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Just Flight - Romantic Wings - Luftwaffe Jet Age for MSFS 2020
Nels_Anderson posted an article in HN
/images/notams/notams22/roma0324/roma0324.jpgThis Romantic Wings collection for Microsoft Flight Simulatorprovides five different variants of the Messerschmitt Me 262, fourdifferent variants of the Heinkel He 162, an upgraded version ofPeenemünde airfield (EDCP), ships and other objects. All the included aircraft have been built to represent theirreal-world WWII counterparts as closely as possible. /images/notams/notams22/roma0324/1.jpgMe 262Me 262 Me 262 B1U1 Me 262 Lorin Me 262 V083 Me 262 V555 /images/notams/notams22/roma0324/2.jpgHeinkel He 162He 162 Spatz He 162 Type C He 162 Type D He 162 A10 /images/notams/notams22/roma0324/3.jpgPeenemünde (EDCP)Included in this pack is a modification of the existing MSFSrendition of Peenemünde airfield (EDCP). It extends playingcapabilities by creating new parking spots (Mil Combat 152 and 174),three ships and many WWII objects such as cars, aircraft, V1 and V2rockets and much more. /images/notams/notams22/roma0324/4.jpgShips And Other ObjectsThe main ships are the two cruisers 'Bismarck' and 'Prinz Eugen',as seen in the Baltic during the 'Rheinübung' exercise. They areescorted by a supply ship in the colors of the Hapag'. Other objects include aircraft (Ju 87, Ar 193), trucks, cars, V1,V2/A4 (static and launching), Tiger tanks and much more. Purchase Just Flight - Romantic Wings - Luftwaffe Jet Age for MSFS 2020 See other Just Flight aircraft for MSFS 2020 -
Great Airplanes 4: Messerschmitt 262 By Andrew Herd (12 January 2005) So far, all the classic planes we have covered have been available as part of a default FS2004 setup, but this month I am going to write about one that is best accessed in another sim - IL-2 Sturmovik Forgotten Battles - although versions for Flight Simulator do exist. The Me 262 might seem a strange choice because it wasn't the first jet powered plane to fly; nor, fortunately for the Allies, was it produced in particularly large numbers. Its development was cursed by troubles; production aircraft were unreliable enough that more were lost due to failures and pilot error than to enemy action; and it served in such small numbers that its debut barely affected the course of the war; but the Me 262 had a profound effect on the subsequent history of aviation. From the moment this twin engined jet first appeared in the skies of the Western front, the writing was on the wall for the piston engined fighter - as General Adolf Galland said of his first flight, 'It flew as if there was an angel pushing.' The history of the Me 262 goes back to October 1938, when Professor Messerschmitt gave the go ahead to his project team to undertake feasability studies on a single seat fighter powered by turbojets. The initial studies were encouraging - although fuel consumption meant that endurance was likely to be limited to 30 minutes, level speeds of over 500 mph seemed possible with the added attaction that the powerplant was as efficient at 20,000 feet as it was at sea level. This was radical thinking at a time when biplanes were still in front line use in all the major air forces. Studies were at an advanced stage by April 1941, when aerodynamicists noted during wind tunnel tests that a model whose leading edge was swept back 18 degrees had a higher limiting Mach number than one which had a straight wing; and incorporating 35 degrees of sweep back increased the limiting Mach number to an even greater extent. The decision to alter the Me 262 design to incorporate a swept wing might have altered the entire course of the war, had it not been for subsequent developments. Early in the war, planes flew at speeds in the order of 200 - 250 mph, their designs relying on the fact the air molecules move around an airframe in a predictible fashion because the density of the air remained constant. But the teams involved in the design of faster fighters were already having to deal with a difficult problem: as airspeed increases, physics dictates that some of the energy of the plane must go into compressing the air, which changes the air's density, and in turn alters the amount of resulting force on the plane. The closer the plane gets to the speed of sound (about 330 m/s or 700 mph), the more pronounced this effect becomes, until finally, shock waves are produced that have profound effects on both lift and drag. This phenomenon governs the limiting Mach number, restricting existing winged fighters to well below the speed of sound - and none of the Allied aerodynamicists knew how to get around it. Now at the start of the war it was widely known that compressibility effects could be limited to a certain extent by having the cross section of an aircraft change as smoothly as possible, but since piston aero engines had an unavoidably large frontal area, designers had focussed on building thinner wings. This was something of a mixed blessing, as a thin wing reduced high speed drag at the price of introducing other problems like flutter and control reversal and as a result, some of the faster piston engined fighters could only be recovered from high speed dives using the elevator trim tabs, if they could be recovered at all. To give some comparative figures: the straight winged Gloster Meteor jet had a limiting Mach number of 0.80; while the figure for the thin winged Spitfire and the swept winged Me 262 was closer to 0.83, the difference between the two being that the Spit could only achieve that sort of speed in a steep dive. As long ago as 1936, German aerodynamicists had discovered that effective wing thickness should be measured along the line of the airflow, rather than along the line of the chord. These findings had actually been published in a meeting in Italy well before the start of the war, but for some reason had not become known to Allied designers. Put simply, in an unswept wing, airflow and chord are coincident, making a thin wing essential in a high speed aircraft - but if the wing is swept back, a thicker wing effectively becomes a thin one as far as airflow is concerned, thanks to the way chord is measured. A designer who knew this could build a fast plane with a relatively thick wing that was strong enough to fly in the wave drag regime at or near the speed of sound. Messerschmitt knew. Once the wing planform was agreed, the airframe design went forward rapidly, but the promised engines were slow to appear. Part of the problem was that the Me 262 was powered by axial flow turbojets, rather than the simpler centrifugal flow units used by Frank Whittle in the UK. The attraction of axial flow was that it allowed the design of gas turbines with smaller frontal area, but the technical problems associated with designing engines that used up to seven stages of compression, running at up to 9000 rpm took a long while to solve. Despite Messerschmitt having a choice of engines from BMW or Junkers, production problems meant that deliveries trickled in and the company was still desperately short of supplies in early 1943. During this period, as the test flying program began, it was found that the airframe masked the elevators when the plane was in ground attitude, making it impossible to take off unless the pilot jabbed the brakes at the correct moment, a technique which positively invited a high speed somersault. The crude (but effective) solution of painting a white line across the runway at the braking point was adopted and this allowed the first flight under turbojet power to be made in July 1943, although the ultimate cure was to convert the Me 262 to tricycle gear. There then followed a series of military, political and organisational setbacks on an epic scale. In August 1943, the 8th Air Force bombed the Messerschmitt plant at Regensburg, killing 400 workers and destroying a large nuumber of production jigs. The plant had to be moved, while new personnel were sourced and trained. It was during the period that Hitler first spoke of using the Me 262 as a high speed bomber capable of striking at the British Isles. The conventional wisdom is that his decision fatefully delayed the full scale deployment of the Me 262 and materially influenced the course of the war, but although the extra design work needed did not help, it wasn't the whole story. Engines weren't available in adequate numbers until mid 1944, by which time the strategic bombing offensive had seriously derailed German aircraft production, which had to be widely dispersed to avoid its total destruction. Germany's transportation network was under similar stress and to make matters worse, fuel for the 262 was in increasingly short supply thanks to a combination of Soviet territorial gains and Allied bombing raids. Professor Messerschmitt himself didn't exactly help the situation, as he spent more time on the lost cause of the Me 209 than he did on the 262 - and as the Third Reich began its slow disintegration, political infighting took its toll on the program. The one person whose advice might have saved the situation was Adolf Galland, who consistently championed the cause of the Me 262 as a fighter, rationalising that its heavy cannon armament and high speed were the only solution to the high altitude daylight bombing offensive. But Galland was out of favour; Goring, his chief, was out of his depth as commander of Germany's air force, and when Me 262s did begin to roll off the production lines, it was a case of too little, too late. Luftwaffe testing had taught them that the 262's wide turning circle made it unsuitable for dogfighting conventional fighters and throttle lag made the conservation of momentum a priority. Nevertheless, the appearance of this advanced aircraft was a huge shock. Allied aviators reported encounters with the Me 262 in awed tones, but it wasn't that long before it was proved that shooting one down was possible, the trick being to catch the jet as it slowed in an evasive maneuver, or as the 262 was throttled back to avoid overhauling a target. The jet engines were relatively fragile and prone to quit after a few hits; the loss of one unit reducing the speed of the 262 to a level where a conventional fighter could easily catch it. Luftwaffe pilots knew to avoid tangling with Allied fighters and used their speed to escape, which meant that dogfighting opportunities were rare; the pragmatic solution being to stake out the jet bases with the aim of shooting the planes down during their approach or departure. This was something of a nightmare for 262 pilots, who were committed to land once they had closed the throttles and needed a stabilised approach to bleed speed off the plane. The German response was to protect bases with vast flak installations, which tied up entire AA regiments at a time when they were desperately needed elsewhere. Right at the beginning of this piece, I