Bachem Ba 349 Natter
The Bachem Ba 349 Natter was a German rocket-powered interceptor of the Second World War, designed by Erich Bachem's company and built largely of wood for vertical launch from a tower. Guided at first from the ground, the pilot was to fire a salvo of unguided rockets at a bomber formation, then be thrown clear to parachute down while the rocket motor fell separately for reuse. The type never saw combat: its sole manned flight killed the pilot, and two examples survive.
Why It Mattered
The Bachem Ba 349 Natter was the world's first manned vertical-take-off interceptor, a small wooden rocket aircraft built in the last months of the Second World War to climb from a launch tower directly into Allied bomber formations. It was an answer to a desperate problem: by the spring of 1944 the Allied bombing offensive was taking a serious toll that conventional fighters could not stop, and the Air Ministry (RLM) had called for an inexpensive fighter made of non-essential materials to defend important targets. The Natter never saw combat, and its only manned flight killed its pilot. It remains the extreme case of wartime improvisation: an interceptor meant to be thrown away after a single flight, with only its rocket motor recovered for another attempt and its pilot expected to descend by parachute.
Design Notes
The airframe was deliberately crude: plain rectangular wooden wings with no ailerons or flaps, assembled from simple materials with nails and glue, so that unskilled labour could build it with low-tech tooling. Control came from a cruciform tail of four fins, whose surfaces worked in combination to give pitch, yaw and roll, aided at low speed by guide vanes in the rocket exhaust. Power was a Walter 109-509A rocket motor, the same basic engine used in the Messerschmitt Me 163 Komet, burning two liquid fuels. Four Schmidding solid-fuel boosters bolted to the rear fuselage gave the extra thrust a loaded Natter needed to leave its launch tower. The armament was a single salvo of 24 unguided rockets in the nose, fired shotgun-style at a bomber formation; there was no second shot. Afterwards the pilot was to blow off the nose section, be thrown clear as a parachute deployed from the rear fuselage, and descend under his own parachute.
Operational History
Erich Bachem built the Natter at his Waldsee factory in the Black Forest, after the SS ordered 150 aircraft and the RLM followed with an order for 50 and the designation Ba 349. Flight testing began on 3 November 1944, when a prototype glider was carried aloft behind a Heinkel He 111 and released; towed and free-glide tests and unmanned vertical launches followed. A first powered vertical launch failed in December, but on 22 December a Natter launched successfully, and ten more successful launches followed over the next several months. On 25 February 1945 a Natter with a dummy pilot performed the entire mission sequence successfully. The only manned flight followed on 1 March 1945: the canopy tore away, the aircraft dived into the ground, and test pilot Lothar Sieber, the first person to ascend vertically on a rocket, was killed. No cause was ever determined; the recovered canopy's latch may not have been fully closed at launch, and Sieber is believed to have been unconscious long before the crash. It remained the only piloted Natter launch; the subsequent flights were unmanned, and of the 200 aircraft contracted, only 36 were built. Ten operational Natters were built for a first combat deployment near Kirchheim unter Teck, but American forces overran the area in April 1945 before any could be launched.
Afterlife
Only two Bachem Natters are known to exist. The Smithsonian's aircraft was one of four captured by U.S. troops at St. Leonhard im Pitztal, Austria, in May 1945; it is kept in storage, in poor repair and no longer accessible to the public. The other survivor is displayed by the Deutsches Museum in Munich; it is reported to have been reconstructed partly from surviving sub-assemblies and is painted to look like a test aircraft, which would leave the Smithsonian machine as the only wholly original Natter. Several static reproductions stand in other museums, and the only intact Natter launch pad still stands in the Hasenholz woods in Germany.