German Jet Genesis

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{detailed description}Jets and rockets, ramjets and pulsejets. Wings swept forward and back and forward again, crescents, deltas and canards. Vertical take-off and variable geometry, bouncing bombers and flying saucers. Airborne fact and science fiction, war-winners and no-hopers. All these and more are here in German Jet Genesis, David Masters' account of a remarkable episode in aviation history.
Driven first by the hunger for a Thousand-Year Reich and then by a burning determination to defend the ravaged Fatherland, Germany's extraordinarily creative wartime aircraft industry produced a glittering confusion of advanced designs, prototypes and fighting machines that advanced the aviation state of the art at a pace never equalled before or since.
It all began with a pyrotechnic-powered glider, built and flown as a publicity stunt in 1929. The Opel Rak-1 didn't last long, crashing to destruction after being set ablaze by its own rockets, but it attracted enough funds to permit research into the liquid-fuelled motors whose descendants would one day power the V-2 rocket and Me 163 Komet fighter.
The rocket effort was paralleled by work on air-breathing turbojet engines which culminated in 1938 in the world's first flight by a jet-powered aircraft, the Heinkel He 178. Then came the war, and an increasingly desperate investment of time, resources and ingenuity in projects designed to counter an Allied assault upon German and Occupied Europe that grew in ferocity with every passing month. The products of this penod varied from the thoroughly practical and effective, via the promising but underdeveloped, to projects that would have overwhelmed the technology of the 1980s, let alone that of a battered Germany in 1945.
Typical of the first category are the Me 262 and Ar 234. If Hitler had not demanded that Messerschmitt's Schwalbe be used as a fighter-bomber, this fine interceptor might have wrought decisive destruction among the Allied bombers and their fighter escorts. Arriving just too late to make a significant contribution to the German defence of the Continent, the Arado bomber was more than a match for the Allied fighters in level flight and displayed plenty of development potential.
Outstanding among the promising projects that never made it beyond drawing-board or prototype stage was the Messerschmitt P.1101, a variable-geometry swept-wing research aircraft whose design contributed greatly to the development of the two great Korean War adversaries, the F-86 Sabre and MiG-15, and which was finally reborn in highly refined form as the Bell X-5 technology demonstrator.
But German reach often exceeded grasp in those frenzied years, and some of the resulting aircraft projects remain impossibly ambitious to this day. Most astonishing of these was the Sänger-Bredt stratospheric bomber, a mighty ramjet-powered dart designed to fly halfway round the globe by skipping from high altitude off the denser lower layers of the Earth's atmosphere, rather like a re-entering Apollo spacecraft. Almost as bizarre were the mysterious Schriever "flying saucers" and the FockeWulf Triebflugel vertical take-off interceptor, with its huge tip-driven rotor and tail-sitting undercarriage.
In the end this fascinating outpouring of ideas came to nothing, and Germany was defeated. But the captured design teams were to work on either side of the Iron Curtain, and ultimately their efforts exerted a profound influence on aeronautical development in the West and the Soviet Union.
Take a large helping of aeronautical genius, blend with three new technologies - jets, rockets and transonic aerodynamics - and subject it all to the intense pressures of war. The resulting rich and strange mixture of the crackpot and the visionary, the highly practical and the Heath Robinson, is described here in over 180 brief project histories illustrated by David Masters' own line drawings and a number of black-and-white photographs.
{Author / Publisher / Date}by David Masters
Published by Janes 1982 1st edition. 142pp profusely illustrated with drawings and photos, appendices, bibliography. 22x28
{condition}small inscription to front free endpaper, lightly bumped corners, otherwise near fine, inc. d/j
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