Comments by "Michael Wright" (@michaelwright2986) on "Imperial War Museums" channel.

@wanderschlosser1857 That's absolutely true, and it shows up in German designs that were studied by Western and USSR design teams: but the sweepback on the Me 262 was a Centre of Gravity decision, just as it was on the DC3 and many other aircraft where they got the calculations a bit wrong.
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@WilhelmKarsten There are many, many instance of designers introducing small amounts of wing sweep to correct CoG location. I'm not an aircraft historian: what are the primary sources for the design process of the Me262?
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@wanderschlosser1857 I stand corrected. But it is still a bit misleading to foreground the effects of sweep, as the video does, because the Me262 wasn't a "swept-wing design" in the same way that the Ta 183 or Messerchmitt P.1011 would have been, or the proposed Me262 variants with larger angles of sweep. BTW, I discover that the first proposals for wing sweep for reasons of transonic aerodynamics were first made, in Germany, well before WW2. That was really forward looking.
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@WilhelmKarsten Which myth is that? You may have noticed that in one of my posts on sweep, I pointed out that the value of wing sweep in the transonic regime was described in Germany before the war. Germany had a working, flying, gas turbine before anyone else, and was well ahead of the field in designing swept wings. Doesn't make the Me 262 an all conquering wonder-weapon, and the post-war US designs didn't follow it, but other German work.
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@WilhelmKarsten It's an extremely pervasive myth. Could you please direct us to the source that will correct this common error?
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@WilhelmKarsten Could you give a reference to records of Busemann working on the Me-262, as well as the later aircraft with much greater angles of sweep? This would perhaps also explain why the Me-262 sweep was so much less than the later designs. References, please, not rhetoric and abuse.
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@WilhelmKarsten I am not denying what you're saying. It would be important if the aerodynamic aspects of wing sweep were present in the initial design of the Me-262. But I am not going to believe that just on the say-so of some guy on the internet. WHERE ARE YOU GETTING THIS INFORMATION FROM?
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@gort8203 Thanks for confirming my suspicions. I was pursuing it because it wasn't impossible that something of what he was saying was true: I myself only know the CoG story from a chain of second-hand accounts, and certainly Busemann had done work on swept wings in the transonic region (as had an American, whose work was entirely ignored by his colleagues). But, in a case like this, documents or it didn't happen. Have you encountered the Santos Dumont fans who insist the Wright brothers were frauds?
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