Willy Messerschmitt - Wizard of Warplane
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Transcript of Willy Messerschmitt - Wizard of Warplane
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Over nearly half a century, Willy Messerschmitt designed a remarkable array of aircraft
By Stephan Wilkinson
The career of Germanys most famous airplane designer nearly
sputtered out before it took off. Willy Messerschmitt (only
his mother called him Wilhelm) began as a builder of stone-
simple postWorld War I gliders, then moved on to powered
sailplanes with what would today be considered riding-mower
en gines. A series of light sport planes followed, and during the late
1920s and early 30s Messerschmitt designed several successful
four- to 12-seat airliners. In 1935, thanks to such a modest avia-
tion background, Third Reich offcials told him to not even bother
competing against Germanys major manufacturers for the con-
tract to build the Luftwaffes new air-superiority fghter.
Messerschmitt tested just how small his chances were by quietly
putting out word that he was considering
leaving the industry and accepting a profes-
sorship at Danzig Technical University. He
was then encouraged by the Reichsluft fahrt
ministeriumthe RLM, the bureaucracy
that controlled all aviation in Nazi Ger-
manyto hurry up and accept the job,
because his work as an airplane designer
was of no importance. Talk about dis-
couraging words
But they didnt discourage Willy Messer-
schmitt. On his frst try at gaining a real
military contract, he produced the Bf-109,
the most revolutionary and effective fghter
of its day. Spitfre advocates will argue
that point endlessly, but nobody can deny
it was an accomplishment akin to Clyde
Cessna turning out the P-51 after a lifetime
of lightplanes. Messerschmitt had one advantage over his competi-
tors: Since the RLM initially didnt consider him part of the formal
competition, he could design as he wished rather than having to
stay within the parameters stipulated by the aviation ministry. The
result was the Bf-109the smallest, simplest and lightest possible
airframe that could be wrapped around one pilot, the requisite
armament and a large and powerful V12 engine.
The Bf-109 was by no stretch of the imagination an up-engined
Bf-108, though the family resemblance between the two is strong.
What the 109 did take from its family-sedan precursor was Willys
extreme emphasis on simple, modular construction with major
forces concentrated at a few points on the airframe, such as the
sturdy engine mount suspended from the
frewall, where landing-gear loads were also
localized. Bf/Me-109s could be built in
4,000 to 6,000 man-hours, depending on
the year of manufacture, while it took two
or three times as long to build a complex,
largely hand-wrought Spitfre or Hurricane.
Willy went on to create a second game-
changer, and he did it while the world was
collapsing around him, his factories bat-
tered by Allied bombers. American and
British fghters by this time were superior to
even the best of his 109 versions. Yet while
the Yanks and Brits struggled to create a
few lumpish proto-jets, few of which ever
made it into limited combat, Messerschmitt
directed the design and engineering of the
Me-262, and his company produced more
22 AV I AT I O N H I S T O RY MARCH 2014
Wilhelm Willy Messerschmitt in 1938.
sueddeutsche zeitung/alamy
-
Black 2, a Messerschmitt Me-109G-10
converted from a Spanish-built Hispano-
engine version, sports the markings of
Luftwaffe ace Friedrich-Karl Mller.
joHn M
. diBBS/tHe pLane picture co.
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24 AV I AT I O N H I S T O RY MARCH 2014
than 1,400 of the twin-engine jets, 300 of which saw action.
Think of that: While the U.S. and Britain were still experiment-
ing, a nation that had already lost the war managed to produce
an effective operational jet fghter 100 mph faster than the Allied
fghters that opposed it, thanks to Willy Messerschmitt and the
team of engineers he had gathered. (To be fair, no legendary air-
craft designer ever created a complex, high-performance airplane
on his own. Robert Lusser, Messerschmitts project offce director,
and Richard Bauer, chief design engineer, had a great deal to do
with the design of the Bf-109; and engineers Wolfgang Degel, Karl
Althoff and Rudolf Seitz were crucial to the development of the
Me-262, a project directed by Waldemar Voigt because Lusser had
been hired away by Willys archenemy Ernst Heinkel.)
