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The Messerschmitt Me 261 ''Adolfine'' was long-range maritime reconnaissance aircraft designed in the late 1930s. It looked like an enlarged version of the Messerschmitt Bf 110. It was not put into production. ==Design and development== In 1937, Messerschmitt began ''Projekt'' P. 1064, a study for a long-range reconnaissance aircraft, and took the basic design of the Bf 110 twin-engine heavy fighter as its basis.〔Donald 1994, p. 290.〕 The P. 1064 had a long, slim fuselage with two wing-mounted engines. The aircraft was planned from the outset as a record-breaking aircraft, but after becoming convinced that the aircraft was capable of taking the world long-distance flight record, the German Air Ministry approved the project and gave it the designation of 8-261.〔Green 1986, p. 617.〕 The intended goal of the project was for an example of the aircraft to carry the Olympic Flame from Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany (site of the 1936 Winter Olympics) to Tokyo, Japan for the 1940 Summer Olympics in what would be a record-breaking nonstop flight〔 (5870 mi / 9445 km). The plan captured the imagination of Adolf Hitler at an early stage in its design and in tribute, the aircraft carried the unofficial name: ''Adolfine''.〔Smith 1971, p. 99.〕 The Me 261 incorporated a number of features which were highly advanced for its day. The single-spar all-metal wing was designed to serve as a fuel tank and its depth at the wing root was only slightly less than the height of the fuselage.〔 The fuselage itself was of virtually rectangular section, with space for five crew members, consisting of two pilots seated side-by-side with the radio operator directly behind in the front compartment, while a navigator and a flight engineer were housed in the rear fuselage under a stepped, glazed station.〔 Power came from four Daimler-Benz DB 601 engines, coupled together in pairs in a "power system" known as the DB 606, weighing 1.5 metric tonnes apiece. The DB 606 "power systems" were originally developed for both the single-"engined" Heinkel He 119 high-speed reconnaissance aircraft, and the Heinkel He 177 strategic bomber, but the Me 261's design housed the DB 606 "power systems" in nacelles that afforded significantly better access for maintenance and ventilation for the "twinned" DB 601 component engines in each one, than the Heinkel heavy bomber possessed. Each pair drove a variable-pitch propeller, each meant to be a pair of counter-rotating propellers as the He 177A used (for the fourth prototype onwards), each four-blade propeller being driven through a gearbox shared between each of the "twinned" DB 601 engines forming the "power system", generating 2,700 PS (1,985 kW) each.〔 The Me 261 had a conventional, retractable tail-wheel landing gear, although it had unusually large and bulky low-pressure tires, much like modern day aircraft tundra tires, which prevented the aircraft from becoming bogged down on rough grass landing strips. The main gear's design appears to use main struts that rotated through 90° during their rearwards retraction sequence, that had the sizable main wheels resting atop the retracted struts, much like the production examples of the Junkers Ju 88 already used, with even the fully retractable tailgear possessing a larger-than-average, low-pressure pneumatic tire.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Messerschmitt Me 261」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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