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Old 21st January 2006, 01:11
Graham Boak Graham Boak is offline
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Re: Me262 over Korea

The comment about pitch trim is news to me (or perhaps I'd simply forgotten it). As a fairly simple-minded performance engineer I was referring to Mcrit as being the Mach number for drag divergence, which is where the drag stops rising with the square of the speed and shoots upwards dramatically - the "sound barrier". This is caused by the appearance of wave drag from compressibility effects and is a fairly simple relationship between the wing thickness/chord ratio and the point of maximum thickness. The 262 cannot go faster than this because it simply doesn't have the thrust to overcome the drag rise. That bit of extra force provided by gravity in a dive is comparatively small.

I'm sure you're right about windtunnel variants with swept wings, but such a major change to the wing would have required a major rebalancing of the aircraft configurations and I stand by my comment that such an aircraft would not be a 262. No more than a 209 (fighter not racer) was not a 109 despite the clear relationship. In the same sense as a Meteor NF Mk.14 is still a Meteor, or a Spitfire F Mk. 24 is still a Spitfire (by the skin of its teeth!), but an F-84G is not the same aircraft as an F-84F, despite the USAAF designations.
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