And lets not belittle Messerschmitts lightplanes. In 1934 he cre-
ated a four-seat personal aircraft, the Bf-108
Taifun, that would only see its equal in per-
formance and effciency when the Beech
Bonanza was introduced in 1947. There are
Taifun owners todaythe design stayed
in production with the French Nord com-
pany into the 1960swho wouldnt trade
their rides for any single-engine spamcan
yet produced.
Willy got his own private pilots license
in 1929, which wasnt an occasion for uni-
versal delight. Fritz Hille, sales director of
the company for which Willy worked,
Bayerische Flugzeugwerk, went public with the claim that Messer-
schmitts new fying hobby was an irresponsible distraction from
his duties as developmental head of the frm. Hille then resigned,
blaming Messerschmitt for a variety of fnancial problems that BFW
was experiencingthe company was close to bankruptcyand im-
mediately went to work for Heinkel, making it clear that the whole
ploy was an attempt to discredit BFW.
As a pilot, Messerschmitt was no Kurt Tank, the famous Focke-
Wulf designer who was as skilled a test pilot as he was an engineer
(and who had worked for Willy in the early 1930s). Messerschmitt
had his own Bf-108, though he only few it with a company pilot in
the right seat. On one fight, he announced that he wanted to fy the
whole leg on his own, with the copilot acting solely as a silent safety
pilot. Messerschmitt forgot to retract the Taifuns landing gear after
takeoff and few the whole distance with the gear down. To Willys
embarrassment, his copilot, per orders, never said a word.
Messerschmitt went on to direct the design of a surprisingly var-
ied assortment of aircraft, including the Me-209, which held the
world piston-engine speed record until 1969; a four-engine Me-264
Amerika Bomber (a planned six-engine version never few, nor
did the sweptwing version with auxiliary turbojet engines); the
worlds frst swing-wing jet, the P.1101 prototype, model for the
U.S. Air Forces Bell X-5; and a massive cargo glider that in its
powered form was the C-5 of its day, the Me-321/323. The one
Messerschmitt that Willy had little to do with was the Me-163
rocket plane, a product of Alexander Lippischs fevered brain.
Messerschmitt in fact wanted to redesign it as the Me-334, with
a Daimler-Benz 605 V12 and pusher prop in place of the danger-
ous, barely controllable bomb that Lippisch had placed in its tail
(Messerschmitt engineers called it the Flying Firecracker).
It all started when 15-year-old Messerschmitt apprenticed
himself to German glider pioneer Friedrich Harth just before
World War I. Since gliding was the only way to train a cadre
of future Luftwaffe pilots without openly fouting the pro-
visions of the Versailles Treaty, the sport became particularly
impor tant in Germany in the 1920s, by which time Messerschmitt
was improving Harths designs and increasingly working on his
own. (Germany was so glider-savvy that the Luftwaffe developed
the concept of troop-carrying gliders, frst used in combat in
May 1940, during a stunningly successful glider assault on the
impregnable Belgian Fort Eben-Emael. Even today, German
Messerschmitts frst designs were sailplanes such as the s 10, shown fying in 1922.
Messerschmitt stands in front of his Bristol cherubpowered Motorfugzeug M 17, now on display at Munichs deutsches Museum.
photos: eads corporate heritage
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MARCH 2014 AV I AT I O N H I S T O RY 25
competition sailplanes reign supreme.)
Willy had a lot to learn. His frst few designs were controlled by
pivoting the entire wing from a joint above the minimal fuselage
part wing-warping, part angle-of-attack shifting, a concept hed
learned from Harth, who called it wing control. There were no
other movable control surfaces, just a trimmable tailplane. Even
when Messerschmitt built his frst powered airplane, in 1924the
S 15, basically a motorgliderhe still resorted to wing-warping
for lateral control, though at least now the wing was fxed and the
airplane had an elevator.
