In April 1941, the prototype of the world’s first operational jet fighter made its maiden flight with a Junkers Jumo 210 piston engine and a wooden propeller bolted to its nose, because the jet engines were not ready. This episode treats the Messerschmitt Me 262 as a biographical subject, tracing it from Project P.1065 in April 1939 under Woldemar Voigt, through Hans von Ohain’s 1936 jet engine and the Heinkel He 178 flight in 1939, to a combat debut in 1944 at 900 kilometers per hour, roughly 150 km/h faster than any Allied fighter in Europe, armed with four 30mm cannons.

The story is one of accidental engineering and crippling shortages. Its famous 18.5 degree swept outer wings were added in March 1940 purely to rebalance heavier-than-promised BMW 003 engines that had been moved from the wing roots to underwing pods, not for speed, yet they brushed against the principles of transonic flight. Its Junkers Jumo 004 engines, built with mild steel and an aluminum coating because blockaded Germany lacked nickel, cobalt, and molybdenum, needed a complete teardown after 10 to 25 hours. And its fuselages were assembled by enslaved laborers from the Gusen II concentration camp, where life expectancy was six months and an estimated 35,000 to 50,000 people died.

• How a double flameout in 1942 was survived only because the piston engine was still in the nose, saving the entire program from becoming a smoking crater
• Why Hitler’s Sturmvogel bomber order delayed the first fighter unit by less than three weeks, and why melting engines and raw material shortages were the real fatal flaw
• Eric Brown’s two-second firing window: closing on B-17 formations at over 100 meters per second with no dive brakes, opening fire at 600 meters and breaking off at 200
• Fritz Wendel’s brake-tap takeoff trick to lift the tail out of its own exhaust turbulence, and why tricycle nose gear followed
• Allied fighters loitering over German airfields to catch jets on approach, the March 1945 four-to-one kill ratio that dented only one percent of a 1,200-bomber raid, and how Operation Lusty fed swept wings and leading-edge slats into the F-86 Sabre and MiG-15