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18 Markets & Products<br />
A legend flies again:<br />
The “Stormbird”Me 26<br />
A homecoming journey: <strong>Kuehne</strong> + <strong>Nagel</strong><br />
transports one of the <strong>world</strong>’s most famous<br />
aircraft, the Me 262 jet fighter.<br />
An icon of the air and a milestone of technology: the Messerschmitt<br />
Me 262 is one of the epoch-making developments in<br />
the history of flight. Already planned in 1939 by the brilliant<br />
aviation pioneer Willy Messerschmitt, the Me 262 became the<br />
<strong>world</strong>’s first jet aircraft to go into series production. A total of<br />
1,433 were built. With its revolutionary swept wings and jet<br />
engines, the Me 262 was substantially faster than any other<br />
plane in the <strong>world</strong> with a speed of 950 km/h. The design and<br />
configuration of this machine for the first time allowed flight<br />
at speeds in the high subsonic range. The basic arrangement<br />
of the Me 262, with engines suspended beneath its slightly<br />
swept wings, is still adopted in modern aircraft design, particularly<br />
in the freight and passenger sector.<br />
Today only a small number of original examples still exist, and<br />
none of them can be restored to an airworthy condition. This<br />
gave a team of aircraft enthusiasts from the USA the idea of<br />
building an airworthy reproduction of the Me 262.<br />
Not just a copy, but a replica that was identical in every detail<br />
with the original. They began tackling this project in 1993.<br />
<strong>Kuehne</strong> + <strong>Nagel</strong> transports the valuable Messerschmitt Me 262 jet<br />
fighter from the USA to Munich.<br />
An enormous challenge, for original parts were rare and the<br />
last surviving technical drawings were mostly incomplete.<br />
So the team set out to find an original Me 262 in a good state<br />
of preservation. Their search was successful, for in western<br />
Pennsylvania they tracked down one that had been in the possession<br />
of the US Navy for 50 years. The owners gave the team<br />
permission to restore this aircraft and to build exact replicas<br />
of it. A total of five fully airworthy examples have been built,<br />
and after this painstaking work of reproduction it is unlikely<br />
that another Me 262 will be constructed.<br />
<strong>Kuehne</strong> + <strong>Nagel</strong> World No. 1/2006
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