2
After joining the Bayerische Flugzeugwerke as a young management assistant in 1926, Rakan Peter Kokothaki worked his way up through the organisation to become eventually the Member for Finance and Marketing on the Messerschmitt AG board. In 1928 Willy Messerschmitt had moved his small aircraft building business from Bamberg to Augsburg, integrating it into the Bayerische Flugzeugwerke but retaining for his design offices a measure of autonomy from the larger firm. Kokothaki thus became an interested observer at first hand of Messerschmitt’s relentless lust for aircraft designing from 1928 onwards.
A year before the move, Messerschmitt had developed the M 20, a ten-seater commercial aircraft. Deutsche Lufthansa, controlled at the time by Erhard Milch, later to become Goering’s Luftwaffe Secretary of State, ordered ten of the machines. Appointed as test pilot for the maiden flight at Augsburg on 26 February 1928 was Hans Hackmack, Erhard Milch’s personal friend and pilot. The flight took a most tragic course. Hubert Bauer, then an assistant at the works, later a Messerschmitt AG board member of long standing, was a witness to the accident and described it thus:
The aircraft flew for a considerable time over the aerodrome and surrounding district without any problems. After about twenty minutes it came back over the airfield and through binoculars one could see something bright flapping at the trailing edge of a wing. Shortly we saw the pilot emerge from the door at the rear of the fuselage and jump. His parachute canopy began to deploy immediately and tangled into the aircraft so that Hackmack was left dangling by the parachute straps. While he struggled desperately to unsnag it by tugging on the shrouds and kicking out, the aircraft continued serenely in level flight for quite some time before eventually the nose dipped and dived into the ground. Hackmack was killed instantaneously.
The investigation reported that some fabric had come loose at the trailing edge and this was the flapping seen by witnesses. It was assumed that the pilot had mistaken it for a fire or believed that the wing had fractured. Nobody was directly responsible for the accident. Hans Hackmack had probably lost his nerve, perhaps mindful of a test flight a few weeks previously in which he had narrowly escaped death. According to the report there should have been no problem landing the M 20 safely.
That Milch was deeply affected by the death of his friend was obvious. He blamed nobody but reacted very emotionally at Messerschmitt’s disinterest in his personal loss. Messerschmitt did not even deign to attend the crash site. This coldness in Messerschmitt’s personality was one of the causes for the split in the relationship between them.
Nevertheless Milch ordered two modified M 20a aircraft after they had been test-flown and pronounced problem-free. They proved successful on operations and when an M20b version became available Lufthansa also ordered two of these. Both crashed, one with only the pilot aboard, but the other involved passenger deaths. Initially, Messerschmitt was accused of having built M 20b in breach of safety regulations but after examining both wrecks, the German Test Institute for Aviation (Deutsche Versuchsanstalt für Luftfahrt) rejected the accusations. The actual cause was put down to sudden turbulence. Little was known of this at the time although aeronautical scientists in Germany were studying the phenomenon.
Willy Messerschmitt – today an acknowledged pioneer of lightweight construction – spared weight wherever possible provided it did not contravene aircraft construction regulations. If the regulations themselves were inadequate, that was not his fault. The two M 20b accidents were thereafter always known as the ‘Turbulence Cases’. How widely known Messerschmitt had become for his successful lightweight airframes is exemplified by the following anecdote: The Academic Pilot Group (Akademische Fliegergruppe) Berlin had ordered from Augsburg the sporty M23. The Group’s leader, a Dr Leander, arrived at Augsburg to fly the aircraft to Berlin. Messerschmitt took this important client for a guided tour of the works and rounded off by asking if the customer had any request. ‘Yes,’ Leander said, ‘Show me how you scrape the wood off from beneath the varnish.’
