The Me 262 has swept wings, and the Me 262 was the first jet fighter to fly in combat. It is tempting to connect the two — to assume that Messerschmitt understood what happens to air near the speed of sound and shaped the wing accordingly.
Mostly, they did not. The sweep is there because the engines came out heavier than promised.
A balance problem
The aircraft was designed from 1939 around a pair of turbojets that did not exist yet. When the engines finally arrived, they weighed considerably more than the figures the airframe had been drawn to.
Extra weight hanging under the wings moves the centre of gravity, and an aircraft whose centre of gravity sits in the wrong place relative to its wing is unstable or unflyable. The cheapest fix was not to redesign the fuselage but to move the wing's lift — by sweeping the outer panels back about eighteen and a half degrees.
That brought the balance back into range. It also, by accident, gave the aircraft better behaviour at high speed than a straight wing would have had.
The accident that turned out useful
German aerodynamicists were in fact working on wing sweep at the time, and there is a long argument among historians about how much of that thinking fed into the 262. What is not in dispute is the sequence: the balance problem came first, the sweep was the answer to it, and the transonic benefit was understood afterwards.
Either way, Allied engineers took the aircraft apart after the war and noticed the shape. The swept wing turns up shortly afterwards on the F-86 Sabre and the MiG-15, and it has been on nearly every fast aircraft since.
Too late, and too fragile
The 262 was faster than anything the Allies could put up — roughly 870 km/h against a Mustang's 700 — and it carried four 30 mm cannon in the nose, where there was room because the engines were out on the wings.
But the engines lasted between ten and twenty-five hours before needing replacement, the aircraft was vulnerable on takeoff and landing, and it arrived in 1944, when Germany had neither the fuel nor the trained pilots to use it properly. Around 1,400 were built; a fraction ever flew operationally.
The model
COBI's Messerschmitt Me 262A-1a Schwalbe, set 5776, is a 1:32 model built from 505 blocks, with a pilot figure and a display stand.
One detail worth knowing if you have built a COBI Me 262 before: every previous version used the nose part from COBI's P-38 Lightning, which was too blunt for the shape. This release has a newly tooled nose made specifically for the aircraft.
It is available to pre-order. The expected shipping month is shown on the product page, and you can cancel any time before it ships.
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