As with MiG and Sukhoi one produces the best aircraft the other gets the contracts, hence the reason the soviet forces had more Sukhoi aircraft than MiG. So it was with Heinkel. Apparently the Heinkel 100 series was a better performer on the power plant fitted than the Me 109 but the contract was awarded to Messerschmidt even before the fly off.
Not quite, my good man. The Bf 109 and He 112 were direct competitors, and the He 112 was found to be severely wanting in flight tests against the faster and more agile Bf 109. As with all things involving the Nazi gov’t, there was a definite political undertone… in this instance, the head of the Luftwaffe procurement office, Erhard Milch, absolutely loathed Willy Messerschmitt due to a series of fatal crashes of his M20 airliner while in Lufthansa service, which caused a great deal of ill will towards the airline. And who was the head of Lufthansa at the time? Yep, good old Erhard Milch. He was forced to acknowledge the superiority of the 109 to the 112 and production contracts were awarded to Messerschmitt, with satellite production being arranged by other facilities including Focke-Wulf, Arado, and AGO.
The He 100 was in fact a superior design to the 109 (especially in the gear design), but by the time the He 100 was being tested, all of the production infrastructure had been put in place for the 109, so no orders were forthcoming. Believe it or not, the Germans had to pay for everything just like everyone else (at least prewar), and they couldn’t afford to split production capacity at the time.
As to the 177, the much-maligned “Reichsfeuerzeug”, that still stands as the “perfect storm” of unintended consequences due to overengineering. My favorite design “feature” on the aircraft is the oil tank for the DB 610 which was mounted to the magnesium firewall. Vibrations from the inherently wobbly DB 610 would be transmitted back through the engine bearers to the firewall and assorted framing, and the oil tank would develop small fractures, allowing oil to drip down. No biggie, right? Well, due to the inverted V engine design, the inboard banks of cylinders shared a central exhaust manifold exiting from the lower end of the nacelle… directly below the aforementioned oil tank. It doesn’t take a degree in aeronautical engineering to forecast what came next… oil drops down, catches fire on the manifold, which then spreads to the magnesium firewall, and voila… it’s parachute time!
Drag reduction by coupling engines is all well and good in theory, but I’d say the benefits were far outweighed by the catastrophic design failures encountered. And I’d venture to say that Ernst Heinkel would likely agree with that, were he around today.
Lynn
Sign In