The consequence of the three M 20 crashes was the cancellation of the Deutsche Lufthansa order. This meant administration for the Bayerische Flugzeugwerke. The negotiations were handled between Augsburg banker Friedrich Seider, an experienced liquidations administrator, and the BfW financial wizard Kokothaki, and lasted from 1931 until the Hitler government saved the firm with the first armaments contracts in 1933. Kokothaki despaired at the construction costs incurred from early on by Messerschmitt. Although the aircraft were outstanding, demand was slack. But Messerschmitt was not the only aircraft builder who paid scant heed to costs so long as others were going to be paying them.
During the Spanish Civil War another Messerschmitt design, the Bf 109 fighter, confirmed a superiority which had been self-evident for some time and in the summer of 1937 the Bf 109 left the aviation world in shocked silence. Dübendorf aerodrome near Zürich was the venue for an international flying tournament attended by entrants from France, Italy, Germany, Britain, Czechoslovakia and elsewhere. There were five competitions and the Bf 109 won all five. The machine flew and climbed faster than all its rivals. As a fighter it won the individual and team races. Never before had German aircraft even participated in an international competition. A few in the know might have been confident enough to place a bet on one or two victories. Europe was already bracing itself for war. To win all five races outright was almost a provocation. The Bf 108 Taifunfour-seater pleasure aircraft, and the Bf 109 fighter, his two excellent designs, elevated Willy Messerschmitt and his engineers, who numbered among the best in Germany, into the front rank of the world’s aircraft builders.
In the spring of 1938, they now faced a daunting task. Men who would later become household names in Germany – Lusser, Voigt, Degel, Hornung, Kaiser, Wackerle and Ludwig Bölkow, a young graduate engineer fresh from University who knew his subject, had talent and a store of ideas – wrestled at desk and drawing board with the mathematics and technical design of an aircraft which was certain to lead them into virgin territory. The problem confronting the team was to come up with something special in aircraft design. A machine to succeed the Bf 109 no less, and that was by no means going to be easy. Within a few months they had conceived project P 1065 for a twin-engined jet fighter. The files entitled ‘Me 262 – Pursuit Fighter’ were presented to the Reich Air Ministry on 7 June 1938. Six months afterwards, in December 1938, engineers and officials from the Ministry made their first inspection of the full-size mock-up. The contract for the construction of three experimental aircraft followed a little later.
Elsewhere a series of world records was now set and broken. On 11 November 1937 – shortly after Dübendorf – Dr Hermann Wurster, chief test pilot of the Bayerische Flugzeugwerke, the trade name of the Messerschmitt organisation, hence ‘Bf’, reached 611.004 kph in a souped-up Me 109E. The flight set a world record for land aircraft. On Whit Sunday 1938 the World War I fighter ace Ernst Udet flew at 634.73 kph over 100 kilometres at the controls of a Heinkel He 100, easily destroying the existing record of 554 kph held by the Italian Francesco Agello. On 30 March 1939 Hans Dieterle flying the Heinkel He 100 V8 set an absolute world speed record with 746.606 kph which Messerschmitt test pilot Fritz Wendel broke in turn on 26 April 1939 with 755.138 kph.
Wendel’s machine was not a souped-up Bf 109, from which it differed outwardly, but an aircraft designed specifically to set the world record, the Me 209 V1. It was shorter, had finer wings; the Bf 109 water-cooling system with its high frontal resistance had been replaced by a surface-mounted radiator and an evaporation device; the oil cooler was a circular intake set in the airstream behind the propeller. Seven litres of cooling water were consumed per minute. Propulsion was supplied by an 1,800 hp DB601 V10 12-cylinder liquid-cooled piston engine specially engineered by Daimler – Benz for record attempts and could manage 2,770 hp in a five-minute burst. The record was claimed at the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI) for an aircraft designated Me 109R to give the impression for propaganda purposes that a modified Me 109 had taken the world record. No effort was spared to protect the machine from the camera to maintain the deception.
