Talk:Messerschmitt Me 262

Unrealistic Aerial Victory Claims

The claims of aerial victories previosly mentioned in this article are outdated and at best unreliable. Initially cited was a book published in 1970, 50 years ago, well before scholarly debate on the topic had reached its height. The Luftwaffe was well known to over sell its aerial victories. When the ME-262 entered the war things were looking very grim for not just the Luftwaffe, but for Germany as a whole. The opportunity presented itself for pilots and for officials of the Luftwaffe to over state their successes at a point in time in the war in which hope was quickly dwindling. The claim of 542+ aerial victories is among the highest claims made and is not backed up by strong empirical evidence. Further work needs to be done on this article in order to make sure that a more reasonable number which is backed by contemporary sources is put in the article. Until that point this number should not find its way back into the article due to the laack of evidence supporting it and the circumstances that could have lead to its creation. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 17Cbake (talk • contribs) 22:57, 22 June 2020 (UTC)

I disagree. Numbers are not outdated. Unless there is an accepted, published work that includes contradictory numbers, the original numbers are fine. Age alone does not disqualify any published material. Neither does "scholarly debate" - whatever that means. What does scholarly debate have to do with overturning long-accepted stats? Does that mean if a couple of academics decide something is wrong, that everyone should then defer to their "new and improved" revision of history? No, I think not. We've seen quite enough revisionist history lately methinks. If you have a better, more credible source that contradicts the figures given, then please produce that evidence. If anything, contemporary sources are likely to be LESS reliable. After all, are we going to believe the people who were there at the time, or someone who has "studied" an event that happened long before they were born? There is no compelling evidence to believe that a recent revision is more accurate than the original numbers. 73.6.96.168 (talk) 22:10, 21 August 2020 (UTC)

Additionally, Luftwaffe numbers weren´t "well known to over sell (its) aerial victories." It was absolutely the opposite - no witness, no victory was the rule. It was the allies that fell flat on their nose with their overclaiming, eg the catastrophic attack on Schweinfurt in 1943, where the bombers´ gunners claimed a laughable 288 victories (that´s MORE than the number of defending german fighter planes involved! - actual number was 23...). 2003:DC:F734:700:D88D:A04C:D330:B2D4 (talk) 10:46, 18 August 2023 (UTC)

Since the 262s only operated regularly and in significant numbers for about the last 60 days of the war, and since even then the numbers were in the low dozens at a time, those victory claims look a bit on the high side. Not physically impossible, but... a bit on the high side. On The Hardest Day of the Battle of Britain, 18 August 1940, the RAF flew about 400 day-fighter sorties against the three major German raids and shot down about 70 of the attackers. Pro rata, the Germans would have had to put up 60 jet sorties a day, every day, scoring 10 kills a day, every day, for those 60 days of operations, to meet the total of victory claims made by the article. Did they? Did they really? Or was the 262, being an invincible Nazi superweapon, so superior that that startling result could be achieved with a much lower sortie rate? The 262's advantage was its high maximum speed, but it had to slow down to engage prop aircraft, and then it was vulnerable, particularly because its acceleration, as with all early jets, was very poor in comparison to prop fighters. In addition its armament, though heavy, was short-ranged, allowing the pilot next to no firing time before he had to break away to avoid collision with the target. And Dr Alfred Price, in Late Mark Spitfire Aces 1942-1945, Osprey, Oxford, 1995, ISBN 1 85532 575 6, p.71, remarks, 'Allied fighters shot down an average of more than two German jet fighters for every Allied fighter or bomber destroyed by the jets.' So the 262 had a kill-to-loss ratio of about 0.5 to 1. (The Spitfire XIV had a kill-to-loss ratio of about 20 to 1.) Khamba Tendal (talk) 17:16, 18 March 2021 (UTC)

I call b/s on that, and cite Adolf Galland: "Verteilt sie unter den Armen", when there downed allied planes without claims. (Literally translated: "Distribute them among the poor" - second (derogative) meaning: "Smear it under your armpits!", meaning "I don´t give a ****!".) Go figure. 2003:DC:F734:700:D88D:A04C:D330:B2D4 (talk) 10:46, 18 August 2023 (UTC)

German fighter pilots at that time were no exception to the general rule of massive overclaims. On 15 August 1940 the RAF claimed 185 German aircraft, against an actual loss of 75. The Germans claimed 111 British aircraft, against an actual loss of 34. Khamba Tendal (talk) 18:16, 20 November 2023 (UTC)

Meteor

User:BilCat reverted me saying "it's the second jet fighter, and first allied one, so naturally itll.be compared"

I think that's a pretty weak argument for reverting my change that was well explained without going to the talk page or contacting me. There are several problems with that. One is the fact it was second is irrelevant, another is most readers of that page will have never even heard of the Gloster even if they are relatively well versed in the air war over Europe because it makes no contribution at all. There's no combat footage and no combat stories. Another is that it looks like it was tagged on to the sentence that was trying to make the point that the 262 was faster and outgunned the fighters that it actually faced in combat which doesn't include the Gloster.

