The Lone Centurion
Active member
- Location
- Deloraine, Tasmania, Australia
the background:
The Me-262, designed by Dr Waldemar Voigt and built by the Willy Messerschmitt company, was the world's first operational jet aircraft. (The first jet aircraft ever to fly was the Heinkel He-178, test-flown in August 1939, but it was never put into production.) The Me-262 first flew in April 1941 and went into service in April 1944. It was faster and more powerfully armed - with machine guns and rockets - than any Allied plane, and wrought havoc on the relatively slow-moving Allied bomber fleets. But it came into service too late have any real impact on the course of the war. About 1,400 were built (mostly by slave labour in concentration camp factories), but by 1945 operations were crippled by shortages of trained pilots and of jet fuel. There are 11 surviving Me-262s, several of them still flying. The one in the Australian War Memorial in Canberra is the only one still with its original German paint.
The Me-262, designed by Dr Waldemar Voigt and built by the Willy Messerschmitt company, was the world's first operational jet aircraft. (The first jet aircraft ever to fly was the Heinkel He-178, test-flown in August 1939, but it was never put into production.) The Me-262 first flew in April 1941 and went into service in April 1944. It was faster and more powerfully armed - with machine guns and rockets - than any Allied plane, and wrought havoc on the relatively slow-moving Allied bomber fleets. But it came into service too late have any real impact on the course of the war. About 1,400 were built (mostly by slave labour in concentration camp factories), but by 1945 operations were crippled by shortages of trained pilots and of jet fuel. There are 11 surviving Me-262s, several of them still flying. The one in the Australian War Memorial in Canberra is the only one still with its original German paint.