Then...by the time you get into skinning the planes....you can have even more fun..... there's me as the pilot...

Nice! This might be something to look into, both your screenshots look amazing!

On the P-47 again..

Pushed up to the sound barrier.  Not able to go through it.

The P-38 could get close enough in a full throttle, high altitude power dive to start to flutter, shudder and rip aeirolons off.

The one aircraft that did really seriously push the sound barrier was the Me-163 Komet.

Pilots were warned in training not to dive under engine power and even in glide had to brake in long dives.

German engineers couldn't get a handle on the fact that the stresses were from compression of the atmosphere at speed and never remedied it.

Thats rocket powered though. Stands to reason it may have got close or broke through.

Yes--rocket powered but before jets were really perfected and combat operational.

The German engineers were baffled because they knew the engine could accelerate the aircraft faster but it began to fall apart as it accelerated past a certain point (and it was already a death trap).

Another thing they never quite figured out was that their gyroscopic gun sites were too slow to track as fast as the Komet could be brought about.

The survival rates of experienced pilots was so low and their combat deployments in the Komet so brief that no one could understand why the guns were so inaccurate until near the end of the war.

FYI Jafo--there's "Google Mars" too.

The Komet is the aircraft definitely known to have been pushing the sound barrier--by war's end, engineers were understanding more about compression and it's possible post WWII someone pushed close.  If you break the sound barrier though you know it.  There is a huge shake and a rush forward in speed--it would have been like nothing experienced before at that time.

The Me-262 got really nailed on landing and to a lesser extent the Komet did too.  The Allies knew very little about the Komet until after the war.  The largest number of Komet fatalities was from the droppable landing trolley bouncing back up and hitting the underside of the fuselage and detonating the explosive fuel mixture it used.  The other common cause was rough landings on the skid that caused the craft to bound and on dropping back, sloshing together unspent fuel elements--blowing up the craft yet another way.

The plane handled very well and was easy to fly but it was a monster on the details and took fast thinking and keen observation to avoid catastrophe and handle at full speed well enough to engage a target.

First I'm hearing of a plane going SOS that early in the war. The Germans had some pretty good equipment and in some respects were years ahead of the rest of the world. Good solid engineering but with the wrong people in charge. Had the upper echelons left things alone and not listened to their half crazed bosses the world might be a very different place. Werner Von Braun? (not sure if name is correct) might have stayed in Germany and Einstein might have stayed too instead of coming to the US in the early thirties.

Really need to brush up on my history. OMG!

The Sabre was the first 'operational' aircraft to do it....but still needed a shallow dive....

Wasn't the first supersonic jet the F-100 Super Sabre that achieved it in level flight.

Yes....first in level flight.     ...........

You sure Jafo??? The Skyray was a few years before the F-100, and it could achieve it in level flight.

The Skyray was the first carrier launched plane to go supersonic @ 752.943 mph. Short lived service and never saw combat. Had to refer to Wikipedia to get it straight. It was the first Navy and Marine fighter to exceed Mach 1 in level flight. Originally designated F4D but later changed to F6.

Nah...in service...56 vs 54 for the Sabre...

The RAF Swift was in sevice in 54 too.... as for who did what first in prototype...the Swift had the world absolute record in proto in 53 ...but that's 'beyond' mach ...so when it may have gone transonic vs the others...first....who knows.

Probably all that's really logged is sevice entry dates...

There you go.....world's fastest prop-driven..... flop. ...

Yeah, I remember that one. Much like the VTOL that almost but not quite made it. Remember the Gremlin? Tiny jet that hooked up to a mothership, B-36 I think it was. Ugly little sucker.

You want to know a cool job...I interviewed with Lockheed back when the F-22 was still under design.  They had models of the F-22 before it was a real thing and models of lots of planes you've probably never heard of because they never made it to "mass" production.   Besides that, I would have been designing the real thing.  In the end, though, I took another job for the better pay.  But there was no question this was cool work.  All the defense jobs were pretty cool.    They're also relatively easy to get...if you're white or black, English is your first language, and you're unquestionably American.  

I wonder...is there a website that caters to aviation? More specifically prototypes or X planes?