"The Me 262 was faster and more heavily armed than any Allied fighter, including the British jet-powered Gloster Meteor."

Does a "fighter" that doesn't fight deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as the legendary Me 262? The Gloster Meteor was a fighter in name only. It was not used in air to air combat at all. It has no air-to-air combat kills. It saw no combat over Europe and would never have seen a ME262. In fact, flying the aircraft over the continent was forbidden because they didn't want one falling into German hands. It no more deserves mention than the Bell P-59 Airacomet or the Lockheed P-80 Shooting Star which were both operational and deployed but never saw combat. When I read the article and saw it mentioned I thought "Gloster,? what's that doing here?" so I ended up in the British national archives looking at Gloster squadron daily reports. I was not used as a combat aircraft. The same can be said for the P-59 and P-80. It's an interesting side note that they destroyed maybe a dozen buzz bombs include some where the pilot used his wingtip vortices to upset the airflow over the wingtip of the bomb and spun them out of control. But that is not air-to-air combat. They trained for combat but didn't do any, not even over England. I find no evidence they shot down a single piloted aircraft. What is the argument for including it? The point being made on the page was that the 262 was faster and more heavily armed than any allied fight that it faced in combat. That did not include the Gloster. Jackhammer111 (talk) 22:13, 6 September 2021 (UTC)

I think you're reading far too much into what is just a general statement in the lead section, which is about Allied fighters in general, not just those it faced in combat. If you want to change the statement to say that, then propose doing that, along with reliable sources. You seem to have some objection to even mentioning the Meteor, or "Gloster" as you call it. The Meteor, unlike the Me 262, went on to have a long and relatively successful career with the RAF, and was also exported to several countries. So the fact that it was the first Allied jet fighter of the war is important to note, whether or not it ever faced the Me 262 in combat. BilCat (talk) 22:24, 6 September 2021 (UTC)

The Meteor was operational in Belgium. 88.98.205.213 (talk) 22:55, 28 October 2023 (UTC)

The Meteor was in Belgium and Holland, hoping the 262s would attack them. They destroyed 46 planes on the ground.

The Meteor was too advanced to allow the Germans to get hold of a crashed plane on their territory. 88.98.205.213 (talk) 23:04, 28 October 2023 (UTC)

It is not important to note here. You're not reading enough into it. The page and its lead are NOT about Allied fighters in general, it is about the ME262 in particular. I'm pointing out the glaring lack of relevance. It is no more relevant as a combat fighter than the P-59 and P-80. I'd be making the same argument if someone had tagged them onto that sentence. I don't object to mention of the Meteor, I object to it being mention here. This is not a page about the Meteor. It is notable as the first but f you want to note it put it on the Gloster Meteor page or put it somewhere other than the lead on the 262 pages. "The Meteor, unlike the Me 262, went on to have a long and relatively successful career". Unlike the Me 262? Seriously? That is an absurd thing to say. It did not have a long career as an air-to-air combat fighter but even if it did that doesn't make it relevant here. It is not a comparable aircraft. No combat in WWII and here is the first encounter of Meteors with Mig 15s in Korea. " 1 December (1951 )when twelve Meteors were engaged by over fifty MiG 15s over Pyongyang. For the destruction of one MiG, the squadron lost three Meteors with a further two damaged. This encounter highlighted the MiG's superiority in aerial combat, and as a result, the Meteors were confined to ground attack operations." In WWII it was not a fighter. That's what is relevant here.

https://www.airforce.gov.au/sites/default/files/minisite/static/7522/RAAFmuseum/research/units/77sqn.htm

Jackhammer111 (talk) 19:51, 8 September 2021 (UTC)

The article mentions the Meteor several times in its main text, this is because reliable sources on the Me 262 also tend to mention the Meteor. The lead of the article is a summary of the main body, so it naturally briefly mentions the Meteor. This is how Wikipedia works - it reflects what is in reliable sources. (Hohum ^@) 02:54, 10 September 2021 (UTC)

