by Bruce BethkeNew picture this week. I was looking for a really good image of an Me-163 "Komet" in boost phase and found this one, in a wonderful library of old Luftwaffe photos you can't find anywhere else on the web—except on this Argentinian site, of course.
I swear, you can't make this stuff up.
As for why I was looking for such a photo: that ties back to last week's column. I was researching the history of the early near-sonic and possibly transonic aircraft, and found myself once again fascinated by the Messerschmidt Me-262 and Me-163.
The Me-262, if you need a refresher, was the world's first operational jet-powered combat aircraft. It could have been a decisive weapon, had it been built in sufficient numbers and used as a fighter/interceptor, but fortunately for the world Hitler saw the prototype, declared that it should be redesigned as a bomber, and flew into a rage and ordered production stopped when he learned that it was still being built as a fighter. In a deeply perverse way the world is lucky that Hitler was a frothing madman. Had he been just slightly more sane, things could have gone considerably worse for the rest of world.
But never mind that now. The Me-163, in contrast, was the world's first and thus far only purely rocket-powered combat aircraft. Fantastic acceleration, incredible rate of climb, devastating firepower—and an operational range of about twenty miles, after which it ran out of fuel, and with luck, returned to base as a glider.
In his autobiography, Adolph Galland reported that the Luftwaffe pilots loved the Me-262 (when it was working) and feared the Me-163. The Me-262 was plagued by unreliable engines, and while nothing else in the air at the time could match the performance of a working Me-262, they were easy prey for the American P-51's and P-47's if the engines acted up. The Me-163, on the other hand, was little more than a liquid-fueled bomb with wings and guns attached, and with a living man for a guidance system. If the Me-163 cracked up on landing—which happened with depressing frequency—and if the oxidizer tank ruptured in the crack-up, and if there was anything left in the oxidizer tank when it ruptured, death for the pilot was unavoidable, hideous, and not nearly instantaneous enough.
Why then build something like the Me-163? Germans are not, generally, suicidally insane. One plan that was drawn up for repelling the expected Allied invasion of France involved attacking the invasion fleet with vast swarms of manned V-1 kamikaze missiles. The plan was never used because of a distinct lack of volunteers willing to commit certain suicide for the Reich.
Instead, the answer lies in the idea of mission profile. All fighting vehicles, be they ships, tanks, aircraft, or whatever, are built with the idea in mind that they will perform one specific mission very well. At least, that's where the designers usually start: thereafter usually comes a complicated calculus of compromise, funding, assessments of the enemy's ever-changing capabilities, assessments of your own supporting and competing capabilities, great ideas that turn out to be not so hot in practice, and to some extent, vogues and fashions.
When the Me-163 went operational, American and British heavy bombers were wreaking havoc on Germany. Lacking the effective long-range radar that the British had employed so well during the Battle of Britain, the Germans opted for point defense. When an approaching bomber stream was detected, the objective was to get as many interceptor aircraft up to operational altitude as quickly as possible, and given the fuel/weight compromises required in order to achieve this, to then do as much damage as they could in the brief time that they could remain at altitude before running out of fuel. To this end the Germans designed and built a great number of very dangerous aircraft, of which the Me-163 was merely the most numerous and successful.
While considering the Me-163's mission profile, I was struck by one of those oblique inferences to which I am so often prone. A decade ago, during the 2000 presidential election campaign, George W. Bush took a lot of flak from certain parties who demanded to know why he had not finished out his hitch in the Texas Air National Guard by flying combat missions in Vietnam. While there are a lot of ways in which this question can be answered, the essential truth of the matter lies in the concept of mission profile.
There was a time back in the late 1940's and 1950's when it was believed that the greatest threat facing this country would be vast fleets of Soviet bombers, coming in over the North Pole at very high altitude and supersonic speed to deliver Uncle Nikita's H-bombs to every city and town in America. To counter this threat we built first the DEW Line, which was a network of radar stations in the Arctic, and then the SAGE tracking system, which begat so many other cool things it warrants an article of its own, and finally a series of ever more specialized interceptor aircraft, culminating in the F-102 Delta Dagger series, which is the one combat aircraft George W. Bush was trained for and qualified to fly. In hindsight, the mission profile of the F-102 was remarkably like that of the Me-163, only writ large. To wit:
1. DEW Line operators in the Arctic detect Russkis coming in over the pole.
2. Waves of F-102 pilots from the Dakotas to Texas scramble to get into the air and up to altitude as fast as possible.
3. SAGE operators vector the F-102 pilots onto head-on intercept courses.
4. As soon as they get within range, the F-102 pilots disgorge their load of six Falcon air-to-air missiles. Then, missile bays empty, they turn tail and head for home, low on fuel and mission accomplished.
5. With luck, the Falcons get good guidance-system locks and do their jobs, dropping the Russkis somewhere in the less-inhabited parts of Canada. With even more luck, the Russian bombs are not armed and do not detonate on impact.
6. Win, lose, or draw, World War III is over before the F-102 pilots have time to land, refuel, and re-arm.
In this regard, the F-102's essentially functioned as manned first stages in a surface-to-air missile system. Lacking even token guns, they were designed to fulfill one specific role and one role only in a larger strategic defense plan, and around one particular weapons-delivery system and one mission profile. Considered in these terms, they were successful.
But despite their virtues, the F-102's time in the sun was comparatively brief. The projected waves of Russian high-altitude supersonic bombers never materialized; the Russians instead built uninterceptable intercontinental missiles. The F-102's AIM-4 Falcon armament gave way to newer and more capable missiles, which could not be fit into the aircraft's internal weapons bays. (Helpful hint to would-be fighting starship designers: put your space torpedoes on pylons on the *outside* of the hull. This not only makes them easier to replace with newer and better weapons, it also makes them easier to jettison in an emergency. Besides, do they really need to be kept nice and warm—and ever so slightly moist—inside the environmental habitat of the ship?)
The F-102's themselves were soon replaced in front-line service by newer, more capable, and more flexible aircraft, and surviving aircraft were relegated to training squadrons, national guard units, and third-world allies. More than a few ended up refitted as unmanned target drones and destroyed in weapons tests. Some F-102 squadrons were sent to Vietnam, but absent a North Vietnamese high-altitude strategic bomber force to be intercepted they were retasked as ground attack aircraft, a role to which they were not well-suited and in which they were soon replaced.
Chuck Yeager, in his autobiography, reckons that he got out of combat flying at just the right time. He considered the Korean War-era F-86 Sabre to be the last and best real gun-armed dog-fighting combat aircraft ever built, and felt that after that air combat became no longer a test of man and machine, but mostly a matter of who had the better radar and smarter missiles. He foresaw a day not too far off when there wouldn't even need to be a man in the cockpit, except possibly to take-off and land the thing, and even that need would go away when the avionics and autopilots finally improved enough. Finally, he felt that at about Mach 3 manned aircraft had reached the point beyond which it was not even possible for a human pilot to see something with the naked eye, and react to it before it was receding into the distance behind.
Remember that, when you're tempted to put your hero into the cockpit of his trusty Mach 5-capable laser-cannon-equipped SuperMegaStratoblaster and send him flying off into the skies, to battle the forces of evil with no flight plan and no mission profile.
SPLATTERING GUTS FOR FUN & PROFIT runs every Tuesday and is an open column. Do you have a desire to write about some weapons- or violence-related topic that is near and dear to your heart, or at least your spleen? Guest columns are always welcome. For more information, email us at slushpile at thefridaychallenge dot com with a few words about your proposed topic.
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