like a round of ammunition. Build it, Pack it, ship it, stow it and fire it up to 6 months later with zero maintenance. Early US fuses used dry cell batteries which did not have good shelf life in poor weather conditions.
Next step combined two/three things. One was getting the fuse small enough to fit in a 5in/127mm shell and still have room for explosive. Then they kept trying to shrink the fuse to fit in smaller shells, like 4.5/4.7 and then 4 in and then 3.7in. During this shrink process they found they could not shrink the dry cell battery and still have a number of months of shelf life.
So they came up with a wet cell battery in which the battery acid was held in it's own glass container which broke when fired and the battery acid was directed into the stack of plates in the battery. This battery was smaller for the same electrical power and allowed for smaller fuses. It also had a longer shelf life and improved reliability for shells in storage after a number of months.
The next aspect was building the fuses by the 10s of thousands if not hundreds of thousands (into the millions) which required a substantial industrial investment.

Shooting missiles at 200-250mph airplanes flying at 16-24,000ft is several orders of magnitude harder than hitting 400-600ft long ships doing 20-35mph at sea level (it can't dive or climb) so experience with air to surface missiles will be given scant credit.

 

[GrauGeist]

Bell Aircraft actually built copies of Messerschmitt's P.1101, designated X-5.

Their performance was impressive.

One was lost, however, during a 60° wing sweep setting test and entered an uncontrollable spin. The plane and pilot were lost.

 

[Geoffrey Sinclair]

The Bell X.5 was inspired by or based on the Messerschmitt P.1101

P.1101 variable sweep design, butterfly or standard tail. Smith and Kay note performance estimates of 550 mph at sea level and 609 mph at around 23,000 feet. The P.1101 specification at the Luftwaffe 1946 site give lengths of between 7.15 and 8.25 metres, Smith and Kay say 9.25 metres long. Prototype began construction in July 1944, then the completion of the P.1101 was considered impossible at the time thanks to the loss of design documents in France and the destruction of other information.

The X-5 was 10.16 metres long and 1,000 pounds heavier (even more if you remove the P.1101's armament), in round terms around 10% heavier, 10% longer, 33% higher and had a wingspan around 20% wider, unswept, the X-5 fuselage widens until around the trailing edge of the wings, and the P.1101 maximum fuselage width is around the wing leading edge. The X-5 could adjust sweep in the air but could not land if the wing sweep was greater than 40 degrees, versus the P1101 could only change the sweep on the ground. The US engine gave more thrust than the proposed German one, 2,900 versus 4,900 pounds. The X-5 achieved a top speed of 650 mph, though other figures have it at over 700 mph.

http://history.nasa.gov/monograph31.pdf

Goes for Mach 0.98, 705 mph.

 

[z42]

The Germans did have some interesting projects from the Emergency Fighter Program, but which would have served them the best if they had enough resources or time to get them in the air?

Seems many of the EFP competition entrants had some decidedly unconventional ideas. Which doesn't seem that wise given the pressure they were under at the time. So what would be the minimal KISS design?

• A sufficiently powerful engine so that you need only one. HeS 11 is probably the best bet.
• Given how picky early jet engine were wrt ingesting clean, as in non-turbulent, air, and the immaturity of jet inlet knowledge, a nose intake seems to be the safest option.
• Swept wing yes. But forget fancy stuff like variable sweep.

The SAAB 29 Tunnan is a good example of what could have been achieved. Some of the Ta 183 designs (there were apparently several, some quite different from each other ) seem fairly close to the Tunnan design, fwiw.

 

[KLS&C 85]

The biggest problem for Germany wasn't the best planes, but the number of high quality pilots to fly these planes.
Having superior airplanes doesn't do you any good if you don't have the number of experienced pilots to fly them.
Also Germany needed the fuel for the planes to get off of the ground.
In the end Germany was critically short of both quality pilots and fuel.
With that the quality and quantity of planes really didn't matter.

 

[GrauGeist]

A sufficiently powerful engine so that you need only one. HeS 11 is probably the best bet.

I would suggest the HeS30 (109-006) instead.

It's smaller, simpler design and it's superior thrust-to-weight ratio was far superior to any other 1st gen German jet engines and would have been ready for production around late '42 or early '43 if Heinkel was allowed to finish it's development.

 

[z42]

The biggest problem for Germany wasn't the best planes, but the number of high quality pilots to fly these planes.
Having superior airplanes doesn't do you any good if you don't have the number of experienced pilots to fly them.
Also Germany needed the fuel for the planes to get off of the ground.
In the end Germany was critically short of both quality pilots and fuel.
With that the quality and quantity of planes really didn't matter.

A superior plane, deployed in volume, could have greatly reduced the rate of attrition of the pilot corps. Similarly, superior planes might have made the spring 44 oil campaign and destruction of the LW untenable.

This of course doesn't change the basic arithmetic that, having failed to knock out the Soviets in 1941 and again in 1942, defeat was all but inevitable by, say, mid 1943.

 

[yulzari]

I would suggest the HeS30 (109-006) instead.

It's smaller, simpler design and it's superior thrust-to-weight ratio was far superior to any other 1st gen German jet engines and would have been ready for production around late '42 or early '43 if Heinkel was allowed to finish it's development.

Heinkel Jet engines

Here is little on there engine note on Von Ohain said 70% of the work on the o-11 was to have as little heat-resisting steel as possible.To do it they lost 1500lbs of thrust. from me and the net.

ww2aircraft.net

 

[pinehilljoe]

If the Germans had fielded jets earlier, its not hard to imagine the US throwing millions of dollars accelerating production of jets, like the P-80 or mass producing engines for the Meteor to field jets earlier.