No, it does not get mentioned several times in the text. It gets mentioned twice in the body and I can understand the relevance there especially in the second mention in the body about post-war testing which goes on to mention the Lockheed shooting star. That is different than putting it in the lead. Obviously, everything that's mentioned in the article doesn't get mentioned in the lead anyway So there's nothing natural about it. I have been editing for 15 years so I don't need to be told how Wikipedia works. The obvious and Central point being made in the lead is that it was faster and more well-armed than any of the planes that it flew against in combat and was a dangerous aircraft that could have had serious consequences had it been developed earlier in the war. The Gloster jet was not an aircraft of consequence. It's like a false equivalency to be mentioning it in the same sentence in the lead as the 262. It did not fly against the Gloster meteor in combat, it flew against propeller-driven aircraft. The planes never met each other in the air so tell me again why it should be in the lead. Nobody yet has made that argument. The citation that comes after that line is to a book that's merely a directory of aircraft. So using that as a source you could also include two United States jet fighters that never saw air-to-air combat. Certainly, you wouldn't want me to do that to the lead just to prove a point. In fact, that would be so absurd that it makes my point for me. The Source in the lead merely proves that the aircraft existed. I'm still waiting you're somebody to argue why it belongs there. It did not shoot down a single German-manned aircraft. Jackhammer111 (talk) 21:39, 18 September 2021 (UTC)

It has has been pointed out why, multiple times, by different people. (Hohum ^@) 02:20, 19 September 2021 (UTC)

You Jackhammer111 (talk) 19:23, 17 March 2022 (UTC)

The Meteor is naturally mentioned as a comparator because it was the only other jet fighter to see operational service during the war, and indeed entered regular squadron service in late July 1944, shooting down enemy cruise missiles that August, while the 262 did not reach regular operational status until 1945 (serving only with a trials unit in 1944, and notably failing in its primary assigned task, to shoot down an RAF reconnaissance Mosquito). The Meteor and the 262 never met in combat for several reasons: only one squadron of Meteors was deployed to the Continent, they were forbidden to fly over enemy territory for the first few weeks and Me262s were by then tasked almost exclusively to intercept American day-bomber formations, which Meteors did not escort. By that time, Allied fighters not engaged in bomber escort seldom encountered German fighters. It did happen on the odd occasion, and RAF Tempests and Spitfire XIVs did destroy German jets, but it never happened to the Meteors, which like the Tempests and Spit XIVs were assigned to 'armed reconnaissance' at low level and mostly involved in ground attack. Ground attack was the principal task of Allied fighters at the time, since the Luftwaffe was a shrivelled husk and did not do very much except harass American bomber formations to remarkably little effect. The Meteor is not comparable to the P-59 or P-80 since neither of those machines saw service in the theatre of operations during the war. The Meteor and the 262 were the only jet fighters to achieve this, the Me163 being a rocket and the Ar234 being a bomber and reconnaissance aircraft. Khamba Tendal (talk) 19:27, 20 November 2022 (UTC)

1. Operational is when the plane has a trained ground and flight crews, with spare parts and ready to be deployed anywhere. The 262 was with a testing unit until Nov 1944. The first operational jet plane was the Meteor by a number of months.
2. The 262 did not shoot down a Meteor in July 1944. The Meteor landed in Italy. A fuselage door was blown off in a quick evasive action that was all.
3. The Meteor at the war's end was faster than the 262 with improved engines.
4. The Meteor was flying operationally until the 1980s/ Still flying today by Martin Baker.
5. After WW2 no one took up the 262s design which was based on a 1938 propeller air-frame.
6. The Meteor was an all new air-frame for jet engines - forward pilot position, high tail so as not to obstruct jet thrust flow, tricycle landing gear, etc.
7. This article is full of overt errors, written by fanboys.

