Me-262, NOT Bell X-1 Broke SB First

Don't you just hate a guy who spoils a perfectly good argument by
dragging facts into it?

"White 9" deserves the credit, not "Glamorous Glennis"!

This seems complete nonsense to me.

The Germans did fly high-speed tests with the Me 262, of course.
The senior Me 262 test pilot, Zeigler, has described how they
climbed to 10.000 to 12.000 m, and then put the aircraft into
a steep full-throttle dive. At 7000 meter they would reach
950 km/h, close enough to Mach 1 at that altitude to produce a
deep rumble as the airflow detached, followed by a strong tendency
for the nose to drop and the aircraft to roll. The Me 262 then
entered an out-of-control dive until it had descended into the
denser air at low altitude. The dive achieved only Mach 0.86
at 5700 m.

It is also claimed that in July 1944 a modified Me 262 with a
low-drag canopy reached slightly over 1000 km/h at 10.000 m
in level flight, or Mach 0.92. But the type was firmly subsonic.
In service Me 262 were 'red-lined' to stay out of compressibility
problems, as they tended to become (quite unlike the XS-1 or
F-86) completely uncontrollable at high Mach numbers.

But the Me 262 actually had quite good decent aerodynamic
characteristics for transsonic flight compared to the Meteor,
which initially suffered from control problems already at
Mach 0.71 to 0.74, because the engine nacelles of the early
Meteors were too fat and disturbed the airflow.

Of the propeller fighters the Spitfire got closest to Mach 1
because its thin wing had less drag at such high speeds even than
the laminar flow wing of the Mustang. Tony Martindale reached
0.92, not without blowing up the gearing of the overspinning
propeller, and bringing back the aircraft without propeller.
There also is a claim that a weather reconnaissance PR.IX
reached 0.96 in an uncontrolled dive from high altitude over
Hong Kong.

During WWII there were claims to have achieved Mach 1 in
various fighters in dives, but most of these would have been
transsonic dives, with airflow over the aircraft only being
locally supersonic -- and airspeed indication probably
becoming very unreliable as a result. It is characteristic of
the true performance of these aircraft that when designers
decided to install Mach meters, these had scales ranging
only up to 0.8.

all the best -- Dan Ford
email: www.danford.net/letters.htm#9

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