The Me 262 wasn't a great high speed aircraft? It was revolutionary, its wing design is basically what allowed jets to travel at high speeds and eventually break the sound barrier. The Fury showed that laminar wings for jets was inefficient so North American used captured German technology on swept wings. IIRC, the only thing that the F-86 incorporated in its design that was from the Mustang were the speed breaks on the wings which was the same system used on the A-36 Apache/Invader.
The tail system on the F-86 was, if IIRC, was the same or influenced by the one used on the Fury (which design was influenced on the Mustang) but that was also inefficient and was replaced by "all flying-tail" on the E model which was far more efficient than the original tail designed for the Sabre.
Saying that the Sabre was an evolution of the Mustang would be like saying that the F-14 Tomcat was an evolution of the F-111 because it used an improved swing wing system based on the one used by the Aardvark.
The fact is that the early jets made after WW2 owed their design more to captured German designs and technology than any other factor.
ack-ack
Sorry Ack-Ack, but I'm going to have to disagree on a couple points. The real trick to breaking the sound barrier turned out to be the horizontal stabilizers. Without movable horizontal stabilizers, there was no vertical control once you got real close to supersonic speed. When Chuck Yeager got close to supersonic (0.95 mach, or so) in the
straight winged X-1, the elevators became useless. Bell had designed an additional control to rotate the entire stabilizer, and that ultimately proved to be what enabled control at supersonic speed. The F86 had a combination moving stabilizer with elevator (sometimes known as a stabilator (spelling?)), so it could dive with control at above the speed of sound. The Russians didn't figure that out for something like 5 years after the F86 came out, as the Mig 17 still had a fixed horizontal stabilizer, and hence no vertical control at over approximately 0.97 mach.
The later model F-84F had swept wings and a full flying stabilizer, and that may be what you were thinking of, as the F86's always had the same style of stabilizers. Here's a picture of the F-86F that's at the US Air Force Museum in Dayton, OH:
http://www.nationalmuseum.af.mil/shared/media/photodb/photos/050321-F-1234P-001.jpg Notice the small slots on the fuselage at the leading edge of the stabilizer. That's all the movement the stabilizer had on the F-86, but it was enough at high speeds to pull more G's than you could handle.
Now, the swept wing idea did come from the ME-262, and it did cut down on drag, but the laminar flow wing concept used on the P-51 also cuts down on drag. Modern jet aircraft use both concepts together, though many modern fighter aircraft use a wing more resembling a triangle shape. FWIW, a laminar flow wing is a wing that has it's thickest point halfway between the front (leading edge) and back (trailing edge) of the wing.
