Timelines · Aviation · 5 of 9
The first operational jet fighter — 150 km/h faster than anything with a propeller.
1942·870 km/h·~1 050 km·2× Junkers Jumo 004B turbojets, 8.8 kN each·4× 30 mm cannon
· THE STORY
The Me 262 was the first jet aircraft to fight. Its two turbojets had no propellers to run out of breath at high speed, so it simply flew past every piston fighter of the war — Allied pilots’ only reliable counter was to catch it near its own runway. It arrived too late and too few to matter, but it made every propeller-driven fighter on Earth obsolete on the day it entered service.
· WHY IT MATTERED
A propeller loses its grip as blade tips approach the speed of sound, capping piston fighters near 700 km/h. The turbojet has no such limit — the Me 262 cruised where its enemies could only dive, and the entire future of fast flight followed it.
· WHY IT MATTERED
Its Jumo 004 engines ran with almost no nickel or chromium, using mild-steel blades with aluminium coatings. They lasted only 10–25 hours — but they proved axial-flow turbojets could be mass-produced, and the axial layout is how nearly every jet engine has been built since.
· WHY IT MATTERED
Its wings were swept 18.5° — originally to fix the centre of gravity, but the aircraft flew well enough near Mach 0.86 that it pointed straight at the swept-wing jets that followed. German sweep research surfaced after the war inside the F-86 and every fast jet since.
· TRY IT
This is the same interactive turbojet from the Jet Propulsion section, preset to 1944: a feeble compressor (pressure ratio ~3) and a turbine limited to about 1 050 K by wartime steel. Slide the Mach out and watch why even this crude jet beat every propeller — then raise the turbine temperature and see what better metallurgy was about to buy. The full demo below opens up the rest of the engine.