The expression ‘the Me 109’ sounds more formidable and slips off the tongue more smoothly than ‘Bf 109’ and the Propaganda Ministry was quick to seize upon it. The deception was never corrected with the FAI and Fritz Wendel’s world record stood for thirty years. Even then only a few surpassed it. In 1939 Germany had four pilots who each held a world aviation speed record, and that in itself was a world record.
These achievements brought the piston engine to the zenith of its development. The four-stroke machine invented by Nikolaus August Otto could advance no further. And aircraft speeds could neither be increased by higher revs or a different design of spinner. To fly faster would only be possible powered by rockets or jet propulsion. In the endurance field, hardly 500 kph had been attained: even the Me 109 could not manage 400 kph in winning the competition over the set course at Dübendorf. The fastest propeller-driven aircraft of World War II were the twin-engined RAF Mosquito, and the German Dornier 335 ‘Pfeil’ with a propeller front and rear. These were capable of approaching 750kph in December 1944 and became the world’s fastest series-produced aircraft. But that was the dead end.
The first manufacturer to fly a jet aircraft successfully was Ernst Heinkel AG of Warnemünde, whose experimental rocket-propelled He 176 and jet-propelled He 178 made their maiden flights piloted by Erich Warsitz in the summer of 1939. Interested onlookers on the ground were Hitler, Goering and Ernst Udet, Minister for Aircraft Production and Supply, but with the impending invasion of Poland only weeks away decisions had to be postponed until such time as Warsaw had requested an armistice. The German High Command was sure that Britain and France would look the other way once more. Later in the war both aircraft went on show in the Berlin Aviation Museum and were eventually destroyed there in an air raid.
The successor to the He 178 was the twin-engined He 280 with He S 8A turbines each developing 700 kg thrust. First tested in 1942, Udet recognised the possibilities of the machine at once but his pleas for its adoption by the Luftwaffe fell on deaf ears. Seven months later he was dead and Milch, who took over his office, lacked his predecessor’s vision and felt that the development of the turbojet ‘with which the He 280 was first powered had enough bugs in it that the original flights of the jet fighter were made with the engines uncowled’ and was thus not sufficiently advanced for him to advocate it. In the event, although work was continued on the prototype, the aircraft fell prey to the 1940 edict that any development which would not be usable within six months was to be abandoned. This might not have stopped Professor Messerschmitt but it was certainly the end of the He 280, the aircraft for which the time was ripe.
Shortly before the outbreak of war, aeronautical engineers in Britain, France, Italy and the United States were considering jet-engine designs, but in development already they lagged far behind Germany. The Kiel-based firm of Hellmuth Walter supplied the 600kg-thrust rocket motor for the Heinkel He 176 and was developing a liquid fuel for the Alexander Lippisch-designed Me 163 rocket fighter. The jet engine for the He 178 had been built by engineer Dr Hans Pabst von Ohain while early work on jet turbines had been in hand since 1935 at BMW and the Junkers Motorenwerke (Jumo). Information regarding progress being made on building the new turbines came from BMW and Jumo in a steady flow and Messerschmitt was confident that his Me 262 prototypes would be ready for testing as soon as the turbines arrived and were fitted.
Since BMW led Junkers in the development race, Messerschmitt consulted chiefly with the Bavarian firm and calculated from the available data that the fighter could top 800 kph in level flight. This speed was hitherto only dreamed of but still sufficiently short of the sound barrier that the expected problems at Mach 1 need not be addressed.
There was an initial difference of opinion about where the two engines should be sited. For aerodynamic reasons, Messerschmitt himself wanted the two cigar-shaped turbines built into the wings. After his engineers explained the difficulties this would cause, such as poor accessibility for maintenance and repair, the large personnel requirement for engine changes and finally a much greater risk of the whole aircraft exploding if hit by enemy fire, Messerschmitt was persuaded to sling a turbine below each wing. This would allow a conventional piston engine to be fitted in the nose of the experimental prototype as a stand-by in the event of turbine failure. The wisdom of this precaution was to prove itself, although not quite in the way that had been anticipated.
