F-86 and sound barrier

It was the Luftwaffe that broke Mach 1 back in the closing days of
WW2.

Strange, no one in the Luftwaffe claimed it - unless you count everyone's
favorite oddball, Dr. Mutke - who also claims that the Me 262 he defected in is
actually *his* personal property!

Check out the Wright Patterson Official Manual on Flying the
Me-262 (circa 1946).

Have it. It has one paragraph that is open to the interpretation you prefer -
but they also had plenty of compressibility reports, tuck under events, and
other bits that told them something was happening at a bit over 1,000 kph.
Still, they never claimed to have broken Mach 1. Wind tunnel experiments and
pilot anecdotes show the airframe, more specifically, the engine nacelles and
wings, are incapable of exceeding .84. But if a single paragraph is enough to
convince you of a non-event, not much I can say that would change your mind.
Still, I think it speaks volumes that no one in Germany, officially or
unofficially, claimed to have exceeded Mach 1, until fifty years after the
"event". I accept that the postwar Pilot's Manual has a problematic mention of
transonic flight - that doesn't suggest how, when, or where such an event could
have, or did, occur. Even Messerschmitt made no such claim. My opinion, worth
as much as yours, is that engineers explained the many high speed crashes and
near-fatal events associated with compressibility as transonic events - by
1945-46, most test pilots and aeronautical engineers knew that the 'barrier'
was there and its no stretch to assume crashes, and near crashes, during very
high speed flight, were the result of teasing the barrier. Re-read the
paragraph with that info in mind, and its not so damning.

Or, do it my way and interview countless Me 262 pilots from fighter,
nightfighter, bomber, and test units, add in US and British test pilots, and
see if even ONE suggests that the Me 262 could power itself to Mach 1. It
can't, and nothing you can say will change that blunt-nose Jumo OO4B into a
transonic-capable engine. No air = no thrust = no possible transonic event,
unless you believe you can achieve it in a glider.

It says that the Me-262 can break the sound
barrier in a shallow dive. So either one of the captured 262s flown by
a US pilot broke Mach 1 or the information came from German sources in
1945.

....and German sources used wind tunnel data, not just pilot reports. Also, you
are leaving out the possibility that the "mystery Mach 1 aviator" was not a
Brit test pilot - who had more flights on captured German jets than we did.
Matters not - of the three RAF test pilots that I have talked to, none suggest
the Me 262 was capable of anything over Mach .84, dive or no dive.

Anyway, the official manual precedes Yeager's official flight-
fact.

That arcane reference mentions no date, circumstance, or method of proving its
single statement. As far as proof, one completely unsubstantiated comment is
rarely adequate to be considered "proof".

This has been gone over in minute detail by the guys at Stormbirds.com as well
as other Me 262 websites and Mutke's claim is not accepted by anyone that flew
with him, or flew the Me 262. His mates laugh at him, literally.


What does that tell you about how honest the USAF is and how
historically accurate aviation history is?

You paint with such a broad brush that its hard to see where to start with
correcting your claims. I'll stick with this one: you cannot show any proof
that an Me 262 broke the speed of sound, beyond that single note in a 60 year
old book that doesn't give enough information to check the comment in any way.
Tell me which German (or American) pilot took an Me 262 transonic? If you
can't, its just a really neat, but unproven, sea story. That doesn't count as
"historically accurate aviation history" either, does it?

Gordon