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01.03.2001 19:25:38
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WWI; ВВС;
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Пилоты Люфтваффе утверждают: они первыми перешли звуковой барьер в мае 1945
Luftwaffe pilots claim to have been first to break sound barrier
They achieved Mach 1 in April 1945, they say
By ROGER BOYES The Vancouver Sun, February 22, 2001
BERLIN — America's claim to have been the first country to break the sound barrier, one of the great postwar aviation milestones, is being challenged by Germany.
Aging Luftwaffe pilots and engineers have ended five decades of silence to seek their place in history. Theirs is a tale of derring-do at a time when Nazi Germany was scrambling for a new miracle weapon that could save it from humiliating defeat in
the Second World War. Nobody quite understood the power of their new jet-powered Messerschmidt, the Me-262A, and its pilots were astonished when it started to knock on the supersonic door.
There can be few more sensitive areas of transatlantic rivalry than this, since Charles (Chuck) Yeager, who first reached Mach 1, the speed of sound in air, is a national hero who was celebrated by Tom Wolfe in The Right Stuff.
In October 1947 Yeager's Bell X-l was taken to 26,250 feet by a B-29 bomber and released, at which point Yeager fired his rocket engines and felt his lungs "pressed as flat as pancake!." Yeager experienced a sensation akin to "shooting through the roof of heaven."
Now veteran German pilots claim that they achieved Mach 1 in April 1945 in the Me-262A.
The scientists of the Hitler regime in fact made many astonishing breakthroughs, in biochemical weaponry and non-military areas such as cancer research as well as in aerospace and missile technology. But Germany, as the defeated nation, had to stay silent as personnel and tons of research material were shipped to America.
The German pilot who is credited with first breaking the sound
barrier is Hans Guido Mutke, who is now 79, In the spring of 1945 the Luftwaffe was trying to put together a new fighter squadron to fly the Me-262, the first jet to go into mass production.
German air ace General Adolf Galland praised the power of the jet, saying: "It is as if angels are pushing you forward." But most of the Me-262s could not be flown because of lack of fuel.
On April 9, Mutke was flying at just above 36,000 feet. Suddenly he was told of a fellow pilot under attack by an RAF Spitfire and immediately dived towards the dogfight under full power. "The speedometer remained
frozen in the red area at more than 1,100 kilometres per hour," he said. Suddenly the aircraft reached the shaking phase that sets in at around Mach 0.8. "The rivets started to fly out of the wings. The plane rocked and vibrated and I smashed my head on the roof of the cockpit," he said. But, after a wild spin down to 26,250 feet he managed to regain enough control to return to base. On the ground his aircraft looked as if it had been punched by a giant.
Pilots' handbooks dated January 1946 in the military archives at Dayton, Ohio, give a picture of the capabilities of captured Me-262s tested by American and
British airmen and support the German claims, making clear that they touched Mach 1 in tests.
Further support comes from Karl Doetsch, 90, a retired aero-nautics professor, who was assigned in 1944 to find the reason for a series of mysterious and fatal Me-2^2 crashes.
Again and again the aircraft were disintegrating hi the air or smashing into the ground. Doetsch subjected the jets to a series of test&and found that the problems began at Mach 0.85. Some of the pilots who had been killed had clearly broken the sound barrier — and died as a result.
The Times of London