His next design, the S 16, looked like a real airplane rather than a
spindly single-seat glider, and it had normal ailerons, a rudder, an
elevator, wheeled landing gear and a passenger seat. Willy was done
not only with Harths wing-control concept but also with unpow-
ered fight, other than the aberrant World War II Me-321 Gigant.
In 1924 Messerschmitt founded his own company. He continued
his and Harths model num-
bering se quence, but the
designator S (Segelfugzeug,
or sailplane) became an M
(Motorfugzeug, or motor-
plane). The S 16 was fol-
lowed by the M 17. That
sequence ended with the
sole 1934 M 35a six-seat,
single-engine passenger car-
rier built for a Romanian
airline. At that point Adolf
Hitlers RLM began assign-
ing designators and model
numbers to Germanys
various manufacturers, so
Messerschmitts next design
necessarily became the
Bf-108Bf because Willy
Messerschmitt was now
design director of Bayerische
Flugzeugwerke.
This eventually became
the excuse for an endlessly
argued piece of Messerschmitt trivia: Is Willys fghter a Bf-109 or
an Me-109? Reasonable historians say its both, depending on the
variant. By 1938, Messerschmitt quietly controlled enough of
BFWs stock that the company made him its managing director
and chairman of the board. The 109 and its designer had become so
well known that Bayerische rode his coattails by renaming itself
Messerschmitt AG. As a result, aircraft designed and de veloped by
Bayerische are properly designated Bfs, and those birthed by suc-
cessor Messerschmitt AG can be considered Mes. Which means the
A through D models of the 109 are Bf-109s, and the E through Z
models are Me-109s. (Yes, there was an Me-109Za twin-fuselage,
F-82-like variant that was built but never fown.) This is also the
opinion of the historical offce of todays German air force.
Others claim all 109s are Bfs and that theres no such thing
as an Me-109. Yet if you ask any air-minded U.S. WWII vet to
name the airplane, to a man theyll say, Its a Messerschmitt
an Me-109. Which gave rise
to that hoariest of aviation
jokesthe one that comes in
many varieties but always has
as its punch line Those fokkers
were Messerschmitts.
How, exactly, did an
aero nautical engineer
become powerful
enough to buy the
company he worked for? After
all, Kelly Johnson never bought
Lockheed, nor did Ed Heine-
mann ever come close to taking
over Douglas. But Willy Mes-
ser schmitt found himself a rich
sponsorand roommate. At
the time when BFW was in
fnancial trouble, he had met
and fallen for the Baroness Lilly
von Michel-Raulino Stromeyer,
the daughter of a wealthy Ba var-
ian family. She was smart and
charles Lindbergh examines the cockpit of a Bf-109 during an
interwar visit to the Messerschmitt plant in Augsburg, Bavaria.
despite a family resemblance, the Bf-108 shared very few design features with its groundbreaking successor, the Bf-109 fghter.
sdasm/alamy
interfoto/alamy
-
26 AV I AT I O N H I S T O RY MARCH 2014
beautiful, but she was seven
years older than Willy and
already married, to fn ancier
Otto Stromeyer.
Nevertheless, Willy asked
Lilly for help, and she per-
suaded her husband to buy
an 87.5-percent share of
BFW; Messerschmitt owned
the remaining 12.5 percent
of the stock. The more they
saw of each other, the more
Lilly became fascinated by
the daring, dashing young
engineer. He was distinguished-looking,
in a dark-eyed, sharp-featured, professo-
rial way. And above all, he was a vivid
contrast to her boring, stuffy husband.
Inevitably, the baroness and the engineer
began an affair.
They went about it quite openly, which
was shocking to the cackling busybodies,
as one Messerschmitt biography put it, of
Catholic Bavaria. To say nothing of the fact that Otto Stromeyer
was the chairman of Messerschmitts board, of which Willy had
become a member. But never mind, that was Willys waythe
hell with convention, with the ordinary way of doing things
and the baroness was equally bold. Independently wealthy, she
soon divorced her husband, took control of her own share of the
Stromeyer Messerschmitt stock and moved in with Willy, though
they werent married until 1952.
