Wolfgang Späte also commented on the dangers of losing an engine in combat, as stated in his own book, Top Secret Bird, when referring to the Me 262 and the Jumo 004 engines: “Frequently, after an Me 262 hit an enemy aircraft and flew through the wreckage, an engine would flame out because of damage to the compressor. In that situation, there was nothing else for the Me 262 pilot to do except to break off the engagement and head home. Then the pilot had to make sure that he didn’t meet up with a Mustang or Thunderbolt.
“Under those conditions, they were faster and more maneuverable than the 262 and were definitely not going to let such a fat target get away from them. Not even Nowotny was able to make it out of a similar situation. He had an engine flameout after he shot down another airplane. Because he was no longer fast enough and maneuverable enough, he was shot down by one of the escort fighters.”{7}
Galland stated his opinions on this issue regarding the engines, as related in Morgan: “A disadvantage of the powerplants was that they were not reliable. My JV-44 jets accumulated only twelve hours and twenty minutes between engine changes. This was a very short time when one considers that engines of today last up to 40,000 hours. Often we took a new engine out of its packing case, fitted it onto the wing and in the test run it suffered a massive mechanical failure of some sort. [Authors’ note: These were engines produced after April 5, 1945, and the reason was the loss of available metals for alloy use, such as nickel and chromium, among other factors.]
“The powerplant needed much more development and testing time, which we didn’t have, and we were also very short of high grade steel, crucial for their manufacture. The engines were very sensitive to acceleration and power settings, and by the end of the war, there had been a device developed and fitted for automatic acceleration.
“This meant that we could handle the throttle as we wanted—a device, therefore, that made progressive power setting by itself, rather than the pilot having to do it. There was no question that the engines stalled quite often, and needed considerably more thrust. We also had another advantage that is not commonly known. In the control stick, we had two gears. One gear for takeoff and general movements and another gear, which was very sensitive for flying at high speed. Naturally we didn’t have ‘fly-by-wire’ at this time, and everything had to be done mechanically.”{8}
Despite these advances in speed and firepower regarding the engines and the previous comments, certain reliability problems remained—but the Luftwaffe needed the jets immediately. During September 1944, engine production allowed the Luftwaffe to receive ninety Me 262s. These were divided among the newly established Kommando Nowotny, Ekdo 262, Kommando Schenck, Kommando Stamp, KG-51, and KG-54. Active combat testing was the litmus test required to ensure the quality of the product.
This activity, while not fully endorsed or even looked upon favorably by the Reichsluftfahrtministerium (RLM), did pique the interest of other noteworthy people, not the least of which was Adolf Hitler. While Messerschmitt and Heinkel had both worked on their designs, Hans A. Mauch became head of rocket development at the RLM on April 15, 1938. He quickly increased his responsibilities to emphasize turbojet development, working with an experimental department under Helmut Schelp of the RLM research branch. By mid-1938, they had established a functional, comprehensive program of jet engine development that incorporated turbojet and turboprop projects.
One would think that they had plenty of time to produce a largely error-free powerplant ready for mass production with spare parts and trained personnel long before 1944. A plausible argument is that if the politics had been kept out of the science, Germany would have fielded the Me 262 easily by 1943, if not even in 1942, during the halcyon days of victory when materials were abundant, the leadership of the Third Reich was more compliant, and Hitler was in a much better mood and less affected by his drug use.
With Hitler’s quiet support, seconded by the ever-compliant Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess (until his defection to Britain in May 1941) and also supported by Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, who took over the position as de facto second in command from 1941 forward, to their credit, the jet program silenced most of the critics in the Luftwaffe hierarchy, including Generaloberst Hans Jeschonnek.
According to Adolf Galland: “Jeschonnek’s opposition was only due to the costs involved at the expense of building more conventional aircraft for the war. Unlike many others, he was not opposed to new technology, just the opposite; he just wanted to make sure other areas of critical interest did not suffer as a result. I think that this was just one of many reasons he decided to commit suicide later, as he and Göring were constantly at odds. Erhard Milch, on the other hand, was a fanatical supporter of the new aviation sciences, as he was not so entrenched in the old ways. Ernst Udet was also a great supporter, although he and Milch had a parting of the ways shortly after the war started, much of this having to do with the development of jet aircraft.”{9}
Another reason for the halfhearted support for the “new sciences,” as mentioned by Galland, was the long period of delays from design to production to delivery. Laymen like Hitler could not comprehend the groundbreaking and revolutionary scientific barriers that had to be overcome. It had taken two decades for piston-powered aircraft to reach 400 miles per hour from only 120 miles per hour in World War I due to better engine technology and airframe designs. German scientists (and also the British working on the Gloster Meteor jet at the same time) were on the verge of breaking the speed of sound in level flight. They still had not even addressed the human factors, however, such as increased g forces upon pilots and pressurization of cockpits.
The lifesaving g suits so common today were over a decade away at this time. This was completely virgin territory. In fact, when the Allies collected all of the data captured from the Germans at the end of the war, it took them another five years to work out the issues of swept wing designs and an axial flow turbo jet that would be reliable and operational based upon the German research and development, which was years ahead of the Americans and British.
The first preproduction series was the Jumo 004A-0 (actually the 109-004A-015), which was the engine for the initial powered flight tests. The design team deciding against using the BMW engine, despite a successful test flight of the He 178 on August 27, 1939, using a von Ohain–designed single BMW engine centrally mounted within the fuselage. The end result was a successful five-minute flight, but in the final analysis it was determined that the airframe was not stable enough for the heavy engine. Heinkel would then design the more rugged H-280.
This early Jumo engine consistently failed due to overheating and cracking of the turbine’s fan blades, giving the Ohain BMW design a chance at being awarded the contract. German engineers tried to overcome the technical problems and worked on developing metals that were strong, light, and able to handle the extreme heat generated by the fuel. It was by all measures a frustrating process, as there were no previous benchmarks from which to review previous experiments. The engine development continued under the direction of Anselm Franz at the Otto-Mader-Werke, which had been involved with the project from the first days in 1939.
The reconstruction of the Jumo 004A for online production (with material upgrades) began in the summer of 1941. The first engines were completed and ready for production in early 1942. The engines for the Me 262 V1 eventually arrived from Spandau in November 1941, being the backup BMW 003 that produced 1,213 pounds of thrust. Fritz Wendel described his first flight at the controls with the BMW 003: