Sunday Aircraft Cheesecake (Me 262)
The first jet fighter in history to see battle, the Messerschmitt Me-262:
The Me-262 Project is a private effort to create reproductions of this historic and beautiful aircraft. Interesting to me, much of the initial work was done in Fort Worth, Texas, just about an hour and a half southwest of here. Here's a picture of one of their creations in flight:
Update: The Country Pundit wrote a nice piece about this airplane, with more detail and history than I typically use in these kinds of posts.
Oh, the 262 is always a good choice for cheesecake. It's just an attractive design, even with podded engines. Good thing for us that the guns weren't very useful for anything other than shooting at non-maneuvering bombers.
Didn't some German ace (Nowotny?) get a couple of air-to-air kills against USAAF fighters? I can't run it down on the Internet, but I'm almost certain that it was mentioned as a "despite its design" fact. Something was wrong with the overall aircraft for dogfighting, whether it be the picky engines, the fat wing, or the slow ROF & light ammunition load for the guns.
Posted by: The Country Pundit at June 20, 2005 09:48 PM