Throughout a large part of his career, Willy Messerschmitt had
one implacable and powerful enemy: Erhard Milch, a bureaucrat
who became head of the RLM and ultimately a Luftwaffe General
feldmarschall. Their bad blood extended back to the late 1920s,
when Milch was managing director of the airline Luft Hansa.
Messerschmitt designed and built for Luft Hansa a single-engine,
10-passenger airliner with a large but lightweight cantilever, single-
spar wingthe M 20. Its payload as a percentage of gross weight
was remarkable, and its huge 500-hp BMW V12 en gine could be
run at very low power settings in cruise, for economy.
Unfortunately, the frst M 20 crashed as a result of some trailing-
edge wing fabric tearing loose during a landing approach, which
caused Luft Hansas chief test pilot, Hans Hackmack, to panic and
jump out only 250 feet above the ground. His parachute
never deployed, and he was killed. It was later deter-
mined that if hed simply continued the landing, all would
have ended well. Hackmack was a close friend of Erhard
Milchs, and Milch never forgave Messerschmitt for react-
ing coldly to the pilots death. As far as Willy was concerned,
Hackmack had screwed up and destroyed his airplane. Milch
thereafter thwarted Messerschmitt every chance he got, cancel-
ing contracts and projects, removing RLM subsidies and openly
favoring other manufacturers. In Milchs defense, Messerschmitt
seemed unlovable to others as well; he and Ernst Heinkel loathed
each otherHeinkel considered him a glider-builder, not a legiti-
mate warplane designerand Willy parted ways with pioneering
designer Alexander Lippisch during development of the Me-163.
Willy wasnt perfect as a designer. He has often been accused of
building fimsy airplanes that crashed, but only by people who con-
fuse lightness with fimsiness. Some of his aircraft did crash, most
notably that Luft Hansa M 20, which also suffered two weather-
related fatal crashes in airline service (though Milch blamed Mes-
serschmitts design for the second of them, claiming the speci fed
gross weight resulted in an overload). But Messerschmitts record
was no worse than those of other designers of the time.
Landing-gear design, however, was a challenge that Messer-
schmitt never quite conquered. In 1931 he invented single-strut
landing geara simple tubular strut housing the entire shock-
absorbing mechanism with few moving parts, a concept that soon
became common. But a number of his
airplanes suffered landing-gear col-
lapses, and the problems created by the
narrow, knock-kneed, diffcult-to-align
main gear on the 109 have been amply
discussed. The original Me-262 proto-
types had conventional tailwheel gear,
requiring a delicate tap on the brakes
during the takeoff run to get the tail off
the ground. When Messerschmitt as a
result added a tricycle-gear nosewheel, it
often collapsed.
national archives; inset: interfoto/a
lamy
Future Luftwaffe inspector General Erhard Milch (left)
became Messerschmitts enemy due to the crash of the
BFW M 20 (above), which killed pilot Hans Hackmack.
the dangerously unstable Me-210, Messerschmitts worst design, damaged his reputation.
national archives
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MARCH 2014 AV I AT I O N H I S T O RY 27
Messerschmitts worst blunder, however, was the Me-210. The
109 is easily the most famous German airplane ever to fy, but the
210 has been called the worst single airplane Germany ever devel-
oped. Willy was asked by the RLM to quickly turn the Me-110 into
a dive bomber, since the Junkers Ju-87 Stuka was growing long in
the tooth and the 110 wasnt having much success as a twin-engine
fghter/bomber-destroyer. Messerschmitt, as was his wont, did as
he wished and instead developed a totally new airplane that turned
out to have dangerous stability problems. The Me-210 was laterally
unpredictable, and since its propellers were unusually far ahead of
the center of gravity, this could have been longitudinally destabi-
lizing, particularly if power was suddenly added during a too-low
landing approach.
Thanks to many accidents, including landing-gear collapses
while taxiing, the Me-210 was adjudged useless as a combat aircraft
and withdrawn from service; production was canceled. It was a
hugely expensive mistake, and Messerschmitts reputation suffered
a crushing blow. He was shifted to production oversight responsi-
bilities, and design duties were largely removed from his purview.