 

[z42]

If the Germans had fielded jets earlier, its not hard to imagine the US throwing millions of dollars accelerating production of jets, like the P-80 or Meteor to field jets earlier.

Yes. Germany would still lose the war, but there might be a timeout for the allies to get their own jets in the air in volume.

And of course, it's not like Germany suddenly from one day to the next world switch over to a next generation fighter fleet based on jets, so the allies would have time to prepare their response.

 

[pinehilljoe]

Yes. Germany would still lose the war, but there might be a timeout for the allies to get their own jets in the air in volume.

And of course, it's not like Germany suddenly from one day to the next world switch over to a next generation fighter fleet based on jets, so the allies would have time to prepare their response.

yes, Jets would not save them from the Russian Army. Jets may have been a nuisance for Normandy but I don't think jets would have stopped Overlord.

 

[Admiral Beez]

Jets may have been a nuisance for Normandy but I don't think jets would have stopped Overlord.

You can't stop 2,500 landing craft, supported by 300 warships and 4,000 combat aircraft from landing 73,000 troops at Normandy with even all 1,400 Me 262s produced. But find two thousand Arado Ar 234 Blitz (that's 10x actual production) armed with Hs 293 or Fritz X and send them against the Allied LSTs and larger troopships, then jets might have had an impact on Normandy.

 

[Shortround6]

You can't stop 2,500 landing craft, supported by 300 warships and 4,000 combat aircraft from landing 73,000 troops at Normandy with even all 1,400 Me 262s produced. But find two thousand Arado Ar 234 Blitz (that's 10x actual production) armed with Hs 293 or Fritz X and send them against the Allied LSTs and larger troopships, then jets might have had an impact on Normandy.

This requires a whole bunch of things to go right for the Germans and several things to go wrong for the Allies.
1. Germans don't get any of the B series (ones with retractable gear instead of skids) flying until Mar 12,1944 Production line is not set up until end of June. First planes reach operational unit in the Autumn. It is not just producing 2000 planes, it is doing all of the R&D a number of months earlier in order to start building the production line/s many months earlier.
2. The Germans need new models of the Hs 293 or Fritz X missiles as the existing missiles won't work on the Ar 234.
2A. The existing missiles need an operator to steer the missile with a joy stick as it falls. Hard to do with a single seat plane, pilot uses an auto pilot to fly at a fixed speed/altitude and direction?
2B, the existing missiles cannot be used from very high speed aircraft as the operator has to maintain eye contact through the sight. Plane flies at a speed and gentle turns to keep the missile pretty much under the aircraft as it falls. Flying at over 400mph means that you out run the falling bomb (even with small rockets) and are trying to look behind the aircraft rather than pretty much down.
2C, Germans were working on different guidance systems but none went into operation during the war.
3. Assumes the Germans can sling either missile under the Ar 234B to begin with. While the max bombload is 1500kg that is one 500kg under the fuselage and one 500kg under each engine. Or one 1000kg under the fuselage or possible a 1400-1500kg store under the fuselage. Problem with the max bomb loads is that they cut into the fuel load, limiting range.
Max load also meant an long take-off run and while they had booster rockets, the weight of the booster rockets may also affect fuel load (max gross weight). Hs 293 is light but it is bulky with the rocket motor getting really interesting to carry nearly scrapping the runway.

Now for the Allies, we have to assume that the Germans do improve the guidance link at least some what and/or that the 3 levels of improvements made to the allied jamming equipment either never happened or the Germans managed to keep up with electronics.

Now maybe if the Germans had managed to get the Ar 234 with four BMW jet engines and a two seat cockpit and a new missile or maybe new guidance system into mass production in the Jan/Feb 1944 at the rate of 400-500 planes a month it might have worked.

 

[GrauGeist]

Historically:
He178 first flew 27 August 1939
Heinkel He280 first flew 22 September 1940
Gloster E.28/39 first flew 15 May 1941
Me262 first flew (with jet power) 18 July 1942
Bell P-59A first flew 1 October 1942
Gloster Meteor first flew 5 March 1943
Arado Ar234 first flew 30 July 1943
dH Vampire first flew 20 September 1943
Lockheed P-80 first flew 8 January 1944
Heinkel He162 first flew 6 December 1944
Horton Ho229 first flew 2 February 1945

 

[Nick Beale]

You can't stop 2,500 landing craft, supported by 300 warships and 4,000 combat aircraft from landing 73,000 troops at Normandy with even all 1,400 Me 262s produced. But find two thousand Arado Ar 234 Blitz (that's 10x actual production) armed with Hs 293 or Fritz X and send them against the Allied LSTs and larger troopships, then jets might have had an impact on Normandy.

There was too little ground clearance under an Ar 234 to carry those weapons and they would block the landing gear retraction. (Confirmed by German documents reproduced in Smith and Creek's "Arado Ar 234 Blitz"). Even the conventional SC 1000 was only supposed to be carried by experienced pilots. I have never seen a documented case of an Ar 234 B carrying bombs under the nacelles on an actual operation although the reconnaissance versions did use the hardpoints for droptanks.

 

[SaparotRob]

Historically:
He178 first flew 27 August 1939
Heinkel He280 first flew 22 September 1940
Gloster E.28/39 first flew 15 May 1941
Me262 first flew (with jet power) 18 July 1942
Bell P-59A first flew 1 October 1942
Gloster Meteor first flew 5 March 1943
Arado Ar234 first flew 30 July 1943
dH Vampire first flew 20 September 1943
Lockheed P-80 first flew 8 January 1944
Heinkel He162 first flew 6 December 1944
Horton Ho229 first flew 2 February 1945

It surprised me that the Airacomet flew before the Meteor.