ME 262 Engines

I remember that the RAF used to circulate a magazine type document in which selected accident reports were reviewed. the idea being that both ground and aircrew, could learn from their errors.
One that sticks in my mind contained a photo of a reassembled pair of pliers which had been left in a jet intake and had subsequently passed through the engine. It had been very neatly chopped into about 8 pieces, but had not done the engines internals any favours either.

Returning to the OPs original question, I always understood that the German engines suffered from blades burning out because they did not have the exotic alloys to withstand the very high temperatures reached in a jet.

Even in todays warbird community, bolts are found in oil systems which helped to ground a certain UK based 4 engined plane for a while.

Just another bit on DB engines,
A czech maintainance engineer on the late DB’s wrote this:

“don’t believe stories of communist sabotages invented by writers-the work was done thorougly untill the end of the war”

Personally I believe perhaps some sabotage occured but I don’t think it was a huge problem; it seems poor workmanship, adverse working conditions and haste was the real culprit for alot of sabotage!

I have posted this link before…
Hans Fey…262 production test pilot debrief
These a/c were being built muchly by slave labour,who could blame them for being ‘slapdash’

http://www.zenoswarbirdvideos.com/Images/Me262/ME262PILOTDEBRIEF.pdf

The paragraph ‘Structural Workmanship’ is fairly illuminating

+ 262 pilots notes by Fritz Wendel

http://www.zenoswarbirdvideos.com/Images/Me262/ME262WendeL.pdf

rgds baz

I would have to say as a person who has worked on alot of different types of vehicles over the years that rags can definatly be left in engines. Ive done it.
But ive also worked in aircraft maintanance for a few years and done my share of engine changes . Stuffing a rag into an oil line is the last thing anyone would do. As soon as the rags in there it would become obviose that
whoever gets the job of reconnecting them wont see them and disaster will follow. The result is also not very likely to result in any evidence of the tampering either.
I dont think there would be many aircraft engineers who would be too comfortable stuffing rags into oil lines at any time expecialy wile under the preasure of far from ideal working conditions thay may have been under.

I have worked in aircraft maintenance for 20 years and I have seen very odd items in very odd places. None of them due to sabotage. A 2 foot piece of 4×4, used to support the spoilers during maintenance, left in the trailing edge falsework of a 737, only to be spotted by an observant passenger. Luckily nothing happened.

A pair of wirecutters halfway embedded in the sealent of a main fuel tank, having passed production inspection at Boeing. That’s VERY serious!

More tools and equipment than you can shake a stick at, mostly in “safe” places, but nevertheless items that shouldn’t be there at all. To protect the uneasy fliers, I will not make a full list here 😮

Personally I have yet to find oil rags in engine parts, but I’m sure others have. I have found enough loose rags everywhere else to be pretty certain about it. Very bad engineering, but nevertheless something that happens now and again.

During the war, parts were cannibalised from any other aircraft that had them. Including wrecks and instructional equipment. People might not have stuffed rags into functional aircraft parts, but U/S, or discarded, parts might have been reinstalled on aircraft without the proper inspection.

I’m not saying sabotage did not take place, I just don’t think it was on a scale that would give German engineering a bad name. The engines in question were most likely rubbish, due to bad materials, bad workmanship and bad management.

I would have to say as a person who has worked on alot of different types of vehicles over the years that rags can definatly be left in engines. Ive done it.
But ive also worked in aircraft maintanance for a few years and done my share of engine changes . Stuffing a rag into an oil line is the last thing anyone would do. As soon as the rags in there it would become obviose that
whoever gets the job of reconnecting them wont see them and disaster will follow. The result is also not very likely to result in any evidence of the tampering either.
I dont think there would be many aircraft engineers who would be too comfortable stuffing rags into oil lines at any time expecialy wile under the preasure of far from ideal working conditions thay may have been under.

This is one isolated case – I have seen plenty of other cases on German aircraft where you have to stop and think – ‘Why did that happen?’