88.98.205.213 (talk) 22:51, 28 October 2023 (UTC)

If you have WP:Reliable sources to back all that up, then you can fix it. (Hohum ^@) 22:56, 28 October 2023 (UTC)

Well, the article's claim, under 'Introduction', that the 262 'could accelerate to speeds over 530mph, about 93mph faster than any Allied fighter in the European Theater of Operations' is cited to an American source and only in fact applies to US fighters, specifically the P-51 at 437mph (the British Spitfire XIV being about 10mph faster), while the Meteor F.3 operational with 616 Squadron RAF on the Continent from March 1945 was tested to 493mph at 30,000ft (William Green, War Planes of the Second World War: Fighters, Vol.II, Macdonald, London, 1961, ISBN 356 01446 0, p.56). This is fairly academic, since the Meteor and the 262 never met in combat, but still. The Meteor went on to set two world speed records of 606mph and 616 mph just after the war, while flight test (and bitter German experience) had established that any 262 attempting to go anywhere near that sort of speed would suffer a fatal rearward shift of the centre of pressure, putting the aircraft into an irrecoverable nose-dive, which is why so many 262 pilots died in crashes. The 262's airframe had severe high-Mach problems and its critical limit appears to have been inferior to the Spitfire's. (Spitfire PR XI PL827 was regularly and safely dived to Mach 0.85. PR XI EN409 achieved Mach 0.92. As the article notes, Messerschmitt was aware that the 262 could not reach Mach 0.86 and survive, and nor could its pilot.)

Additionally, the article's claim, in the lede, that the 262 influenced the design of the F-86, the MiG-15 and the B-47 is again odd, since a mere glance at the respective aircraft shows that they were swept-wing, which the 262 was not (its mild degree of sweep, done purely for centre-of-gravity reasons, does not amount to a swept-wing design). And the Soviet jet had a British-designed centrifugal engine (the Rolls-Royce Nene, reverse-engineered by the Russians), while the axial engines of the US types derived from the British Metrovick engine and not the German pattern.

The article isn't altogether bad, but it does suffer from the problem that the 262, because of its stylish appearance and its association with the Third Reich, has become a cult object which attracts fanboi claims. Khamba Tendal (talk) 19:12, 20 November 2023 (UTC)

Reference to "nose wheel" is nonsensical

This passage under "Test flights":

Its only major deficiency was that brakes could not be used until the nose wheel had touched down, because engaging them before would smash the nose wheel strongly into the runway, potentially destroying the nose wheel and even the aircraft.

Elsewhere (and just looking at the photos) the aircraft is described as using conventional landing gear, which does not have a nose wheel (such aircraft have, as pictured, a TAIL wheel). It sounds like applying the breaks too early could lead to the nose of the plane crashing into the runway, but no nosewheel would be involved in such a situation, as no nose wheel exists. I think this paragraph needs to be completely rewritten, but I'm not an authority on this. Kswoll (talk) 13:15, 27 November 2023 (UTC)

The first few prototypes had conventional (tailwheel) landing gear, later revised to tricycle gear for production aircraft. The first paragraph in the 'test flights' section is at minimum therefore misplaced, in that it seems not to be referring to test flights at all. The reference to smashing the nosewheel clearly applies to later aircraft, is out of chronological sequence, and probably belongs at the end of the section, or elsewhere. And given that the paragraph is based solely on a single primary source - the debriefing of Luftwaffe test pilot Hans Fey - we should probably make it clearer that it is all his subjective opinion, rather than an authoritative independent assessment. AndyTheGrump (talk) 13:38, 27 November 2023 (UTC)

Looking into this further, I've removed the paragraph detailing Englander's debriefing of Fay entirely, for now at least. Not only was the paragraph out of place chronologically, but the way it was worded was misleading - describing it as "a report by Major Ernst Englander", rather than what is actually was: a debriefing of a Messerschmitt test pilot, Hans Fay. The comments on the attributes of the Me 262 are Fay's, not Englander's. And even if we take the source as legitimate (which it most likely is, though I'd rather see an alternative source for what is clearly a transcription - preferably one that actually stated where the original could be located) it is very much primary, and originates in circumstances where objectivity might very well be called into question. As I understand it, the general practice amongst the allies when interviewing POWs was to record what they said more or less verbatim, rather than immediately analyse it for veracity - intelligence was collated later, through cross-checking of sources. Accordingly, I don't think we should be using this debriefing in the manner it has been in this article - as an objective report on the handling of the Me 262. Such commentary is better left to secondary sources, and if we decide to include Fay's opinions at all, make the circumstances under which he expressed them clearer. AndyTheGrump (talk) 22:01, 30 November 2023 (UTC)

Projekt 1065 Gratz

Why does the link in the origins section link to a YA author? 2600:1702:4B05:800:5575:827B:FABB:50EC (talk) 02:42, 5 January 2024 (UTC)

Have removed it as an unlikely confusion. Nimbus (Cumulus nimbus floats by) 11:26, 18 January 2024 (UTC)