Those Jumo 004’s were more advanced than the metallurgical knowledge that went into the construction of their turbine blades. The result was they were as much a danger to their pilots as they were to the enemy and flame-out on take off was a real danger. Johannes Steinhoff was a handsome man before he flew the ME-262:
Even worse, the early 262s were tail draggers and the downward force from the jet engines on the horizontal stabilizer was so great that, in order to lift the tail to takeoff, the pilot had to stomp on the brakes during the takeoff run. Imagine how dangerous that was. They wisely changed to a tricycle landing gear for the production models.
That first ripped-up-ultralight pic…that’s courtesy of an unhappy brown bear. The podcast linked up there is pretty amusing if you’d like to know more.
I really admire the taping job. I can barely cut off a six-inch strip without the damn tape getting a fold in it. The bigger question is how many rolls of duct tape were required?
The lightning was such a mad machine. The days of “hey why don’t we stack the engines on top of one another and put the fuel bags on top of the wings, woudn’t that be great” are sadly over. It’s al min/maxed by computers these days.
I don’t know what sim it’s from. I tried and failed to find a shot from directly behind and not at angle. From directly behind you can see that the engines are not stacked exactly vertical. They’re longitudinally staggered by a few degrees with the vertical stabilizer exactly centered. Apparently this provided unimpeded airflow from the two engines stacked so close together…
Yeah the engines were staggered. Perhaps also to maintain center of gravity/center of thrust. Those things could move. If only for about 15 minutes lol. They gave F-15s a hard time when those were coming in.
This was the plane that nearly killed Chuck Yeager when it lost all control authority above 100,000 feet and tumbled out of the sky like a falling brick.
In 1984, I was on a school bike trip in West Germany. One afternoon the route went fairly near the inter-German border. I was cycling across a narrow valley when a German F-104 flew over at a couple of hundred feet going Mach 5000. I only had enough time to see the iron crosses on the fuselage and that it had Sidewinders on the wing tips. It was absolutely frightening.
