Allied aircraft responded to the arrival of these amazing new jet aircraft by bombing the runways and factories where the planes were evident, and it was this relentless barrage coupled with a shortage of fuel that ensured that the Me-262, for all its technological sophistication and success in use, had limited impact on the course of the war. Nonetheless, the German designs went on to influence developments in the United States, notably the design of the Boeing B-47 and the North American F-86, better known as the Sabre jet, which was developed with the extensive involvement of German data from the war.
In Russia, work on jet engines had revived in the closing months of the war. From 1944 the Soviets had evidence of the British and German developments in jet engine design, and Lyulka was encouraged to try to improve them for use in Soviet aircraft. Starting in 1945 he constructed the first Soviet jet engine, the TR-1, which passed all the required tests successfully and went on to give rise to the engines which powered the highly successful MiG fighters. They were built by a company established in December 1939 by Artem Mikoyan, a young aviation designer from Sanahin, Armenia. Many of these Russian engines were copied from Junkers and BMW jet engines brought to Russia from Germany after the war. Then, in 1946, the new British Prime Minister Clement Attlee — keen to cement cordial relationships with the Soviet Union — arranged for an export of 40 Rolls-Royce Nene turbojet engines. It was hoped that further orders would follow, but instead the Russians simply copied the British design and constructed a pirated copy of the engine for use in the MiG-15. Rolls-Royce, with Government encouragement, sought to reclaim £207 million in license fees, but did not succeed.
These MiG-15 fighters, used later in the Korean War, proved to be superior to anything in the West. The MiG-29 is the fourth-generation MiG fighter aircraft designed in the Soviet Union and was developed from the earlier designs during the 1970s by the Mikoyan Company. This aircraft entered service with the Soviet Air Force in 1983 and it remains in use to the present day by the Russian Air Force and also in several other countries.
Hans Joachim Pabst von Ohain was brought to the United States in 1947 under the top-secret Operation Paperclip (see chapter 4). He joined the staff at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and in 1956 became Director of the Aeronautical Research Laboratory. In 1975 he was appointed to the role of Chief Scientist at the Aero Propulsion Laboratory. Ohain made innumerable contributions to American fuel technology and won many awards, including the United States Citation of Honor. Ohain eventually retired to Florida, where he died in 1998.
Meanwhile, in 1976, Whittle had divorced from his British wife Dorothy and he married an American woman, Hazel S. Hall. He emigrated to the United States and became the NAVAIR (Naval Air Systems Command) Research Professor at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. He later wrote a book entitled Gas Turbine Aero-Thermodynamics: With Special Reference to Aircraft Propulsion which appeared in 1981. He came to know Ohain, and the two often gave talks together. Ohain reportedly said that if the RAF had taken Whittle’s design seriously when it was originally submitted, there would have been no World War II at all. Sir Frank Whittle died in 1996 at his home in Columbia, Maryland.
Not all the secret aircraft were fast, large or impressive. Small and discreet aeroplanes also played their part. The Arado Ar-231 was an extremely lightweight seaplane that the Germans designed as a spotter plane and it was intended to be carried aboard the U-boat Type XI B. The plane was designed with light parasol wings and was powered by a 160hp (119kW) Hirth HM 501 inline engine. The plane weighed 2,200lb (1,000kg) and had a wingspan of just 33ft (10m). It could be folded down within 6 minutes and fitted inside a tubular casing measuring 6.7ft (2m) across. Although it was an ingenious little portable aircraft, it proved to be seriously underpowered, too light to handle and unstable in flight, even when the weather was calm. With small waves causing unsteadiness in the mother submarine, it proved near-impossible to fold up the wings and store the plane away. Six prototypes were built for testing purposes, but it was never used in the war.
Submarine commanders, however, knew that some means of carrying out reconnaissance was imperative. Current limitations were imposing severe restraints upon the U-boat campaigns. The distance of vision is severely restricted through a periscope, and some means of gaining height — as in the abandoned Ar-231 — conferred a considerable advantage. Accordingly, focus was directed instead to the notion of having an observer towed along underneath some kind of kite. This would not be just a conventional kite, either, but a superbly thought-out and well-designed kite with rotary wings.
The project was put to the designers at the Focke-Achgelis Flugzeugbau (a division of Weser Flugzeugwerke) of Hoykenkamp in Lower Saxony, who were experienced in helicopter production. Since helicopters had emerged in their present-day form in 1936, their production had become routine and companies like Focke-Achgelis Flugzeugbau were well equipped to tackle the problem. The Weser Flugzeugwerke were based at the Lloyd Building in Bremen, and they acted as the government contractors for the project; all development and manufacture, however, was carried out at Hoykenkamp. The result was the Focke-Achgelis Fa-330 gyroglider, an autogyro that could be tethered to the deck of a submarine at the end of a wire cable 500ft (150m) long. A minimum airflow of 20mph (32km/h) from the movement of the submarine caused the rotors to turn at about 200rpm, lifting the glider 400ft (120m) above the sea. The observer could spy out features up to 25 miles (40km) away, rather than being able to see just 5.5 nautical miles (10km) from the top of the submarine’s conning tower, and he could send back real-time reports by telephone. When observations were over, the Fa-330 was hauled down, the rotors stopped by means of a hub brake, and the craft stowed away in watertight compartments aft of the conning tower. This was not a simple task and could take 20–25 minutes in rough seas.
The Fa-330 was nicknamed the Bachstelge (Sandpiper) and 200 were built. These little gliders were successful in use, but were disappointing as agents of warfare. There was only one instance when a sinking resulted from their use — a Greek steamer in 1943. They also posed a problem for the submarines, for they could be detected by British radar and thus inadvertently reveal the location of the submarine. Pilots of the Fa-330 were sometimes forgotten about by the captain of the submarine, which suddenly dived leaving the pilot and his craft doused in the sea. It soon became routine for the pilot to call down the line ‘Haul me in!’ before announcing that an enemy ship had been sighted. In May 1944 one of these gyrogliders was captured and examined by the Allies. Experiments were carried out by the British, but the helicopter was seen as a higher priority and the little rotary glider was never used again. Design of the Rotachute, a British single-seat gyroglider, was undertaken by an expatriate Austrian designer, Raoul Hafner. The design was modified by Dr Igor Bensen after he had seen one of the German Fa-330 gliders, and the Benson design became popular. This original Rotachute was intended to be towed behind an aircraft, and was not ready until 1946; but Benson’s B-7 gyroglider was a success and later re-emerged as a sports craft. It is still popular with enthusiasts today.
The gyroglider was a form of aircraft similar to an autogyro — the essential difference being that the forward motion of an autogyro was provided by its own onboard propulsion system, whereas the gyroglider was towed by a moving vehicle. Autogyros were the invention of Juan de la Cierva, a Spanish engineer and flight enthusiast. His first successful design, the fourth with which he experimented (the C-4), flew in 1923. The aircraft had a forward propeller and engine with a rotor on a vertical mast. The C-19 was licensed to several overseas manufacturers, including Harold Pitcairn in the United States and Focke-Achgelis in Germany. Amelia Earhart flew a Pitcairn PCA-2 to a world-record altitude of 18,415ft (5,613m) in 1931.