saboteurs??
not necessarily – what has to be considered is
a) the difficulty to obtain the raw-material needed for the various alloys needed in aircraft and engine fabrication
b) the fact that during 1944 the life expectancy of an German fighter aircraft was set at approx 20 hours which means that also the engines didn’t have to last for hundreds of hours.
The Swiss AF received 12 Bf-109G’s during 1944 when after a Bf-110G night fighter with the latest Lichtenstein search radar variant had run out of fuel and landed at Dübendorf airfield near Zurich. The Swiss were offered 12 Gustavs for destroying the Night fighter (to make sure the allies wouldn’t get a go at it).
After delivery, many problems arose during operation of this G-6 variant (remember, we had E’s and a few D’s already in service for 5 years). Technical examination revealed that the production standard in general was rather low – at one point it was believed that we had received aircraft that didn’t pass the quality control at the factory, but this soon was proved wrong.
Fact is that the DB-605’s were not built for prolonged use, and the factories ‘used’ POW’s and convicts, plus people from conentration camps – i.e. people not properly trained for the task of building precision machinery, while the V-1650’s (Packard built Merlins) could be built with the best raw material and highly experienced personnel.
Another point is that the rôle of the Bf-109 and its DB-605’s was mainly in defence and short-range missions, with flying times of normally less than one hour per mission, while the Packard V-1650 equipped Mustangs were destined for long range escort missions of several hours in one go.
Therefore the conception of the durability of these engines was entirely different.
Martin / Swiss Mustangs
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