Messerschmitt Me 163 Komet

In that video you can really on see how fast it rises by its smoke trail...all nice and flat and then like a rocket - straight up! I can see how he would feel that way, especially given the next fastest plane at the time!

 

There is growing evidence showing that the supposed faulty workmanship was actually the result of mass sabotage. By this time of the war, almost all of the new jet/rocket aircraft and the V1-V2 rockets in Germany were being made in hidden facilities where more than half of the assembly lines were staffed by slave and prisoner labor. About 5 years ago, a retired Col. spoke at Wright-Patterson AF Museum about his research and participation in restoration works on Me-163s in various museums around the world. He was amazed to discover the amount of sabotage which took place. On all examples he examined, at least 1 major component of the aircraft was sabotaged. Most common acts were "forgetting" to fix screws on vital engine parts so they would rattle violently and more often than not causing a part(s) to break and come apart, placing foreign objects in various mechanisms, over-polishing materials so they were worn so thin as to be too fragile, urinating in the glue vats which held the wings together making the glue weak, and etc.

The study revealed that despite the overly dangerous fuels being used, and the crude design of aircraft rocket engines, those alone could not have accounted for the high failure rate which befell the Me-163. He concluded that a very high percentage of the "accidents" were a result of sabotage.

As a matter of pure coincidence, at the same time the WPAFM was also restoring it's own Me-163, and after close examination, it too was found to have been sabotaged: screws which were to hold the fuel pumps in place were missing and more dangerously, a stone was found wedged and almost piercing one of the fuel tanks. A message of defiance written in French was also found, presumably by a French slave/prisoner laborer. The aircraft never did make a combat sortie before it was captured, and probably a good thing for it's planned pilot for it would have surely exploded during or shortly after take-off.