Top 10: the worst German aircraft ever made

From rocket fighters to pulse-jets and even airships over three times longer than a Boeing 747, seemingly nothing was too outlandish for the Germany aviation industry to try in the 20th century. Though it created some fine aeroplanes like the Focke-Wulf Fw 190 and Messerschmitt Bf 109, Germany also created some of the most diabolical flying machines ever flown, let’s meet 10 of them.

PHOTO: the disastrous Heinkel He 177 heavy bomber of the Second World War

The Bf 210 was a good-looking heavy fighter-bomber but that was about all it had going for it. It was underpowered and its handling was so bad that it was dangerous to fly, being prone to enter a sudden and vicious stall under the least provocation. The chief test pilot commented that the Bf 210 had “all the least desirable attributes an aeroplane could possess.”

It took the ridiculous total of 16 prototypes and 94 pre-production models to iron out the worst of the problems that bedevilled the 210. To put this in context the Fw 190, a contemporary (but very successful) aircraft which also took considerable development to get ‘right’ went through only five prototypes and 28 pre-production examples.

Compared to the Messerschmitt Bf 110 heavy fighter it was replacing the 210 was slower and shorter-ranged as well as possessing appalling handling qualities. Even the undercarriage was lousy and kept failing on the 210. The 210s that had managed to make it into service, were withdrawn after a month and replaced by the very aircraft they were supposed to succeed.

The production line was shut down and the Messerschmitt Bf 110 was put back into production fitted with the 210’s better streamlined engine nacelles. Willy Messerschmitt’s reputation was in tatters and his resignation was officially demanded from the company that bore his name.

The Me 321 was designed to fly armoured vehicles, soldiers and military supplies to where they were needed. Such a task required a truly enormous aircraft, which was a problem if the aircraft had no engines. The Me 321 was a massive battle transport glider too large to be towed into flight. Even with 3280 horsepower, the Ju 90 airliner tow aircraft struggled to tow this behemoth sky-bound (they even tried tying it to three Bf 110 fighters).

The next attempt to create an adequately powerful tow aircraft involved bolting two bombers together (pictured), which was also far from ideal. Even strapping rockets to the machine wasn’t getting the desired results.

While these slapstick endeavours had been taking place, Messerschmitt had been simultaneously working on a powered version – the Me 323 (pictured). This worked, but was so slow and cumbersome that in contested airspace proved extremely vulnerable; on one notable occasion in April 1943 near Sicily, an escorted flight of 27 Me 323s were ambushed by Allied Spitfires and P-40s; 16 Me 323s were lost.

Despite this, its sheer scale and ambition made it a forefather of modern military strategic transport aircraft like the mighty C-17 Globemaster.

In the early 1960s, the Luftwaffe became concerned about the vulnerability of aircraft operating from large air bases. The solution appeared to be removing the aircraft’s need for a long runway. The British developed the vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) Harrier; the Germans, in a frenzy of innovation, developed and flew, but did not put into service, two potentially supersonic VTOL fast-jets, and a VTOL transport, the Do 31E.

They also experimented with a zero-length launch system for the Lockheed F-104 Starfighter, the ZELL (based on ideas from the rocket genius and occultist magician Jack Parsons). The Do 31, as a production aircraft, was envisaged as supplying tactical logistic support to the fast jets, itself using as forward operating bases the airstrips on which the ZELL Starfighters were expected to land using arrester gear.

The support of forward air operations can be well supported by another aircraft which was in development at the time – the very conventional G222. The G222 has now evolved into today’s C-27 Spartan, which offers similar payload-range performance to the Dornier 31E, albeit with short take off rather than vertical take off capability.

A conventional turborprop is available at the fraction of the cost, risk and complexity of a production Do 31. The Do 31 was an impressive answer to a question that shouldn’t have been asked. Technical progress and ambition had run ahead of operational analysis, resulting in flawed requirements.

In the 1950s, East Germany desired a new airliner, so Brunolf Baade, a wartime bomber designer, responded with a futuristic design. It was dubbed the Type 152 and based on the EF 150 bomber concept he had designed for the Soviet Union.

