Heinkel He 280
The Heinkel He 280 was a German twin-jet fighter prototype, the first jet fighter to fly. Heinkel began it after the Air Ministry showed little interest in the He 178; it flew first as a glider in September 1940 and under jet power the following spring. Persistent engine trouble and official preference for the Messerschmitt Me 262 ended the programme in 1943, after nine prototypes; it never entered service, and no complete example survives.
Why It Mattered
The Heinkel He 280 was the first jet fighter to fly. Heinkel began work on it in late 1939, after the German Air Ministry had shown little interest in the company's He 178, the first aircraft to fly on jet power alone. In December 1942, in a mock dogfight staged for Air Ministry officials, the He 280 flew four laps of an oval course while the piston-engined Focke-Wulf Fw 190 managed three. Even so, it never entered production, and only nine prototypes were built. The aviation authors Tim Heath and Robert Dorr have both argued that politics helped decide its fate: Heinkel had fallen out of favour with influential figures, while Willy Messerschmitt was favoured.
Design Notes
The project, led by designer Robert Lusser, began under the designation He 180. Where the He 178 had buried its single engine in the fuselage, the He 280 carried two turbojets in nacelles below a mid-set wing. The airframe itself was comparatively conventional: all-metal, with twin fins and rudders and a tricycle undercarriage that was still uncommon at the time. Its intended engine was Heinkel's own HeS 8, a centrifugal-flow turbojet expected to produce about 1,540 pounds of thrust, and the axial-flow HeS 30 was also to be tested in the type. The planned armament was three 20 mm cannon in the nose. One feature was a genuine novelty: a compressed-air ejection seat, the first fitted to any aircraft.
Operational History
The first prototype was completed in the summer of 1940, but development difficulties with the HeS 8 meant it could not yet fly under power. On 22 September 1940 it made the type's first flight as an unpowered glider, towed to altitude behind a Heinkel He 111 with ballasted pods standing in for its engines. Powered flight followed in the spring of 1941, though accounts differ on the day: two give 30 March, for the second prototype, and 2 April, for the V1. A demonstration before Luftwaffe and Air Ministry officials followed on 5 April 1941. The engines then held the programme back: in flight the HeS 8s delivered 1,102 pounds of thrust each, well short of what had been expected. In 1942 the Air Ministry ordered Heinkel to abandon both the HeS 8 and the HeS 30 and concentrate on a follow-on engine, the HeS 011, which was not expected to be available for some time. During pulsejet trials the first prototype iced up, and its pilot, Helmut Schenk, escaped using the ejection seat — the first emergency use of one anywhere. The December 1942 mock dogfight did its work: the Air Ministry ordered 20 pre-production aircraft, to be followed by 300 production machines. The second prototype was re-engined with Junkers Jumo 004s and flew on them from 16 March 1943, but the larger engines were judged unsuitable for the airframe. Less than two weeks later, on 27 March 1943, Erhard Milch ordered Heinkel to abandon the He 280 altogether. It never entered service, and it never saw combat.
Afterlife
The end of development in 1943 did not ground the prototypes: they flew on as test beds for engines and aerodynamic research, one of them making at least 100 towed flights between August 1944 and early 1945. No complete He 280 is known to survive; of the third prototype, only the tail unit was found after the war, at Heinkel's factory complex near Vienna. Heinkel's interest in jet fighters did not end with the cancellation: it led to the single-engined He 162, chosen as the winner of the Emergency Fighter Program in October 1944. Robert F. Dorr, writing in Defense Media Network, sums the type up as Germany's first jet fighter and a "brilliant mistake".