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Sniper297 · 04-07-16, 10:45 PM

Can't believe all the pundits either.

1. Hugh Dowding (RAF fighter command chief) had a plan B - if the fighter losses got too great he would have pulled them back out of range of the 109 and waited for the invasion, accepting whatever damage that caused in southeast England.

2. The pundits often claim the ME-262 and HO-229 could have won the war for Germany if they had been produced sooner. False. The metallurgy for jet turbines was still being developed, and to withstand the heat and stress the steel alloy required high concentrations of tungsten and nickel. Tungsten was no problem, but 95% of the world's nickel was in Canada, which would have been unlikely to sell nickel to the Germans since Canada was on the Allied side. So the prototype JUMO jet engines had a MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure) of 100 hours. Since the production engines couldn't be mass produced with the high nickel concentration, the turbines had a MTBF of 5 hours. So essentially every jet flight required both engines be changed after 1 or 2 sorties, and they still blew up in flight all too frequently.

04-07-16, 10:45 PM	#8
Sniper297 The Old Man Join Date: Dec 2005 Location: Philadelphia Shipyard Brig Posts: 1,386 Downloads: 160 Uploads: 19	Can't believe all the pundits either. 1. Hugh Dowding (RAF fighter command chief) had a plan B - if the fighter losses got too great he would have pulled them back out of range of the 109 and waited for the invasion, accepting whatever damage that caused in southeast England. 2. The pundits often claim the ME-262 and HO-229 could have won the war for Germany if they had been produced sooner. False. The metallurgy for jet turbines was still being developed, and to withstand the heat and stress the steel alloy required high concentrations of tungsten and nickel. Tungsten was no problem, but 95% of the world's nickel was in Canada, which would have been unlikely to sell nickel to the Germans since Canada was on the Allied side. So the prototype JUMO jet engines had a MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure) of 100 hours. Since the production engines couldn't be mass produced with the high nickel concentration, the turbines had a MTBF of 5 hours. So essentially every jet flight required both engines be changed after 1 or 2 sorties, and they still blew up in flight all too frequently.