But this was a terrible basic design for a jetliner. For a start, it had a bicycle undercarriage — meaning the aircraft could not rotate (lift the nose wheel off the runway) promptly on take-off. It also required great precision to land precisely.

It also had terrible engines, its Pirna 014 jets based on wartime technology, which offered a miserly 3:1 thrust-to-weight ratio (compare this to the far superior 4.5:1 of the US Pratt & Whitney JT3D jet engine which first ran a year earlier than the Pirna) and a lousy specific fuel consumption.

The maiden flight of this aircraft took place on 4 December 1958. Four months later the aircraft took its second flight and crashed killing all on board. In mid-1961 the East German government stopped all aeronautical industry activities, as the Soviet Union did not want to buy any of these aircraft or support a potential rival to their own Tu-124.

The Luftwaffe correctly assumed it would need a long-range bomber, and the He 177 was conceived in 1937. The problems all stemmed from the He 177’s powerplant which consisted of a pair of Daimler Benz V-12 engines mounted on a common crankshaft in each wing – with incredibly tight fit into their cowlings. Both engines shared a common central exhaust manifold serving a total of 12 cylinders, the two inner cylinder banks of the component engines.

The central exhaust system would often become extremely hot, causing oil and grease in the bottom of each engine cowling to catch fire. This was was compounded by a tendency for the fuel injection pump on each engine to lag in their response to the pilot throttling back in such situations, deliver more fuel and thus fuel the fire.

While the constant fires were by far the most serious issue affecting the Greif the big Heinkel also had to contend with an overly heavy undercarriage, a dangerous swing on take-off, due to the massive torque of the enormous propellors, an inadequate defensive armament and unpleasant handling characteristics.

The French finished a version of the He 177 after the war with four separate engines and it served reliably for years on test programmes, proving that if Heinkel hadn’t inexplicably persisted with the coupled-engine concept they could have had an effective, reliable strategic bomber from 1942. As it was, the Luftwaffe was left with a machine that its chief Hermann Göring himself once described as a “monstrosity”.

PHOTO: captured He 177 wearing RAF markings

During taxi trials and small hops, many of the faults of designer Forssman’s terrible creation of 1914 became apparent. The structure was too weak and was beefed up, not least by adding extra wing struts, the first of an unprecedented five major rebuilds and redesigns. There was insufficient tail area, so a second rudder was added and the wings were modified.

At the same time an attempt to balance a tail-heaviness issue was made by crudely adding a tub-like gunner’s position on the nose. Further short hops revealed that the modifications had not made the aircraft anywhere near acceptable. Any reasonable manufacturer would have cut their losses, dumped this hopeless aircraft and moved on but Siemens-Schuckert were determined that they should get some kind of return for their investment

More powerful Mercedes engines were added in the inboard positions, leaving the outer engines as they were. All the engines received streamlined mountings and the nose of the aircraft was reworked into a pointed shape with massive round windows. The pilot now sat under a fully enclosed cockpit, an incongruously advanced feature.

Unfortunately, the designated test pilot, after some ground runs and despite his comfortable enclosed cockpit, refused to fly the aircraft. Siemens-Schuckert managed to persuade air-ace Walter Höhndorf to perform the first flight but in September 1915, whilst completing another test hop, something went awry, the aircraft turned onto its back and was partially wrecked.

Although it was a horrific death trap with a litany of flaws, no one could deny the Komet was impressive in one key way: with a top speed of 596mph (959km/h), it was the fastest aircraft of the second world war; the rocket plane also possessed the best climb rate of any aircraft in the world until the supersonic Bell X-1. It became operational in 1944 and was designed to combat the US Air Army Force bombers then laying waste to German cities.

The Komet’s rocket motor was colossally thirsty – and had only eight minutes worth of fuel. The engine was either on or off, with no ability to cruise or throttle back. The closing speed between it and its target was so great that it was extremely difficult to aim and fire with any hope of success.

