William
The odds are that it is a fake- and that it was deliberately done to attempt to fool- well , people who became our enemies. As such I would regard it as a treasure to keep and simply wonder---if?????
it's the sort of thing that British Intelligence kept observing a new German Airfield
with with Dummy planes and buildings and all sorts of things. Once the construction was finished , the Royal Air Force was ordered to bomb it------with WOODEN Boombs
Half the success in politics is miss-information.
Cheers
Norman
Well, I don't see anything that would make it a fake. This particular print deals with the body joints on the V-2, from the nose cone down to the rear body joint with the engine attach. I have looked at real V-2's at both the Smithsonian and places like the White Sands Missile Museum, and everywhere else I could see one, and all the details are as described. I have never been able to see the joint that has the safety-wire on it on a real one, but that would be the only difference that I can see that would be missing. The one at White Sands is only the lower engine section, and it was outside, and I could freely look at all the attachment points, and they all matched the drawings. I don't think the Germans were faking blueprints. since no one would have access to them if they did not work on the program.
Vast amounts of blueprints were gathered during operation "Paperclip", when the U.S. basically took everything that wasn't nailed down. They handed out literally TONS of information to any U.S. company that asked for it. One of Germany's largest supersonic wind-tunnels went to Bell Aircraft. It was stumbled upon by Major Larry Bell, ummmm......who owned Bell Aircraft. He also loaded up the Messerschmitt prototype P-1061 and all the drawings.
(Google the Bell X-5 and you will get the story on THAT episode)
Howard Hughes asked for, and got, an Me 262 aircraft. He not only wanted to fly it to see what it was like, he wanted to enter it in the 1946 Thompson Trophy Races, in the unlimited category. (He didn't mention THAT part when he requested the aircraft!) Since the Me-262 was still superior to any aircraft the U.S. had at that time, the government said that there was NO WAY a Nazi aircraft was going to win an American race, and he was refused entry. The reason I know this, is that one of the guys who worked on it to bring it back to flying condition was one of my A&P instructors in aircraft maintenance when I was working on getting my mechanic's license out of high school. He did a lot of work on the Jumo engines, and reported them as very troublesome. The fuel controls had to be set EVERY DAY with the current barometric settings to make them operate correctly for that day. Hughes got the aircraft, along with 15 Jumo engines as spares. They went through that aircraft and by the time it was done, it was in better-than-new condition. The after restoration photos are in several books on the Me-262. When you look at the pics, you can see it is ready to race. When he was stymied in that race effort, he donated the aircraft to a mechanic's school in Claremont, California. When that school closed, the aircraft was bought by Ed Maloney, at the "Planes of Fame" museum in Ontario, California. It has since been sold to Paul Allen, who buys WWII aircraft and restores them to original flying condition. He has since died, and I have not heard anything more about the aircraft.
I learned to keep my eyes open when going to garage sales in Los Angeles. You literally NEVER knew what you were going to see and be able to buy. Just as now, when gramps died, everything went to a yard sale, and what didn't sell, went in the trash. Back in the 1970's, when I lived there, the yellow pages phone book was 15 inches high, and came in about 8 separate books. I think it was the only city in the world where you could look up "Rocket Nozzle Coatings" in the phone book, and come up with 5 different businesses. The aerospace industry in California at the time was Stupendous. There were aircraft and space related factories in nearly every large California town. I would say that the number of engineers there working in aerospace must have numbered in the hundreds of thousands, if not in the millions. There is no doubt it is a genuine blueprint. (Not an original, but a shop floor blueprint that some engineer kept as a souvenir.) I wound up with 4 blueprints in a folder, for 25 cents. I collected all the stuff I could afford to purchase on what I made, working at a gas station. I also came across a complete set of factory blueprints for the Curtiss Pusher. A lot of people said that Curtiss never worked to blueprints, they just did chalk drawings on a wall. I know that is not true, because I have a set of the originals.
If I can take a picture of the V-2 print, I will put it on here.
