B-29 versus he. 277??

Quite wrong...I listed some actual loadouts covering some extreme distances. I mean carry 14,000 lb bomb-load 2182 miles away? Or a 10,000 lb load in an earlier model 1900 miles to Palembang. So it stands B-29 was in a class all by itself compared to the He-277.

 

Dear Ickysdad & Peisander:

Bader's Briar here - if you've ever read the Wikipedia entry on the He 277 in recent months, you'd have found a LOT of content there is now updated from the 1998-published book on the entire He 177 series authored by Manfred Griehl and Joachim Dressel and sold at Amazon here, and reviewed by yours truly here posting as "Dave from New England" (my real-world first name).

If you can, in any way, get a hold of a copy of that book for yourself, or from a library, PLEASE read it, and learn a lot MORE about how the He 277 turned out, in fact, to be Heinkel's Amerika Bomber contract contender by the 1943 timeframe, and that NO complete example of the He 277 was EVER COMPLETED to airworthy status at any time...in fact, exactly like the Heinkel He 343 four-jet medium bomber project, both the He 277 and He 343 never got ANY closer to airworthiness than a few completed parts for each airframe, when paid-for (from the RLM) work on each one "in their turn" was halted, with the He 277 design halted by the RLM in April 1944.

A few SCANS from that book show the He 277 was meant to be produced with a fuselage featuring a nosewheel "tricycle" landing gear and twin-tail feathers, features of the smaller, well-known He 219 Uhu (Eagle-Owl) night fighter on which it was going to be based (at least for the fuselage pattern/layout) for the Amerika Bomber contract competition, and that it COULD carry across the Atlantic - given a full consumable load of fuel and engine lubricant of 12.2 metric tons all-up, a three metric-ton bombload of six SC 500 bombs (or perhaps, I'm surmising, a pair of internally carried Fritz-X PGMs!) over a range of some 6,550 km in combat radius. The specified seven meter bomb bay length for the He 277 could just physically accomodate a pair of Fritz-X PGMs (as a very tight fit!), and had plenty of room for the similar-weight bombload of half-a-dozen SC 500s.

Further updated info about the entire He 177 series has already been posted by yours truly here in our forum, from the content of the Griehl/Dressel book...the B-29 certainly ends up a "notch higher" than the Amerika Bomber ultimate spec for the He 277 project, as the He 277 Amerika Bomber was much more a match for either the Avro Lancaster, B-24 or perhaps the Avro Lincoln, but NOT the equal of the B-29 at any time.

Yours Sincerely,

Bader's Briar....!!

 

No I stand by what I said... You are no doubt confusing the subject by comparing later low altitude night raids. It is well known that later as B-29 raids over Japan progressed high altitude missions were abandoned for low altitude incendiary raids to enable larger bomb-loads. In comparing the B-29 with the He-277 however we are talking about comparing two comparable aircraft on High altitude missions. In such a scenario the He-277 was more than comparable.

The August 10th 1945 raid on Palembang was only just within useful bomb load range from Colombo in Sri-Lanka (then British Ceylon) 1,853 staute miles. General Kenny instead however wanted a raid on Balikpapan (east Borneo) 2,608sm, but was told this was far beyond the range capability of the B-29.



The Yuwata Steel works were only just within the useful range of a B-29 from Chengdu in China, 1,860sm. When sixty eight B-29s left on June 15th 1945 for a night raid on Yuwata, only 51 aircraft reached the target area and of these only one single bomb actually hit the target.

 

A close friend of mine actually researched German archival material for Manfred Griehl's books. Over the course of many email exchanges over the years my friend complained to me that Griehl often refused to publish facts which were stated plainly in historical archives due to pressure by the German Government "to falsify certain unwelcome facts."

So let me say this again:

At least eight He-177 A6 prototype aircraft were converted in workshops at Reichlin E-2 into He-277 B5 aircraft with twin fins and 2,060hp Jumo 213E engines (produced for the Ju-188 & Ta-152). (Source: Hitler’s Last Weapons, Josef Garlinski, Magnum Books 1979 – based on earlier works by German author Uwe Feist eg: Hirsch, R.S.; Feist, Uwe and Nowarra, Heinz J. Heinkel 177 "Greif" (Aero Series 13). Fallbrook, CA: Auro Publishers Inc., 1967. ISBN 0-8168-0548-2.)



You are quite incorrect as the He-277 was not intended to be a nose wheel aircraft however an unbuilt projected version would have been developed as a nosewheel aircraft.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoghPts44Ng

 

I always know when you run out of arguments Dave because you resort toi purile cheap insults.

B-29 range capability from B-29 operations manual:



He-277 Sources:

Hirsch, R.S.; Feist, Uwe and Nowarra, Heinz J. Heinkel 177 "Greif" (Aero Series 13). Fallbrook, CA: Auro Publishers Inc., 1967. ISBN 0-8168-0548-2

Hitler’s Last Weapons, Josef Garlinski, Magnum Books 1979

Gunston, Bill. The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Combat Aircraft of World War II, Salamander Books, London, 1978.

Kay, A L & Smith, J R. German Aircraft of the Second World War, Putnam Aeronautical Books, London, 2002.

Ottomotoren mit Direkteinspritzung: Verfahren, Systeme, Entwicklung, Potenzial Edited by Richard van Basshuysen, Ulrich Spicher, 2009

Engine performance - the DB603S equipped with the TK11 turbosupercharger was analgous to the DB603N:

 

I've argued with you the same amout of times that there were He 277s built.

Zero.

You are cherry picking theoretical/projected performance and even at that I don't see anything there talking about 49,000 feet.

 

That seems self contradictory to me. Now maybe high performance and low reliabilty/availability but I just can't consider a system that has a very low reliability/availability rate as being of very high quality.

 

Boiled down, well crafted junk. A bad design that was built really well.

 

The raid of 8/14/1945 was hardly what one would could call a low altitude raid by ETO standards. You must remember that those two earlier Yawata and Palembang raids were with B-29's which carried several more crew,10-.50 caliber MG's along with turret mechanisms and around 2000-4000 lbs of ammo whilst the later raids were after users had more expierience in flying the plane... I have in front of me a document showing a B-29 capable of carrying 5 tons of bombs out to 1600 miles while having a full crew and full armament(with turrets and all ton/ton and a half of ammo)..One of your own documents shows a B-29 capable of carrying 10 tons out to 1500 miles.Operationally B-29's flew a lot of high altitude bombing operations from the Marianas carrying 6-8 tons of bombs at least 1500+ miles at high altitude. I also wonder if the He 277 could have coped with the winds the B-29 coped with over Japan.


http://www.warbirdsforum.com/topic/4673-b29-range/

http://www.warbirdsforum.com/topic/3252-b-29-versus-he-277/

http://www.warbirdsforum.com/topic/487-b-29s-in-combat/


http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB162/9.pdf