Next Model

Now that I have four days off from work, I've decided to bore everyone with a gloriously irrelevant post about the next model I propose to build. Here is a Messerschmitt Me-163B Komet interceptor as operated by Nazi Germany in the last year of the war. It's a tiny tailless rocket-propelled airplane that was easily the fastest and fastest-climbing airplane of the war. The fastest Allied fighters would do about 450 miles per hour; the Me-163 would do 650 miles per hour - but not for very long because rocket engines are voracious consumers of fuel.

The peculiar-looking Me-163 was an abject failure as a warplane and, insofar as the German war effort was concerned, an egregious waste of resources. But as a technical exercise it was brilliant and established a number of aerodynamic features that we today take for granted, like the fact that thin swept wings delay the onset of compressibility effects much better than thick unswept wings, that tailless aircraft can be perfectly controllable and indeed pleasant to fly, and that if high speed flight research is your bag, rocket engines can get you to the "area of interest" with dispatch. And let's face it, compared to the old piston-engined fighters of World War Two, the Me-163 still looks modern and rakish.

I have the Academy kit and intend to finish it in the overall red scheme of PK+QL as flown by Major Wolfgang Spaethe in a demonstration in 1944.

And now, back to your normally scheduled weekend.