Some observations on aircraft development by the combatants.

World War 2 saw a massive increase in aircraft development and complexity. In just half a decade, more or less, the major combatants went from 300 mph aircraft to 500 mph aircraft and were introducing jet and rocket planes that bordered on breaking the sound barrier. But, there was a war going on to so this was not just an experiment in new aircraft development but rather a necessity. Or, at least to most of the major players it was...

Starting with the notable exception to the above, Germany, their aircraft development bordered on schitzophrenic. The Germans had a propensity in developing aircraft to build a plethora of prototypes in many cases concurrently with using some of these as operational aircraft. Some examples of this include:

The Ar 240. This plane started life as a multipurpose design to replace the Me 110 and began life in 1938. A year and a half later the first two prototypes flew with near disasterous results. The V1 and 2 proved unstable around all three axes of flight. The remote gun system was another disaster never working right. Pressurization couldn't be gotten to work. But, Arado pressed on. By October 1942 (4 + years into the program) there were now 6 prototypes and three pre-production planes in the works even though the program was riddled with problems.
Milch from the RLM stopped the program in December 1942 but, that hardly killed it. The existing planes were issued for operational use. Another half dozen airframes were completed afterwards and flown. These continued in limited service into 1944 despite problems with maintaining an "oddball" aircraft in the field.

The Ar 234: This jet ran to over 30 prototypes despite its introduction in the closing days of the war. This is about half the number of production planes built. That is, for each two production planes an experimental variant was produced. This was occuring at a time when Germany's enemies were at their borders.

The Fw 187: The Luftwaffe expressed little interest in this plane but allowed Focke-Wulf to build nearly a dozen prototypes and pre-production models before the program ended. These were used in limited numbers operationally.

The He 100: A dozen prototypes were built even though the Luftwaffe again wasn't going to use the aircraft.

The Ju 288: A failed design of the Bomber B program. This project lingered on despite no hope of it actually getting into production through nearly 1944.

The German aircraft industry exhibited this tendency to tinker with their designs continiously. The Luftwaffe, apparently most of the time, allowing them to do so if not outright encouraging it.

In the US, Japan and, Britain the typical development cycle was for a proposal to go to manufacturers indiscriminantly. All could submit proposals in return. Some obviously passed when what was requested was outside their expertise of course.
The accepted proposals allowed those manufacturers to build usually just one or two prototypes. The program's success largely hinged on these prototypes working as advertised. Where they didn't they were either dropped or if the manufacturer could fix problems they might be allowed to continue development. But, only rarely were more airframes added to the program.
If the prototype showed promise then a batch of 6 to 12 additional aircraft were built to thoroughly test the design. If these worked out then production was begun. The entire cycle lasted about 18 to 24 months. Japan's cycle was often more protracted than that of the British or US due to the lack of facilities comparatively.
In some cases interesting designs or ones that were clearly intended for experimentation were allowed to contine to operate to destruction. But, these were always limited to one or two aircraft at most and none of these were used operationally.

Russia had a similar but more structured system. There design bureaus concentrated on certain types of aircraft. Yakolev and Lavochikin for example did fighters. Their design and development cycle was much like that of the Western Allies. A proposal was made and several prototypes built. These either worked or didn't and production followed on their success.

The other thing the West and Russia did was limit in production changes to aircraft. While development was continious changes were made only at specific points in the cycle or when sufficent ones had accrewed that it represented a major step forward in the aircraft's performance.
The Germans simply introduced continious marginal changes in their designs such that it was literally possible for a squadron in service to have no two same aircraft on their flight line but rather a dozen or more of the same basic design but all having detail differences in equipment and construction.

 

A small part of Japan's problem, was not having airfields directly adjacent to some of their factories, particularly the main Mitsubishi factory. Every thing had to be trucked, railed, and later carted from the factory to the airfield.

 

We shouldn’t forget that as early as 1939 "Kelly" Johnson and a co-worker at Lockheed (Hibbard) had worked on the design of an experimental (never built) design for a jet powered airplane with a revolutionary axial flow style engine. The L-133 air-frame with the L-1000 engine were both too far ahead of their time to be financed. It was beauty with front canard wings and streamlining up the whazooo. (see photo in first link)

The L-133 was never really considered at the time, but when the bid went out for a new jet fighter "Kelly" Johnson was able to use much of his previous work on the L-133 to "jump start" the XP-80 project. This might have been a contributing factor to the Lockheed team coming in under time and on budget.

See:

Lockheed RF-80 Shooting Star

for a really good site devoted to Mr. Johnson see:

Clerance L. "Kelley" Johnson Page

and on the L-133, see:

http://tanks45.tripod.com/Jets45/Histories/Lockheed-L133/L133.htm

 

The P-80 really isn't an exception to my commentary. It was conceived as one of a number of late war projects involving jets and turboprop aircraft by the USAAF. These included the:

P82 A turboprop mixed propuslion escort fighter by Consolidated
P83 A Bell long range jet escort fighter. Based on the P59 it proved uninspired in performance and was dropped.
P84 Republic's entry in the same category as the P80
P86 North American's entry which was dubbed the "jet Mustang." This project originally envisioned a new fuselage welded to P 51H wings and tail as a jet fighter. Post war it morphed into the Saber jet.
P88 Lockheed's entry for a long range escort. This became the Voodoo post war. In its initial configuration it was a dismal failure.

Each of these only appeared as prototypes numbering no more than two or three aircraft. The programs that proved to be failures were dropped. Others, like the P86, morphed into totally new aircraft and reappeared in small numbers initially until they proved to be what the USAAF / USAF wanted.

 

It's a little known fact that the P80 was the first jet to operate in the Italian theater when a couple of planes were sent there for trials.
AFAIK no Me 262 operated in Italy and the recon 234 came later.

Here is a pic of one of them, love the high tech ladder !!!
View attachment 11962

BTW I don't see the Germans behaving much differently than the others all aircraft industries had their quirks.
Hera are some other "oddities"
- the Soviet system with it's "designers behind bars" bureau
- The Japanese with the "me too" attitude that produced completely different designs for JNAF and JAAF to very similar specifications.
- The US with it's huge "for lend lease only" production of designs discarded by the air force.

Possibly the German industry's biggest quirk was ..... Goering, after all he ended up owning a lot of it. IMO the continuous tinkering was more obvious in the German side as the marking system highlighted it, "dash numbers" in US production show the same thing, just for an example the switch from razorback to bubble in the P 47 didn't produce a new submodel but was pretty major.

 

This is something I noted in reading about Russian aircraft designers, make boss joey stalin mad and you design from behind bars. I guess that better than being dead!

 

That's what happened to Polikarpov. In combat with the Japanese at Kalikin Gol Polikarpov's I 15, I 153 and, I 16 fighters performed poorly against the Japanese in no small part because the pilots themselves were poorly trained. But, that wasn't going to fly with Stalin.
He called Polikarpov to Moscow and demanded an explaination. Polikarpov arranged a demonstration between an I 16 versus a captured Japanese Ki 15 biplane. Stalin didn't buy that either and sacked Polikarpov. His design bureau went to two of Polikarpov's understudies that were showing talent: Mikoyan and Gurevich. The MiG bureau was born.