After World War II, Willy Messerschmitt should have been a
beaten man. His fall from grace, from prosperity, from a position
of command and control was all but complete. His factories were
in ruins, and nobody seemed to care about his accomplishments.
He was briefy fown to London and interrogated after Germanys
surrender, then summarily shipped back to Germany for intern-
ment. While his counterparts Alexander Lippisch and Hans von
Ohain were swept up by Operation Paperclip and sent to the U.S.,
where they lived happily ever after, Messerschmitt ended up for-
gotten in a harsh, American-run camp called Heilbronn. He nearly
died of exposure and starvation during the winter of 1945-46. One
guard took it upon himself to shelter Messerschmitt inside a bar-
racks building, and perhaps because of what that soldier learned
from talking with him, the Americans fnally found out who they
had imprisoned.
Messerschmitt was moved to slightly more comfortable quarters,
but only to await the 1948 Nuremberg Trials. Meanwhile, a nephew
learned where he was being held and brought him a drafting table
and supplies. With them, Willy designed a watch that had only
three moving parts. He sold the drawings to a Swiss company for
5,000 Swiss francsenough that it became Messerschmitts post-
war start-up stake.
But frst, Willy was sentenced to two years in prison for know-
ingly using slave laborers, many of whom had come from Dachau,
near his Augsburg factory. Was Messerschmitt a Nazi? Yes. He
wore a swastika lapel pin constantly, and his party membership
number was 342354. Some say that he was not anti-Semitic, and
his membership was simply something he felt he needed to get the
government contracts that Erhard Milch had been blocking.
Upon his release, forbidden from laboring in the nonexistent
German aviation industry, Messerschmitt put his mind back to
work. First he designed a large wind turbine that, though never built,
had all the characteristics of todays renewable-energy machines:
variable-pitch blades to maintain a constant rpm, automatic over-
speed protection and aircraft-quality alloy construction. He also
missed the boat in 1953, when he began but never fnished work on
a hydraulic turbojet engine for forced-water marine propulsion.
Today such units propel jet boats and jet skis.
His frst productive project was prefab housing to renew Ger-
manys carpet-bombed residential areas. His units were built using
the simplifed alloy-frame construction techniques that Willy had
brian silcox, messerschmitt foundation/eads deutschland
Horst philipp pilots an Me-262A-1/c, outftted with General Electric cJ-610 engines, over ingolstadt, Germany, in september 2007.
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designed into the 109 and other airplanes, and the individual units
were stackable and expandable in multistory complexes.
By 1951, Messerschmitt had reassembled some of his war-
time crew and rented factory quarters in Munich to build
home sewing machinesmuch needed in postwar Ger-
many. Production of these Messerschmitts continued until
1959, but quality control was poor, and they barely made a mark
on the market.
Messerschmitts best-known postwar product was his bubble
car, the KR 175 and 200canopied, tandem-seat three-wheelers
that looked like rolling fghter cockpits. Today they are prized
by enthusiasts, and one sold at this years Barrett-Jackson clas-
sic cars auction for $42,900.
Willy was always the frst to
point out, however, that the
KR was designed not by him
but by aeronautical engineer
Fritz Fend. What Willy brought
to the party was his talent at
ration alizing a fnal design for
the most effcient production,
just as he had with the Bf-109.
Neither the repentant Ger-
mans nor the Allies could forbid
Messerschmitt from working
in another countrys aviation
industry, so Willy approached both Spain and South Africa to see if
either fancied his designing and manufacturing airplanes for them.
South Africa passed, but Spain was a natural, since Germany had
always had friendly relations with dictator Francisco Francos gov-
ernment, beginning with the provision of aircraftincluding some
of the very frst Bf-109sfor Francos rebels during the Spanish
Civil War.
