With the Noise of a Stone Crusher

The engine makes the airplane. An automobile, even a racecar, will run perfectly well with a variety of powerplants, configurations, horsepowers and displacements. But airplanes are different. They are simpler, purer vehicles than their ground-bound kin.



Each airplane has a mission, which dictates its configuration. And the configuration requires a source-of proper size and suitable weight-that delivers the right amount of absolutely, positively reliable power. Without a Pratt & Whitney JT9D, there would never have been a 747. Without a Rolls-Royce Olympus, no Concorde. Take away its Merlin and all you have is an Allison-powered A-36 Apache ground-attack light bomber, not the ultimate all-around fighter of World War II, the P-51 Mustang.



In the 1930s, Americans were building airliners and prototype heavy bombers and as a result became the masters of the round engine-the big air-cooled radials suited to heavy lifting. The Brits saw the storm clouds of war, and knew they would need fighter engines far better than the lumpish 500-horsepower radials and inlines that were then the norm. Contesting the Schneider Trophy for extreme racing seaplanes gave them excellent reason to begin developing huge 12-cylinder, liquid-cooled vee engines- ultimately the Merlin and, a few years later, the Griffon.



The Germans, meanwhile, were barred by the Versailles Treaty from building fighters. So in 1934, Willy Messerschmitt designed the world's most advanced private plane, the Me-108-a 240-hp four-seat retractable that had capability, panache and performance not equaled until the vee-tail Beech Bonanza appeared after the war. Not surprisingly, the basic design would prove suitable for a far more powerful engine, and in 1935 the 108 was re-engineered to become the infamous Me-109, the fighter with which the Luftwaffe took on the RAF in the Battle of Britain.



Until very recently, the engine that powered this airplane was virtually extinct from Earth, even while thousands of World War II Pratt & Whitney, Wright, Allison and Rolls-Royce engines were still flying, driving everything from firebombers and
midnight freight dogs to collector warbirds. Of the tens of thousands of Daimler-Benz 600-series engines that powered the Me-109, all manufactured in the decade between 1935 and 1945*, only two remain operational, courtesy of the attention of a California engine restorer named Mike Nixon.



A peek inside a DB-601 gives a snapshot of German engineering sophistication. The DB-601 was fuel-injected, a German technology invented by Bosch for diesels, that the Brits and we knew little about. Our engines were all carbureted. When an Me-109 was too closely pursued by a Spitfire, the German pilot simply pushed over into a dive and thundered away while the diving Spit, also pulling negative Gs, unloaded its carburetor float, which flopped up and totally closed off the Merlin's needle valves. For several long seconds, the Spitfire became a glider. (Jaguar was still using carburetors when Mercedes put fuel injection on its 300SL racecars in the mid-1950s.) Admittedly, a DB-601's fuel-injection pump alone had about as many parts as the rest of the engine (the total number was still half that of the Brit's) and had to be manufactured with the precision of a Leica. That's the way German engineers like things.



"During the Battle of Britain, that engine was a year or so ahead of anything the British or Americans had," says Nixon, "mainly because of the supercharger drive and the fuel injection." Nixon probably knows more about the DB-601 engine than any other English-speaking person. Though his Tehachapi, California, company, Vintage V12s, specializes in Merlins and Griffons, he has now totally restored those two DBs, laboriously translating manuals, making tools and using several donor engines for some parts while manufacturing others.