Remember that the people actually doing the work on these aircraft and engines were very often not employees like you and I, they may have been displaced from their country of origin; they werent being paid – in many cases, they knew that it was not unlikely they would be shipped off to the camps.

Put yourself in the position of slaves in this situation – would you conform, or would you, just sometimes think – ‘perhaps I can do something about this’.

Its a fact that the quality of the aircraft went downhill rapidly as the war progressed. A mid war FW190 is akin to a Rolls Royce in terms of production standards – as the war progressed, the quality can be seen to markedly change.

I am not the only person who has ever suggested sabotage; there are much better documented examples than my rather circumstantial one.

Incidentally, on the same aircraft, it was also discovered that one of the cannon cannot have been working properly – again owing to rag in one of the lines. There is no reason to have rag in an air line – none at all, unless it was placed there.

Bruce

No, in my opinion, it was sabotage.

The aircraft had just had an engine change, having had an overhauled engine refitted earlier that day. For ground runs, just enough oil would circulate.

In the air a different story. The insides of the engine were bright blue when it was dismantled – a sure sign of lack of lubrication!

The rags were of the type made from overalls, or uniform. There is no accidental way they could have got there.

Bruce

Hei Bruce,

I work as marine engineer and for the last 20 years I have witnessed several times that engines stop due to oil starvation after maintenance. All because of rag in oillines or blocking the suction pipe of the lub.oil pump. Thank god these engines were equipped with proper alarmsystems that stopped the engine and prevented serious damages. On many ships we received old clothes as rags, i would not be surprised that the people who did maintenance at aircraft had to use old clothes/uniforms or overalls because there were no good rags available.
So I doubt that your example was a case of sabotage.

Best regards,

Mathieu.

No, in my opinion, it was sabotage.

The aircraft had just had an engine change, having had an overhauled engine refitted earlier that day. For ground runs, just enough oil would circulate.

In the air a different story. The insides of the engine were bright blue when it was dismantled – a sure sign of lack of lubrication!

The rags were of the type made from overalls, or uniform. There is no accidental way they could have got there.

Bruce

Sabotage was a serious problem.

On the FHC FW190, it was discovered that the oil lines in the engine were stuffed with rags. It ran fine for a while, but sabotage brought it down!

I have seen a number of examples on aircraft under rebuild.

Bruce

Would you think that was from the production?

Rags have been left i bad places, without direct sabotage has been suspected. The aircraft production was running at full pace during the war, they didn’t need sabotage, the tired and overworked “staff” would have produced the same result.

I’m pretty sure British and American productions experienced the same problem, although to a lesser degree. Mistakes are made when you force the production. Even more so, when you use semi-skilled forced labour.

Naturally the Germans would label it ”Sabotage”, as the proud German aircraft industry could not be seen to make such mistakes.

How many people actually risked their lives and the lives of large numbers of colleagues, for the relatively pointless task of stuffed rags in aircraft oil lines?

Same story for ammunition i think.

Packets of flash powder in an 8mm cartridge?
I’m not saying it didn’t happen, but I’m pretty sure it’s another explanation than sabotage. Just imagine how many such packages would have had to be placed in order to archive anything. And how would slave labours get access to flash powder, from the photo shop?

Sabotage was a serious problem.

Bruce

the slave labor they used in the ammo plants did the same thing. been a few 1919A4’s converted to 8MM here in the states that have blown the top covers, broken extractors and barrel extentions due to sabotaged ammo. afterwards you would pull bullets on some WW2 dated 8mm. in the powder would be a packet of flash powder for a camera in a little pouch inside. the main charge would go off then fractions of a second later the packet would go off and damage the gun to the point it would be disabled. i stopped shooting the german ammo dated in WW2 after i saw that…. 60+ years later still finding it in our surplus ammo..

robert

Sabotage was a serious problem.

