Messerschmitt Me 262 (1944): the first jet fighter

1944·870 km/h·1,430 (~300 fought)·2× Jumo 004B turbojets, 8.8 kN each·1,050 km·11,450 m

· THE STORY

A glimpse of the next war

The Me 262 flew on its jets in July 1942 and fought from the autumn of 1944, and for the pilots who met it, it was a glimpse of the next war. Nothing with a propeller could catch it. Its engines were built from mild steel because Germany had no nickel to spare, and lasted ten to twenty-five hours; its pilots were few and its fuel was scarce; and Allied fighters learned to wait over its runways, where it was slow and helpless. Fourteen hundred were built and about three hundred fought. It changed nothing about how the war ended, and everything about what came after.

870 km/hTop speed1,430 (~300 fought)Built

· WHY IT MATTERED

Speed became a different game

A propeller loses its grip as its tips approach the speed of sound, which is why piston fighters stalled out at about 700 km/h no matter how much power they had. A turbojet has no such limit. The Me 262 cruised where a Mustang could only dive, and every fast aircraft since has followed it.

GO DEEPERThe Me 262 in the Aviation timeline →A jet engine without nickel →

· WHY IT MATTERED

Four cannon that emptied in eight seconds

Its four 30 mm MK 108 cannon fired about 14 kg of shells a second, six times a Mustang’s weight of fire, and a handful of hits would take a bomber apart. The shells were slow and the guns emptied in eight seconds, so pilots closed fast and fired late. Racks of R4M rockets, fired from outside the bombers’ gun range, were added in 1945.

GO DEEPERThe turbojet, the full demo →

· WHY IT MATTERED

Killed on the runway

A jet accelerates slowly, and the Jumo 004 flamed out or burned its turbine if the throttle was moved too fast. On take-off and landing the 262 could neither run nor turn, and Allied fighters loitered over its airfields to catch it there. Hitler’s order to make it a bomber delayed its debut by a few weeks; engines, fuel and pilots were the real limits.

· THE ENGINE

A turbojet made of the wrong metal

The Jumo 004 was the first axial-flow turbojet in production, the layout nearly every jet engine has used since. Its prototypes used nickel, cobalt and molybdenum that the blockade had cut off, so the production engine replaced them with aluminium-coated mild steel and hollow turbine blades folded from a chromium-manganese sheet and cooled with air bled from the compressor. It took 375 man-hours to build against 1,400 for a BMW 801 radial, and it lasted a working day. Move the throttle too quickly and it flamed out; move it faster and the turbine burned.

2× Junkers Jumo 004B · axial turbojet · 8-stage compressor, 6 combustors, 1-stage turbine · 8.8 kN each · 719 kg · 10–25 hours’ life

GO DEEPEROpen the full demo →

· WEAPONS AND SPECIALITY

Fourteen kilograms a second

The MK 108 was a short, cheap, blowback cannon firing a 330-gram mine shell at only 500 m/s: hopeless at long range, devastating close in. Four of them gave the Me 262 the heaviest armament of any fighter of the war, for as long as the ammunition lasted. Against bombers it worked. Against a Mustang that could turn inside it, the cannon rarely got the chance.

· TRY IT

Jet against propeller: thrust that does not fall with speed

The lab plots the thrust a propeller can deliver against speed — it falls as the aircraft goes faster — and the near-flat thrust of two Jumo 004s. Where the curves cross the drag of each aircraft is where the jet wins, and why it was so sluggish at take-off. The Jumo itself runs live on the Me 262’s Aviation-timeline page.

Readout

Weight of fire14.30 kg/s

Cannon share100 %

Seconds of fire8 s

Metal in this burst28.6 kg

Messerschmitt Me 262: the guns as carried on the main version; seconds of fire is the gun that runs dry first.