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**Bertie the Bunyip[_25_]** · February 9th 08, 05:50 PM posted to rec.aviation.piloting,rec.aviation.student

wrote in news:9c5876f7-3777-42ec-bb4e-882bc2bc0968
@j20g2000hsi.googlegroups.com:

Yeah, it was a Miles aircraft. The M-52
They got as far as a mockup but dropped the project. It had a
stabiliator and the brits are fond of whining that it was that
development on the X! that enabled it to break the sound barrier.
However, this was not a Brit innovation. As usual, the germans had
realised that in the thirtie, years before Miles..

Intersting -- do you know what aircraft the Germans used that on? If
you have a book reference (or web) on that I'd like to read about it.

I don't think the used it on anything, in fact. I'll have a look in my
books, though. Lippisch was horsing around with a big bag of tricks before
and during the war, but It was deltas he was mostly playing with in
regards to the sound barrier.
They pretty much had the principles of the whold speed of sound thing
figured out by the late thirites, but getting it all into one machine was
something else again. They understood sweep well and applied it extremely
well on the 262, for instance. They would almost have certainly broken it
in something by the end of 45 if the war had continued. Kelly johnson had
what would probably have been a successful supersonic aircraft on paper
fairly early in the war, but it was abandoned for some reason.

Sometimes it blows my mind how many advances were made in the
thirties. The ME 109, Spitfire, and P-38 all come out of that time.
Plus a host of others I probably know nothing about.

Yeah, it was an exciting period in aviation, no doubt about it. It's even
wilder to consider that guys like Lippisch were thinking of airplanes that
didn't appear until the sixties..

Bertie