1-TL-Jäger – Focke-Wulf
I and II 1-TL-Jäger 1 TL Jäger – Focke Focke-Wulf Wulf
Focke-Wulf had long desired to build a jet aircraft and now, finally, it seemed as though the hour of the Fw-TL-Jäger was at hand. As one of Germany’s two most prominent fighter manufacturers, the company had a lot to live up to…
ABOVE: Focke-Wulf’s 1-TL-Jäger, Baubeschreibung Nr. 279 aircraft, later to be given the RLM designation Ta 183. Art by Chris Sandham-Bailey
hen Messerschmitt defeated FockeWulf in a competition to design the Luftwaffe’s mainstay front line fighter in 1936, the Bremen company g p y went back to the drawing board. And while the Bf 109 was being battletested and developed on the front line during the Spanish Civil War, Focke-Wulf was developing what would become the earliest prototype of the Fw 190. This first flew in June 1939, by which time the Bf 109E had already been in service for more than six months. So while Messerschmitt was working on its next major fighter – the Me 262 – Focke-Wulf was devoting all its efforts to bringing the Fw 190 and its troublesome BMW 801 piston engine into service. It was not until the spring of 1942, with the Fw 190’s future assured and with money rolling in from huge government orders, that FockeWulf turned its attention to developing the aircraft’s successor. Interviewed after the war, Focke-Wulf engineer Dr Otto Pabst told his British captors that, like Heinkel, Focke-Wulf had attempted to design its own jet engine. The report states: “Prior to the war, Dr Pabst had also worked on a gas turbine engine to be constructed by Focke-Wulf, which consisted of a double entry radial compressor and a single stage axial flow turbine with a single annular burner chamber which was expected to produce 600kg thrust at 11km or 2kg thrust at sea level. “This power plant was being considered for the Fw 200 (four engine bomber of the B-17 type).” Unlike Heinkel, Focke-Wulf was not successful and abandoned its ambition to design a jet engine in-house. 054
Luftwaffe: Secret Jets of the Third Reich
Much of the effort made in 1942 was aimed at creating a successor to the Fw 190 by replacing its perpetually overheating original powerplant with one of the multitude of p p advanced and promising piston engines then being worked on particularly by Daimler-Benz and BMW – and fitting a suitable new Fw 190like airframe around it. These included the supercharged BMW 801J and BMW P 8028, the heavy but powerful DB 614, the twin-supercharged DB 213A, the DB 609 which required massive radiators to be fitted to either side of the airframe and BMW’s hugely long P 8011 driving contrarotating propellers. Among the many different engines looked at was a simple turbojet design of FockeWulf’s own devising, different to that earlier envisaged, which could effectively be bolted onto the front of the standard Fw 190 fuselage. The device had an annular thrust nozzle – which meant it exhausted down the sides of the fuselage and underneath it, though not over the pilot’s canopy. This was expected to produce a top speed of 516mph, which was less than that projected for the Me 262 and He 280. Although it had the advantage of being able to use factory fresh Fw 190 airframes with very little modification, it was little more than a stopgap and the RLM believed that other projects held more promise. At the same time there was another engine being worked on which could not possibly have been accommodated within an airframe like that of the Fw 190 – the BMW 803. This monstrous 28-cylinder, four-row, 83.6 litre liquidcooled radial engine was essentially a pair of BMW 801s mounted back to back and driving two contra-rotating propellers.
One engine drove one propeller directly, while the other drove a number of smaller shafts threaded between the cylinders of g the other engine which then drove the other propeller via a large gearbox. It produced a whopping 3847hp, compared to, for example, the 1820hp produced by the Spitfire XIV’s Rolls-Royce Griffon 61. All the parts required to make it work, though, made the BMW 803 extremely heavy. On its own, without the rest of any aircraft it might be attached to, it weighed 9086lb fully loaded – more than the maximum takeoff weight of a Spitfire XIV in its entirety. Casting around for an airframe that might house this behemoth, Focke-Wulf’s engineers began to consider the twin boom design of the Fw 189 Uhu reconnaissance aircraft. A whole range of studies were then carried out during early 1943 on the potential of the twin boom layout to house a large and unwieldy powerplant. At the end of 1942, a young self-taught aerodynamicist working in the Focke-Wulf design department, Julius C Rotta, was asked to undertake a wide-ranging ‘blank sheet’ study looking at what sort of airframe might be best suited to housing a single turbojet powerplant and what sort of performance could be expected from it.
THE FIRST SINGLE JET DESIGNS
His report, Fundamentals For The Design of a Jet Fighter, was published on January 4, 1943, and looked at how large a jet fighter ought to be, what sort of shape and layout would be best, what jet engines could be fitted and how, what the advantages and disadvantages of piston engines and jet engines were and aerodynamic issues.