The Spanish company HASA (Hispano Aviacin S.A., which
became CASA and eventually was absorbed by Airbus Industrie)
was already license-manufacturing a version of the 109 with a
Rolls-Royce Merlin enginethe unfortunately bloodhound-nosed
HA-1112 Buchonand in 1951 it had called on Willy as a Buchon
adviser. In 1952 Messerschmitt put together a small team of German
engineers, including some who had worked for him during the war,
and he designed a trainer for the Spanish air force.
The HA-100 looked much like the T-28 Trojannot because
Willy had copied the North American design but because both
were built to the same criteria: an advanced, piston-engine, tricycle-
gear, tandem-cockpit military trainer. Both the original T-28A and
the HA-100 Triana, as it was called, used an 800-hp Wright R-1300
radial, and the Triana was slightly lighter and faster. The Spanish
were happy and wanted Willy to build 40 for them, but Spain
couldnt afford the Wright engines. The two prototypes were
scrapped, though their wings
were used in Messerschmitts
next project: the HA-200 Saeta
jet trainer, a few of which are
still being fown by American
and European enthusiasts look-
ing for a cheap way to get into
jet warbirding.
Always in search of effciency
and economy, Willy recycled as
much of the HA-100 design as
he could. But removing the big
radial from the nose and mount-
ing the two French Turbomeca
Marbor jets conventionallyin the wing roots or somewhere
behind the cockpitwould create a weight shift requiring a sub-
stantial redesign. So he stuck the small turbojets right where the
Wright had been, in the nose, just behind a catfsh-mouth air inlet.
When HASA tried to sell the HA-100 and -200 to other air forces,
its sales brochures emphasized Messerschmitts role, boasting that
he had been involved in every facet of the designsboth air-
craft have been personally designed and worked through by Willy
Messerschmitt down to the last detail. Egypt bought 10 HA-200s
and built another 90 under license.
28 AV I AT I O N H I S T O RY MARCH 2014
Hispano Aviacin s.A.s Merlin-powered HA-1112 Buchon kept the Me-109 fying over spain into the 1950sand thereafter in movies.
the lightweight HA-300 might have out-gnatted Follands Gnat.
eads corporate heritage
richard paver
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MARCH 2014 AV I AT I O N H I S T O RY 29
It would be the last real Messerschmitt,
the fnal production airplane to fully
embody Willys emphasis on light weight,
modular construction, the combination of
several functions into single components
and attention to reducing assembly labor.
But Messerschmitt had one last jewel in
his vault: the HA-300, a sweptwing fghter
that at least on paper was as sleek and
potent-looking as anything from Dassault
or Lockheed in the early 1960s. Willys super-
jet was intended to use an afterburning
Bris tol (later Rolls-Royce) Olympus engine,
a version of which would power the Con-
corde. The British demanded that Spain
co-fund development of the reheat version,
which the Spanish couldnt afford any more
than they could afford elderly Wright radials.
Egypt, however, ended up owning the
HA-300 design when it bought the licens-
ing rights to the HA-200, and the Egyptians
were getting tired of Soviet demands as a
condition of supporting Egypts MiG feet.
They wanted their own jet, so they built
two HA-300 prototypes, one of which frst
few (with a non-afterburning Olympus)
in 1964. Messerschmitt enticed his friend
Ferdinand Brandner to come to Egypt, for
Brandner had helped develop the Junkers
Jumo 222 jet engine and, after being for-
cibly adopted by the Soviets, designed the
most powerful turboprop in the world
at the timethe 12,000-hp Kuznetsov
NK-12. Brandner was developing an
afterburning engine for Messerschmitts
HA-300 when the 1967 Six-Day Wara
disaster for the Egyptiansand renewed
Soviet ties scotched the project. Had they
not, Messerschmitt and Brandner might
well have created the lightest supersonic
fghter in the world.
Willy Messerschmitt died in September
1978 at the age of 80the only aircraft
designer ever to give his name to such a vast
and remarkable array of aircraft spanning
nearly half a century. J
For further reading, frequent contributor
Stephan Wilkinson recommends: Willy Mes-
serschmitt: Pioneer of Aviation De sign, by
Hans J. Ebert, Johann B. Kaiser and Klaus
Peters; Sharks of the Air: Willy Messer-
schmitt and How He Built the Worlds
First Operational Jet Fighter, by James Neal
Harvey; and Augsburg Eagle: The Story of
the Messerschmitt 109, by William Green.