pointed out that the 262 program could hardly be considered a success - but nonetheless, this plane changed everything. The 262 might have been a box of tricks, but it was very fast, thanks to those swept wings. The British might have had the jet engine first, but Allied jets had straight wings which limited their speed due to compressibility - even when captured Me 262s became available in 1945, it took some time for realisation to dawn that the reason the Luftwaffe plane was so fast was because of that swept wing. German aerodynamicists had used the key which unlocked transonic and supersonic flight while their Allied counterparts were still arguing about whether such a thing was possible or not. As Galland's comment indicates, the Me 262 was a pilot's airplane that was docile in normal flight regimes with well harmonized controls and packing a terrific punch thanks to the four 30 mm cannon with which it was equipped. It was a stable gun platform at anything except the highest speeds, when it had a tendency to develop short amplitude snaking, a problem which Messerschmitt were still trying to solve when the war came to an end. At the same time, the 262 demanded to be flown and did not suffer fools gladly: jet pipe temperature had to be watched all the time; the single engine safety speed on takeoff was a daunting 180 mph; and opening the throttles too fast below 7000 rpm could cause compressor stall, with consequent loss of power and the risk of flame out - a particular problem on final, wise pilots making a steep approach, holding at least 6000 rpm until they were sure of making the threshold. This was probably fortunate for the Luftwaffe, because it kept the airspeed up and saved them from finding out about tip stall caused by spanwise flow on the Me 262's swept wing, a problem which would later plague the F-86. Single engine handling was not good and if an engine cut out at below 160 mph, the plane would roll into a tight diving turn, prevention of which required quick application of full opposite rudder and considerable back pressure on the stick. Apart from those swept wings, one of the reasons why the Me 262 still looks reasonably modern is that it has tricycle gear. It is true that the reason the 262 ended up being designed that way was because it solved the problem of how to get it to leave the ground, but the ground handling of the trigear was so much better that no pilot who flew one would have willingly gone back to the taildragger - and that set another precedent. After the Me 262, jets invariably had trigear. A feature where the Me 262 does differs from its fighter descendents is in its underslung engines. At the time of its design, podded engines were a desirable thing given the short TBO of the units available (about ten hours, with a life of no more than 25 hours) and short intake and exhaust ducts made the airframe that much simpler, but the price to be paid was that already unreliable engines were that much more vulnerable to ingesting ground debris and to sustaining battle damage. Fuselage mounted engines became the rule in subsequent jet fighters, not least because it kept the thrust and drag axes closely aligned, but modern passenger jets have adopted podded engines for much the same reasons as the Messerschmitt did - the arrangement frees up fuselage space and allows easy access for maintenance. Anyone who owns a copy of Forgotten Battles has an excellent Me 262 simulation at their disposal, but if you have the Ace Expansion Pack and Pacific Fighters, it is possible to pit the aircraft against more or less any plane that flew operationally during the Second World War. The visual model is excellent, the handling appears to be pretty good - the sim is a beast to land well - and gunnery appears to be fairly realistic, bar a tendency for the nose to pitch down on firing. A wide variety of addon skins for the Me 262 are available if you visit sites like Il2skins - using them is a simple matter of dragging them into the correct \Program Files\Ubi Soft\Il-2 Sturmovik Forgotten Battles\PaintSchemes\Skins folder and then loading them by left clicking the far right button when you select a plane to fly - if you have the skins in the correct folder they will appear in the relevant drop down dialog. I guess anyone who has the Battle Over Europe addon will already have tried their luck against high altitude B-17s in the Me109, FW190 and Ta152, but with the addition of the B-24 in Pacific Fighters, it becomes possible to fly the 262 against both American heavy bombers of the period and some interesting 'what-if' scenarios become possible. What would have happened if the Luftwaffe had had large numbers of 262s in June 1944? How would the invasion have fared? Would even heavily escorted daylight raids have stood up to concerted attacks by experienced pilots in massed 262 formations? And what would the result have been had jet against jet combat actually occurred in World War II? Historically, the only possible contact would have been between the Me 262 and the British Meteor, but the only Allied jet Maddox have chosen to supply is the YP-80. How would it have done? You get to decide... and just in case anyone thinks these planes might have lost their attraction, check this site out. Reading between the lines, it might shortly be possible to buy a new one. Just don't ask what they are likely to cost. Andrew Herd -
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