On the FHC FW190, it was discovered that the oil lines in the engine were stuffed with rags. It ran fine for a while, but sabotage brought it down!

I have seen a number of examples on aircraft under rebuild.

Bruce

The upside being the engines only took a few hours to change, rather than days.

I think in some cases sabotage was not needed to create an unfavourable situation for the germans. Just by the use of unskilled and slave labour and the rush to produce such massive numbers of aircraft the general quality of production dropped, how the drop in quality affected serviceability I cannot comment on; however In Guido de Maeseneers book on Peenemunde he comments on the number of V2s that had to be returned as soon as they arrived just due to the bad quality of work and sometimes just due to the deterioation of the v2’s from sitting on the rail cars in the rain! Jerry Crandalls book on the D9 comments on how the late war plywood flaps of the D9 were even damaged by a rain storm in which 40 sets had to be replaced due to them having warped! Hans Dortenmann also notes how he prefered the superior quality of his early production D9 in comparison to the poor quality of the later D9’s but he did note how reliable his jumo 213 in his aircraft was.
Here is a bit of info taken straight from the Japo K-4 book:

“Defects caused by construction were accompanied with defects caused by hasty and low quality production”

-elevator clearance in operating rod bearing
-loose backlash elimination pieces in mechanism of elevator adjustment
-missing direction marks on gearing rotation
-clogged respective leaking mw system
-faults in electrical wiring
-improper ration of coolant components (almost always not enough glycol)
-lose or mis-screwed sparkplugs
-faulty gun adjustment
-MK108 defects”

it then lists DB605 defects and covers various issues with the k-4 due to hasty building and poor worksmanship but does not mention sabotage.
Matt

I remember reading somewhere that a very sophisticated form of sabotage was carried out during engine manufacture by qualified engineers employed as slave labour whereby the angles of some of the fan blades was altered fractionally, enough to allow them to fail at any time during operation. I think Eric Brown commented on this when the time came to test fly captured Arado 234s. Each engine was considered a time bomb !

I recall this as well. IIRC it was a Polish engineer forced to work in the assembly plants, who would take the individual fan blade mounting blocks and give one or more edge a slight easing, this allowing hot gasses to eventually burn through the small gap. At least that’s how I remember it, reality may be slightly different.

greg v.

I think lack of the proper materials outstripped the “sabotage” element. The Germans were known for severe and swift retaliation for any sabotage. Not thinking twice about decimating the workers, if sabotage was even expected. Purely from a surviving point of view, my guess is that few of the forced workers sabotaged the engines.

Naturally it’s possible that some did get sabotaged, but I doubt it would have been enough to give the engine a bad name.

it doesn’t help having forced labour build the engines either !

There was nothing fundamentally wrong with the design they were simply asking too much for the period in terms of complexity and reliability. The shortage of vital materials made achieving those ends practically impossible. The Whittle centrifugal engine was simpler and far more reliable but ultimately less advanced, but Whittle knew this, he knew about the more advanced turbojet design also but rightly decided it was not achievable within the given time span. Indeed the company once absorbed into a Government sponsored research capacity contributed much of the work that led to post war turboshaft jet design. At least one German ace, sorry his name eludes me claimed that the 262 would have been better with Whittle engines. Ultimately no, but in the circumstances perhaps. As the Comet showed later rushing innovation isn’t by any means the correct solution.

me 262

thankyou for the replies everyone most interesting,exactly how many 262s are still extant

Quote from the Wiki link provided by PanzerJohn:

Postwar production

Following World War II, Jumo 004s were built in small numbers by Malešice in Czechoslovakia, designated M-04, to power the Avia S-92 which was itself a copy of the Me 262. Jumo 004 copies were also built in the Soviet Union as the RD-10 engine, where they powered the Yakovlev Yak-15 as well as many prototype jet fighters.

Were these engines of better quality then? Was the sabotage ‘undone’? Better / proper metal and alloys used? Longer TBO?

Tillerman.