By the outbreak of war in September 1939, German military aviation had been developed only to the stage where the Luftwaffe could control the airspace over the Reich and the territories adjacent to it. Until then, it had seemed improbable that Germany would be faced by a dangerous enemy or superior combined enemy forces in the air. Hitler had concluded a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union, the French air force was obsolete, the Polish air arm was small, obsolete and not independent of the Polish army, while Germany with 4,500 aircraft, some of them of the most modern design, led the field in Europe. The RAF at the time had a thousand fewer aircraft than the Luftwaffe.
The lightning victories over Poland and then France played their part in strengthening German confidence in the invincibility of the Wehrmacht and there were relatively few people, even among those in the know about certain adverse trends in Luftwaffe development, who took a less sanguine view. But even having disposed of the French, the German Luftwaffe was simply not strong enough for an air-war across the western European continent, particularly if pitted against the consequential and technically well-armed opponent which Great Britain was becoming. After an initial superiority the balance shifted to a parity between the fighter pilots of both sides during the Battle of Britain, but Germany lacked a modern heavy bomber able to penetrate far enough inland with a worthwhile payload even from airfields in northern France. And had such a bomber been available, no fighter existed with the range to provide aerial protection to, say, Liverpool or the Tyne and back. Early on, all hopes resided in the He 177 bomber. This machine was to prove itself a problem child of the first order. The trio of twin-engined bombers which formed the backbone of the German offensive against southern England were short-ranged and either troublesome mechanically, such as the Ju 88, or obsolete, as were the He 111 and Do 17: the Bf 110 ‘destroyer’ was too slow and had little value as a bomber. The mediocrity of the Bf 110 had been recognised by the Reich Air Ministry in 1939. Udet himself had asked Messerschmitt if he would be able to supply the Luftwaffe with 2,000 improved Bf 110s by October 1942. Messerschmitt said yes and got the contract. This meant that he was now turning out Germany’s principal fighter, and soon would be responsible for producing Germany’s principal light bomber, and after that the world’s first jet fighter.
By the beginning of 1941 – still without the jet turbines – the airframes of Me 262 prototypes V1, V2 and V3 were reported to the Ministry as ready for aerial testing. Since the manufacturers could not confirm a delivery date for the new turbines, Messerschmitt decided to fit a 750 hp Jumo 210G piston engine in the fuselage nose for the first test flights. Being portly, it was certainly a departure from the aerodynamic elegance of the shark-like hull, but it would serve its purpose and save time.
On the evening of 18 April 1941, Fritz Wendel, who had discharged himself from hospital against medical advice, climbed into the cockpit of Me 262 V1 and took off at 19:35 hrs. With its relatively weak engine, it was a close call to get the 2,660 kilos of machine into the air before arriving at the end of the 1,000-yard runway. In its first ascent and at altitude the new aircraft showed good flying qualities although the maximum 420 kph in level flight was only half its designed top speed. To see how the hull behaved at higher speeds, the aircraft had to be dived at a steep incline at full throttle repeatedly over the series of trials. On the first test, wing vibrations were observed at 540 kph. Twice previously flying other aircraft types Wendel had had to evacuate by parachute perilously close to the ground, but that was the risk a test pilot ran in the endeavour to find a new aircraft’s defects if it was to be recommended for series production. As the angle of dive became ever steeper, the starting altitude became progressively higher to allow the pilot more time to bale out in case of disaster. Wendel established that the dangerous vibrations fell away at higher speeds. This brought him a certain relief, but he was sure that later when the jet powerplants were fitted and provided much higher speeds, more unpleasant surprises would be bound to lie in wait. The flight characteristics of the new hull were not merely good, however; stability, the effectiveness of flaps, ailerons and rudder and performance at slow speed in particular were outstanding. Test flying the Me 262 airframe lasted the remainder of 1941.