The Me 262 Is Reborn
Recreating the flying qualities of one of the rarest airplanes
in the world is no easy task. Just ask dedicated group of
aviation buffs in Seattle (WA) who are replicating a Messerschmitt
262, the world's first operational jet fighter. The revolutionary
aircraft were built by Nazi Germany during World War II. Last
Wednesday, one of five replicas being built by a group that plans
to eventually sell them was moved out of a hangar in Seattle's
Paine Field. After a few false starts, the plane's two engines came
to life. However, it took some mechanical sleuthing to figure out
what ailed the jet.
"There's a detective story, an Internet hunt and crawling around
in basements in Berlin," Jim Byron, a retired Boeing executive and
co-director of the Me-262 Project, which is building five of the
replicas at Paine Field told the Seattle Times
Just over a year ago, their efforts were dealt a serious blow.
On a Jan. 17, 2003, test flight — only the second time the
first completed replica had been flown — something went
wrong. Wolfgang Czaia, a former West German air force and American
Airlines pilot flying the plane, had just touched down on the
runway when the left landing-gear assembly collapsed. The plane
went off the runway and came to rest with its tail extending into
the air, its path stopped by a concrete block that kept it from
going over an embankment. No one was hurt, but the plane suffered
extensive damage.
The landing gear and wing had to be rebuilt. Most importantly,
Byron said, the builders had to figure out why the gear collapsed
in the first place. That led to some sleuthing. Specifically,
members of the Me-262 project went seeking a part called an
actuator, a hydraulic strut-like device that controls the landing
gear. But finding a part designed more than 60 years ago, for a
plane of which only eight originals exist in the world, was like
seeking the proverbial needle in the haystack. The group discovered
that an 89-year-old former World War II German mechanic had a small
private museum in his Berlin home. As luck would have it, he had an
original Me-262 actuator. The Paine Field builders were able to
borrow the part, disassemble it and discover the cause of the gear
collapse.
It turned out that the landing-gear assembly depended on 12
small ball bearings that were supposed to snap into place to lock
the gear down and support the weight of the plane. On the 2003
flight, they didn't lock properly. The fitting had been improperly
machined when the replacement-gear assembly was built in Texas.
Eventually, the Paine Field builders had all new landing-gear
assemblies produced.
"It took six months of research and six months of fabrication,"
Byron told the newspaper.
Eventually, everything was reassembled, and the rebuilt jet
rolled out of its hangar last week for the first time in more than
a year.
The Me-262 first flew in 1942 and was far superior to any
aircraft that Allied forces had in Europe, cutting through American
bomber squadrons and outspeeding pursuers by reaching 540 mph,
about 100 mph faster than U.S. fighter planes. But German leader
Adolf Hitler had insisted on developing the plane as a bomber, for
which it was unsuitable, and by 1944, it was too late to produce
enough of the jets to stop Allied bombers. Only 1,433 Me-262s were
built, and about 1,000 of them were destroyed on the ground by
Allied air attacks.
That's how the plane's history might have ended, except that a
military-aircraft enthusiast named Steve Snyder made a deal in the
early 1990s with the Navy to restore one of the originals, which
was decaying at a Pennsylvania Navy base. Part of the deal was that
Snyder would be allowed to disassemble the plane, copy it and build
five new Me-262s. Snyder formed a company and started restoration
and production in Texas. Financial problems followed. Then Snyder
was killed in the crash of one of his other planes in New Jersey in
1999. But in 1998, Bob Hammer, a retired Boeing engineer who heads
the Paine Field work, had received a call from Snyder, and a deal
was struck to move the work. The supplies and parts for building
five Me-262s were moved from Texas to Paine Field in 1999.
The replicas are duplicating nearly every item of the originals,
from paint to gun ports for the four 30-millimeter cannons,
although (obviously) no operating weapons are fitted. The single
major change is using modern General Electric engines, rather than
original Junkers engines that had to be rebuilt about every 20
hours.
Of the replica planes, one is going to the Messerschmitt
Foundation in Germany and the other, the one with the landing-gear
problems, has been purchased by a retired Arizona judge. Three
others remain unsold, available for about $2 million each, without
engines.