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Plane Panels Part Two

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In my last column, “Can you pick a panel for a plane?” we paired some grand old Air Force cockpit photos with examples of the aircraft depicted.

Here’s another installment, including an exotic German Messerschmitt Me 262 jet fighter that was part of the collection of foreign aircraft gathered at the end of World War II.

All of these photos came in a group, likely from Dayton, Ohio’s Wright Field in the 1940s.

The two Me 262 cockpit photos reveal a mash-up of German and American instruments, alongside placards in English intended to keep American test pilots ahead of the then-modern jet fighter they were evaluating.

The characteristically offset instrument panel of the German Me 262 World War II jet fighter is captured in this Wright Field photograph, circa 1945. Instruments are a mix of German and American. The vertical lever at the lower left portion of the sidewall has a hand-lettered sign proclaiming it is a noswewheel brake. (Air Force photo via the Peter M. Bowers collection)

Visible on the left sidewall of the Messerschmitt’s cockpit is a newly fashioned bracket with an American oxygen blinker flow gauge and pressure gauge. It’s not surprising that a high-altitude system as crucial as oxygen would have been Americanized in this postwar-evaluation copy of the jet.

The left sidewall of the Me 262 cockpit includes dual throttles for the Junkers Jumo turbojet engines. The throttles were constructed with a stop to prevent them from inadvertently being pulled too far back into idle until landing was assured, to give enough power to enable a go around since early jet engines were notoriously slow to deliver thrust when throttles were advanced. (Air Force photo via the Peter M. Bowers collection)
Not combat over Europe, but a friendly bout in the U.S. between a captured German Me 262 jet fighter with a Lockheed P-38 Lightning rolling in from the distance. This might be the Me 262 depicted in the cockpit photos. The German jet’s pilot in this picture is U.S. Army Air Forces Maj. Russ Schleeh. On a later flight, an uncontrollable engine fire necessitated bail-out by the pilot, sending this Messerschmitt to its demise. (Army Air Forces photo via the Peter M. Bowers collection)

The panel of the Bell YP-59A Airacomet shows America’s first jet aircraft, with a cockpit layout that uses typical Bell stamped ribbed rudder pedals much like those used on the famed P-39 Airacobra fighter produced in the thousands by Bell during World War II.

The United States pinned its first jet aircraft hopes on the Bell P-59 Airacomet during World War II. While much was learned from the P-59 about the evolving art of the jet aircraft, its performance could be bested by existing piston-engine aircraft. The Air Force photographed the cockpit of YP-59A number 42-108776, identified in the original photo by a small radio call number tab on the panel. At the 5 o’clock position to the lower right of the turn-and-bank indicator on the panel can be seen a typical Bell dual-needle fuel quantity gauge. Possibly dating back to Bell’s production of Airacobra fighters for Britain, Bell fuel gauges sometimes were marked to show if they were in U.S. gallons and for what model of aircraft they were intended. This gauge is lettered for both the XP-59A and YP-59A variants of the Airacomet jet, registering 120 U.S. gallons of fuel per side. (Air Force photo via the Peter M. Bowers collection)
A Bell YP-59A Airacomet sports clipped wingtip modification that became standard on production models. The P-59 proved a lot of jet concepts, and was quickly superseded by the 1944 advent of the Lockheed P-80 Shooting Star (see below). This YP-59 is one digit higher in serial number than the aircraft whose cockpit interior was photographed. To the right of the Airacomet jet is a Bell P-63 Kingcobra piston-engine fighter. (Air Force photo via the Peter M. Bowers collection)
Though a legend in white on the photo calls this the XP-80, a faintly visible call sign placard suggests it may actually be an early P-80A version of the Shooting Star, America’s first operational jet fighter. (Air Force photo via the Peter M. Bowers collection)
This slicked and polished painted P-80A Shooting Star was part of the research fleet at Wright Field in the last half of the 1940s when photographed with one of the base’s photographers, Gene Furnish, in the cockpit. It was a cadre of professional photographers, some civilians and some military, who photographed Air Force aircraft for test purposes. (Photo from the Gene Furnish collection)

The radium-enhanced dial faces of the instruments in the B-25 bomber panel are typical of the era. Nearly 10,000 B-25s were built by North American Aviation.

This North American B-25 Mitchell bomber, probably a C-model, has its control yokes held by a gloved hand in the hard right position to provide a clearer view of the instrument panel. Under the upper left portion of the glare shield, a tow release is labeled; what remains unclear if this was for target sleeves or glider tests. Since the Army Air Forces experimented with a number of twin engine bombers as glider tow ships, that is a plausible answer. Panel layout places flight instruments ahead of pilot in the left seat, with engine monitoring gauges in front of the copilot. (Army Air Forces photo via the Peter M. Bowers collection)
A red International farm tractor provided the power for brand new B-25 Mitchell bombers on the wartime flightline at the North American Aviation plant. (Photo from the Library of Congress)

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