Jet aircraft in service earlier

[The Lone Centurion]

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 Lone Centurion]

The reason it took so long to get it operational was that Hitler kept interfering in the design process, demanding that it be built as a fighter-bomber. Goering was too weak to stand up to him. This was very fortunate for the Allies, because if it had been deployed in strength in 1943 it could have derailed the whole strategic bombing campaign.

 

[Tabac Iberez]

The reason it took so long to get it operational was that Hitler kept interfering in the design process, demanding that it be built as a fighter-bomber. Goering was too weak to stand up to him. This was very fortunate for the Allies, because if it had been deployed in strength in 1943 it could have derailed the whole strategic bombing campaign.

And the engines had this terrible habit of having tens of hours of run time, and the pilots had trouble doing launches and landings under the watchful eye of angry P-51 pilots, and they guzzled fuel, and a hundred other things that made them strategic garbage. For the price of eight -109s or -190s which could easily net you two hundred plus hours on the very reliable and simple engines, you could get one dual engined Frankenplen who's key feature is a tenancy to explode like a little bitch and who's pilots tended to have problematic habits developed by the atrocity that was the Jagdprogram and German pay scales for pilots.

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.

Yes, yes, four thirty millimeter gun, much whoop, many hollar. Great loadout unless you actually expected to get more than four or five passes out of the guns, since they only had about a thousand rounds apiece. The rockets, meanwhile, are a travesty and the minewerfer was a far better weapons system.

About 1,400 were built (mostly by slave labour in concentration camp factories),

So you want to find enough engines to run those? When each engine had ten to twenty five hours of flight time, you're looking at changing over engines every other sorted, presuming rookie pilots don't slam the throttle, overheat the combustion chamber, and melt the compressor turbines leading to a dead engine.

Practically your best bet is trying to advance the Gloister Meteor by moving production to America or bumping the Shooting Star up the priority queue. It doesn't matter if you have a thousand jet fighters if the enemy has ten thousand prop planes, because his planes work first time every time- yours cannot.