Test pilots who few the Messer-
schmitt Me-210 in the late 1930s
reported serious design flaws.
Airplanes with checkered histories are
usually overlooked by model manu-
facturers, but in 1972 Revell issued a
1/72nd-scale Me-210A-1 that also fea-
tured parts for the improved Me-410.
And in 1998 Italeri released a new tooling
of the fghter, also in 1/72nd scale. Both
kits had short production lives, but a
determined modeler can still fnd Italeris
offering at swap meets or on the Internet.
I started construction on my Italeri
kit by painting the cockpit Schwarzgrau,
RLM-66, as indicated for day fghters in
the Offcial Monogram Painting Guide to
German Aircraft, 1935 to 1945. An expan-
sive greenhouse covers the pilots and
gunners positions. This is an area where
considerable time and effort will add
interest. The pilots area requires little
improvement, but the gunners compart-
ment needs scratch-built enhancements.
The A-1 version, which had a bomb
bay in the nose, was often used as a dive
bomber. I improved this area by box-
ing it in with plastic sheet. Next I assem-
bled two 1,100-pound bombs, sprayed
them dark green and set them aside.
Carefully cement the fuselage parts
together, to ensure the cockpit rests level.
I applied glue to the tabs on the horizon-
tal stabilizers, then left the assembly to
dry with blocks of balsa wood propping
them at 90 degrees to the vertical tail.
Its easy to overlook the two small tabs
of plastic that are glued into the cutouts
in the bottom of the main wing engine
nacelles. These rectangles of plastic serve
as a base that supports the main landing-
gear legs. With the main gear supports
solidly in place, glue the right and left
wing to the bottom section, and then
cement the completed wing assembly to
the fuselage.
Next ft the nosepiece into the front of
the fuselage. At this point it will become
evident whether or not the cockpit has
been cemented level into the fuselage.
You may need to correct the assembly by
trimming, sanding and flling.
While the fuselage is drying, assemble
the cowlings for the Daimler-Benz DB
601F engines. These cowls are handed
for the counter-rotating props, so use
care when gluing them to the wings.
Some flling and sanding will be needed
at the wing-to-fuselage joints and also the
attachments for the engine nacelles.
Check over your work, then fnish off the
basic construction with a spray of primer.
German aircraft camoufage colors
have long been controversial for model-
ers. Luftwaffe Fighter Aircraft in Profle, by
Claes Sundin and Christer Bergstrom,
indicates it was generally accepted from
1941 to 1944 that the undersides, vertical
stabilizer and a portion of the fuselage
sides of day fghters were painted RLM-76,
often called Lichtblau. The topside cam-
oufage on the wings, horizontal stabi-
lizers and top section of the fuselage
should be painted in a splinter pattern of
RLM-82, Dunkelgrn, and RLM-02, Grau.
The splinter pattern is accomplished by
frst painting the appropriate areas with
Grau, and then masking it off and spray-
ing with dark green, RLM-82. The mot-
tling on the fuselage and vertical tail is
achieved by spraying with RLM-75,
Grau violett, in irregular blotches. Note
that the camoufage pattern is illustrated
on the back of the kit box.
Mask and then paint the Me-210s
bomb bay RLM-02. When its dry, glue
the bombs into place. Once all the paint-
ing is complete, spray a coat of gloss over
the entire model, so theres a smooth
surface for the decal markings to adhere
to. Note that the kit offers markings for
two aircraft, one for Zerstrergeschwader 2
and anotherwhich I chosefrom ZG.8,
from Sicily in 1942.
Paint the landing-gear struts RLM-02
and the wheels tire black. Finally, mask
and paint the greenhouse, and then posi-
tion it in place using white glue.
Dick Smith
Build a Messerschmitt Me-210
dick smith