Submarines and their Weapons - Aircraft of World War II

High Command that it had effectively missed the
boat, and that the jet and rocket-powered fighters
which were about to enter service would soon be ineffective
against a new generation of Allied aircraft
such as the B-29 Superfortress with its 11,000m
(36000ft) plus ceiling. Just before the end of the year,
Kneymeyer issued a specification for a new generation
fighter to all the principal producers, with the
stipulation that the aircraft should be powered by the
HeS Oil engine. Roughly, the performance parameters
were a top speed in-level flight of around
1000km/h (620mph) at 7000m (23,00()ft) and a ceiling
of 14,000m (45,900ft); it was to be armed with
fourMK 108 30mm cannon. By February 1945, three
proposals had been received from Messerschmitt, two
from Focke-Wulf and one each from Blohm & Voss,
Heinkel and Junkers. On the last day of the month, a
selection committee sat and chose Focke-Wulf's Project
T to go into development as the Ta 183.
THE FOCKE-WULF Ta 183
The two projects from Kurt Tank's design department
were the work of a man who has been described as the
most important aerodynamicist in Germany at the
time, Hans Multhopp. They were essentially similar
in character: a fuselage which was no more than a
shroud for the single engine, its intake duct and
exhaust tube, with the pressurised cockpit and
weaponry sited above it, which was to be supported
on stubby swept-back shoulder wings (constant-chord
in Project I, variable-chord in Project II), with a tail
unit cantilevered out behind. The tail unit itself was
the factor which differentiated the designs. That of
Project I was entirely innovatory: a T-tail, with the
horizontal control surfaces located at its upper end;
that of Project II was conventional, with the tailplane
located low down. Otherwise, considerable attention
was paid to ease of manufacture with the sort of
resources which could be expected to be available,
and the result of that was a projection that each aircraft
would require a total of 2500 man-hours (the Me
262 probably never got far below 10,000). No single
Ta 183 was ever built, Focke-Wulf's factories having
been overrun by late April, but it is widely held that
the Soviet Army took a complete set of plans, and the
design team of Mikoyan and Gurevich is said to have
used them as the basis for the MiG-15, powered by a
Russian copy of the British Rolls-Royce 'Nene' turbojet
engine. SAAB in Sweden later produced a very
similar-looking aircraft as its SAAB-29, this time
powered by a copy of the de Havilland 'Ghost'.
THE MESSERSCHMITT P. 1101
JET AIRCRAFT
Another of the aircraft entered for the Emergency
Fighter Competition was also to form the basis of a
type built elsewhere, but this time rather more openly.
The Messerschmitt company had in fact anticipated
the need for a replacement for the Me 262 (who was
in a better position to know that aircraft's limitations?)
and construction of a prototype to replace it,
designed by Woldemar Voigt, had begun in July 1944
as the P. 1101. This was in one particular a remarkable
aircraft, for it was constructed chiefly to determine
the best angle of wing sweep; its variable-chord
wings could be reset (on the ground, not in flight) to
any angle between 35 and 45 degrees. Otherwise, the
aircraft was conventional in the new mould, with a
single engine located deep within the fuselage and
exhausting below the extension boom which supported
the tail assembly.
The prototype was about 80 per cent complete
when it was discovered by the Americans on their
arrival in Oberammergau, and it was put on display in
the open along with other 'interesting' developments
from the Messerschmitt studio. It was still there, deteriorating
rapidly, when it was spotted by Robert
Woods, Chief Designer at Bell Aircraft, who contrived
to have it sent it to the United States, where it
was eventually restored and completed, with the help
of Voigt himself, as a non-flying mock-up. It formed
the basis for the first ever variablc-geometry-winged
aircraft, the Bell X-5, the sweep angle of which could
be changed in flight to one of three pre-sets: 20, 40
and 60 degrees. This aircraft made its first flight on 20
June 1951, the geometry of the wing being varied in
flight for the first time on 15 July.
THE MESSERSCHMITT P. 1110 AND P. 1111
The other two submissions Messerschmitt made were
less well developed but somewhat more radical. The
P. 11 10 did away with the nose air intake, locating the
engine much further back in the airframe, with the
duct openings on the fuselage shoulders, just forward
of the trailing edges of the constant-chord swept
wings. The P. 1111 was more adventurous: an allwing
design of near-delta planform with a heavily
swept tail fin and rudder, the air intakes of which were
located in the forward part of the wing roots. A proposal
submitted too late for the competition was a
variant of this design, with a wing of narrower chord
and a butterfly tail. Under ideal circumstances, all
three designs would probably have been built in prototype
form and flown against each other, but as it
25