Hans Guido Mutke (25 March 1921 – 8 April 2004) was a fighter pilot for the German Luftwaffe during World War II.

[citation needed] Mutke also made the controversial claim that he broke the sound barrier in 1945 in an Me 262, but mainstream opinion continues to regard Chuck Yeager as the first person to achieve this milestone in 1947 in a Bell X-1.

He was climbing through at an altitude of 12,000 m (36,000 ft) in near perfect weather with a visibility of over 100 kilometres (62 mi), listening to the radio conversations, when his chief instructor Oberstleutnant Heinz Bär detected a P-51 Mustang approaching the plane of a comrade, Unteroffizier Achammer, from behind.

He reported that with the airspeed indicator still off the scale he attempted to recover from the uncontrollable dive by adjusting the main tailplane incidence angle.

Mutke throttled back and his engines flamed out, and after the short period of smooth flight, the buffeting resumed and the aircraft began shaking violently again.

However, Mutke never claimed he was the first person to break the sound barrier, but instead argued that his flight was merely proof that the Me 262 was capable of reaching and exceeding Mach 1 and that therefore other German fighter pilots may have done so even before him.

The resulting steepening of the dive would lead to even higher speeds and self-destruction of the airframe due to excessive negative G loads.

The Me 262's pre-area rule fuselage would have additionally resulted in very high transonic drag, and its engines were already underpowered and temperamental to begin with.

Allied fighter pilots reported seeing supersonic shock waves and popped rivets during dives as the high-speed air rushing over the wing exceeded Mach 1 even though the forward airspeed of the overall aircraft was well below that speed.

A computer-based performance analysis of the Me 262 carried out in 1999 at the Technische Universität München concluded that the Me 262 could indeed exceed Mach 1[1] [citation needed].