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Hypothetically, what if the P/F80 shooting star entered combat service before the end of World War 2?The P-80 Shooting Star was the United States’ first operational jet fighter aircraft, which went online shortly after the end of the war. Bell had developed the XP-59 Airacomet by October, 1942, but disappointingly its performance wasn’t much better than the piston-engine planes it was intended to replace. The P-80 was the first U.S. fighter aircraft to show a serious operational improvement over piston-engine aircraft.After the war, U.S. Air Force test pilots were tasked to evaluate the Me-262 versus the P-80. Theoretically, later versions of the P-80 out-performed the Me-262 in maximum speed, maximum altitude, and rate of climb. In practice, the pilots found the initial version of the P-80 and the Me-262 to be of such similar operational performance that, while they gave the edge to the Me-262, they didn’t think it offered an overwhelming advantage the way it did over piston-engine aircraft. The two were essentially different, but equal.In fact, the P-80 was accepted for use in February, 1945. This was months before the end of the war in both the European and Pacific theaters. However the war in Europe was by then winding-down, the last-gasp Battle of the Bulge having depleted most of the effective German forces in the West. Americans had also already largely cleared the skies of any effective Japanese fighter or bomber forces with only new, inexperienced pilots being tasked for kamikaze strikes. Despite the Me-262’s presence, the P-80 just wasn’t considered a tremendous need. As a result, development and production wasn’t prioritized compared to other programs.Let’s first assume those pilots were right and the two aircraft were, in the hands of experienced pilots, essentially equal once engaged in a dogfight; and second that after all the U.S. military decided it needed as many operational jet fighters as it could get its hands on. How would the Me-262 (or other advanced German aircraft) have faired in combat once faced with a fighter on equal terms?The biggest problem for the Me-262 was numbers. The reason there are only a few instances of the Gloster Meteor engaging with one, and the reason the piston-engine US Air Force continued to dominate the skies is because there were so few Me-262s to begin with. The Germans had tremendous difficulty building the aircraft due to shortages of war materials. In particular, the engines had to be replaced roughly every ten flights because Germany lacked the necessary metal alloys to prevent heat-induced damage. This limited how many Me-262s that they could build and keep operational, along with any other jets they might have wanted to build.Had the P-80 been accepted in 1944 the U.S. would have been able to ship the design to other builders to begin making tooling and start production. P-80s would have been few in number to start (the initial production order was for 344), but wartime production would have rapidly increased those numbers. Just as the United States had produced tens of thousands of tanks and hundreds of thousands of piston-engine aircraft, it would have also built thousands of jet-powered P-80s.Like their piston-engine counterparts, the P-80 would have overwhelmed the Me-262 with numbers. By 1945, Germany was running out of planes, experienced pilots, and the fuel, parts, and ammunition to keep the ones that they had operational. The Me-262 was introduced in July, 1942 and only about 1,400 were produced and many of these were destroyed in combat or on the ground. Despite curtailed production, an operational fighter group using P-80s was ready in July 1945, just 4 months after it had been adopted.Had wartime production begun six months earlier, with operational P-80s arriving in Europe by February or March 1945, the few remaining Me-262s would have faced an onslaught of piston-engine fighters in addition to the new P-80 fighter group. The best and most experienced U.S. and German pilots flew the jet fighters, so the Me-262 and P-80 probably would have had a roughly equal kill ratio. That is, for every Me-262 shot down, a P-80 would also have been shot down. The difference would have been that the U.S. Air Force had two more P-80s coming off the production line to replace it, while the Luftwaffe did not have many Me-262s in production. Like their piston-engine counterparts, the P-80s would have been able to follow the fuel-hungry Me-262s back to their bases to shoot them down as they attempted to land.The story would be different in the Pacific. The Japanese had already lost the majority of their naval fighter force and the remnants of the Japanese Air Force were mostly in China and unavailable to defend the home islands. However the P-80 wasn’t designed to take off from aircraft carriers, so American forces would have had to deploy it from captured island airfields. Few of these were anywhere close to the Japanese mainland. In fact, the long-ranged P-51 was only introduced in any numbers in the Pacific after the capture of Iwo Jima put it within range of the Japanese mainland. It was used to escort the B-29s against the few remaining Japanese fighters. Iwo Jima was still too far away to put the first versions of the P-80 within combat range. Even airfields on Okinawa would have allowed the pilots of the P-80 to perhaps fly over the southernmost island for a few minutes before turning back.Had the U.S. chosen to invade Japan instead of dropping the atomic bombs, the P-80 would almost certainly have been introduced following the capture of main island airfields. Here they would have been used against the remaining Japanese fighter and bomber forces.So the short answer to your question is: we’d have seen several more jet-on-jet dogfights during World War II, with little operational difference in the final outcome. At the time, the jet engine simply wasn’t—in and of itself—such a superior technology that it would have affected the outcome of the war. Had Germany been able to produce higher quality jet engines in greater numbers, American and British bombers would have faced a tougher task over Germany, and jet fighters might have been a more critical development.