The worst aspect for the pilot was the fuel. The Komet was propelled by two toxic liquids called C-stoff and T-stoff that explode when brought into contact. T-stoff would cause virtually any organic material such as leather or cloth to spontaneously combust, furthermore it would dissolve human flesh.

Even if the landing were successful, the shock of landing could rupture a fuel line or slosh any residual propellants into contact with each other and a catastrophic explosion would be the near inevitable result. So volatile were the fuels that there are accounts of Komets spontaneously exploding for no apparent reason whilst simply sitting on the ground.

Back in 1915 people still didn’t know what aeroplanes were supposed to look like. At least that’s the only explanation I can think of to explain the delightfully chunky appearance of DFW’s T.28, cheerily named Floh (flea), perhaps the cuddliest combat aircraft ever built. There seems to no other reason for building this tiny yet simultaneously weirdly massive machine. Despite being reputedly very fast, because of its daft shape the Floh was never a serious contender for fighter operations.

The main problem was visibility, which was excellent so long as you only wanted to look upwards. The pilot’s view forwards for take off and landing was non-existent and the massive triangular tail surfaces conspired with the biplane wings to obscure the view of more or less anything below the aircraft. With all that fuselage side area and only a relatively modest rudder, one can only assume that directional control was not the aircraft’s strong suit.

Add to that a perversely narrow undercarriage and it should come to no surprise that the Floh crashed on landing after its first test flight. On the upside the arrangement of intakes on the aircraft’s nose gives it the appearance of a jolly smiling face – always a major boon for an aircraft intended for the deadly skies over the Western front.

Just to prove that he wasn’t insane or obsessed with giving aircraft a Rubens-esque profile, Hermann Dorner, who designed the Floh, went on to produce the outstanding Hannover CL series of two-seat fighters which were boringly slender by comparison, did not feature a jolly smiling face, and proved highly successful.

Back in the first couple of years of the First World War airships were the only aerial vehicle able to mount meaningful bombing attacks deep behind enemy lines. But the fact is that the Zeppelins of World War One consisted of a fabric bag filled with between about one and two million cubic feet of hydrogen, a highly flammable element.

The Zeppelins are huge and inflammable, present an unmissably massive target, were slow and susceptible to bad weather. Bizarrely, despite having more than enough carrying capacity to reasonably carry them, German airship crews chose not to bother taking parachutes on missions.

Presumably being able to escape having to choose between plummeting to one’s death or being incinerated in a hydrogen-fuelled inferno was just too easy for the stalwart Zeppelin men of the Imperial German Navy. And that was a choice that became increasingly commonplace after the first Zeppelin was shot down over Belgium in June 1915.

That the Navy persisted in using these giant airships for bombing raids was largely down to the insistence of one dangerously psychopathic zealot, Kapitän zur See Peter Strasser. Despite ever-increasing evidence of the ever-decreasing effectiveness of the Zeppelin as a bombing aircraft, Strasser continued to demand his crews fly strategic raids over England with ever greater loss of life, including his own in August 1918.

The Fieseler Fi 103R was essentially a V-1 cruise missile with a human as the guidance mechanism. The Reichenberg had a quick development period, probably too quick. The German Research Institute for Sailplane Flight started development in mid-1944, and had a prototype ready for testing within days. A cramped cockpit with a jettisonable canopy was placed just under the pulse-jets air intake, and flight controls were rudimentary, although simple.

After release from a carrier aircraft, the Reichenberg was meant to be piloted towards a target and put into a dive, following which the pilot parachuted out. Pilot survival was optimistically rated as being “most unlikely”; it was estimated at a terrifying 1% due to the proximity of the pulsejet’s intake to the cockpit.

Tricky landing controls ensured that two test machines crashed during developmental trials, and although the designers claimed a distinction between their machine and the Japanese Kamikaze, to the pilot there was little difference.

Thankfully for the young men expected to operate this flying tomb, it was quickly abandoned after armaments minister Albert Speer and Luftwaffe KG200 chief Werner Baumbach successfully pleaded with Hitler that suicide was not in the German warrior tradition.