night owl aviation history - july 2016

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HEINKEL PRODUCED ONE OF THE MOSTINNOVATIVE NIGHT FIGHTERS OF WORLDWAR II, BUT NAZI BUREAUCRATS REPEATEDLYSHOT IT DOWN BY STEPHAN WILKINSON

NIGHT OWL

NOCTURNAL PREDATOR

An He-219 bristling with radarantennas finds a victim—anAvro Lancaster—in the nightskies over Germany, in MarkPostlethwaite’s illustration.


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P R E V I O U S P A G E S : © M A R K P O S T L E T H W A I T E ; A B O V E : N A T I O N A L A R C H

I V E S ;

( Reichsluft fahrtministerium

THERE WERE MANY NIGHTFIGHTERS IN WORLD WAR II,BUT ONLY TWO WERE DESIGNED

FROM THE GROUND UP TO PLAYIN THE DARK: THE NORTHROPP-61 BLACK WIDOW AND THERADAR-LADEN HEINKEL HE-219.

OWL BY DAY

An He-219A of I Gruppe,NJG.1, shelters at MunsterHandorf air base duringthe winter of 1944-45.


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VULNERABLE TARGETSFlares silhouette a Lancasterover Hamburg (above) in1943. Shredded by a nightfighter on a mission to Berlin,this Lanc (below) somehowlimped back to Sussex.

Alien

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SOME SAY THEUHU COULD HAVEBEEN THE BESTNIGHT FIGHTEROVER EUROPE.OTHERS THOUGHT

IT WAS OVERRATED.


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TECH NOTES HEINKEL HE-219A-7/R1

SPECIFICATIONS

WINGSPAN

60 ft. 8 in.

WING AREA

478 square feet

LENGTH

50 ft. 11¾ in.

HEIGHT

13 ft. 5½ in.

ARMAMENT Two 30mm MK 108 cannons

in wing roots, two 30mmMK 103 and two 20mm MK 151cannons in ventral tray, plus two30mm MK 108 cannons firingobliquely upward

WEIGHT 24,692 lbs. (empty)33,730 lbs. (loaded)

ENGINE 2 Daimler-Benz DB 603E12-cylinder inverted-Vliquid-cooled engines with1,775 hp each

MAXIMUM SPEED 416 mph at 22,965 feet

NORMAL CRUISING SPEED

335 mph

SERVICE CEILING 41,660 feet

RATE OF CLIMB

1,810 feet per minute

RANGE AT CRUISING

SPEED 1,243 miles


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verted V-12s—was buried behind the cockpit and drove contra-rotating props on its nose. The entire fuselage was cleanly cigar-shaped, and the pressurized cockpit was the fully glazed tip of

the cigar, with the prop shaft running at biceps height betweenthe two pilots.

Lusser took a new cut at the concept and came up with atricycle-gear twin that also had a pressurized cockpit and ejec-tion seats, plus remotely controlled defensive armament of thesort that would later appear on the Boeing B-29. Many pub-lished sources say the He-219’s nosewheel was steerable, whichwould have been another notable innovation. But the Uhu’snosegear was in fact free-castering, swiveling only in response

The ejection seat, however, was another matter. It was a majoradvance that predated anything of the sort in Allied aircraft,even though the British Martin-Baker company would go onafter the war to set the standard for fast-jet ejection seats. The

Germans and the Swedes had been working in parallel onejection-seat design. Both Saab and Dornier were designing would Cuisinart a pilot making a conventional bailout, andHeinkel had the He-280 jet in the works. The need for assistedbailout was becoming increasingly apparent; in the case of theHe-219, the crew sat well ahead of the propellers, and since thereliability of Heinkel’s Katapultsitzen was questionable, those bigprops would remain a fearsome obstacle throughout the air-plane’s brief career.

-ent for a “bungee-assisted escape device” that fortunately neverwent beyond the patent application paperwork. Saab accom-

later, a German test pilot did it for real, punching out of anHe-280 prototype after encountering icing in a snowstorm. In Heinkel awarded each of them 1,000 Reichsmarks (equivalent ejected three times, his back-seater twice—unfortunately too

late for the Heinkel bonus.Heinkel’s ejection seat

was operated not by anexplosive charge, like Saab’s,but by compressed air storedin an array of grapefruit-sizespherical tanks for each seat.

The system was vulnerableto leakage and, of course,battle damage to the pneu-matics. About half the crewdepartures from He-219swere conventional jumps dueto inoperable ejection seats.

The He-219’s entryinto combat was Only one Luft-

waffe night-fighter group, -

tioned nearly all the existingHe-219s, many of them stillproduction prototypes. On the outfit attacked a hugestream of RAF bombersheaded toward Düsseldorf.In an hour and a quarter—

CALCULATING THE RISK

An He-219 crew participatesin ejection-seat trials. Notecalibration markings and

lack of rear canopy.

KATAPULTSITZEN

A German pilotprepares to test theUhu’s ejection seat.

IN APRIL 1944, ANHE-219 PILOT AND

RADAR OPERATOREJECTED DURINGAN ATTACK BY AMOSQUITO—THEFIRST-EVERCOMBAT EJECTION.


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never produced. In the real world, the best the He-219 couldachieve was parity with some of the de Havillands. The supreme

the Hütter Hu-211, which would have created a U-2-like He-219using the Uhu’s main structure and engines with high-aspect-ratio wooden wings and a V tail built by sailplane specialist but the prototype was destroyed during an air raid.

Keeping complex He-219s operable became increasinglyproblematic as the war progressed. One Uhu pilot wrote: “It -sion, usually less, and of those half either returned immediately it was onboard electrics that failed.”

two or three days to air them out. Thanks to damp electrics, one RAF bomber, but when he pressed the trigger button, his land-ing lights came on. He admitted that it was hard to say who wasmore frightened—attacker or target.

When Germany surrendered in May 1945, few Uhus He-219s from a night-fighter base in Denmarkto England and sent the remaining three to

-craft were loaded aboard a British escort carrier and shipped

One unusual piece of He-219 technology that intrigued theArmy Air Forces testers and has thus survived is the “ribbon design have since been used to brake everything from top-fueldragsters to space capsules.

Of the three Uhus that came to the U.S., one was scrapped atChicago’s Orchard Place Airport (today O’Hare). Another sim-ply disappeared, doubtless scrapped elsewhere. The Freeman -

plete static restoration at theNational Air and Space Mu-seum’s Udvar-Hazy Centerat Dulles Airport. EuropeanAviation Curator EvelynCrellin points out that it isactually something of a com-posite, having been reassem-

bled at Freeman Field withengines and vertical stabilizersfrom the other two Uhus.

Crellin can’t give a firmdate for the completion of the the fuselage and the huge,one-piece wing. If it can bedone inside the Udvar-Hazymuseum building, where thewing and fuselage are cur-rently displayed along with thetwo restored DB 603 engines,

it might happen as soon as thissummer. If the componentshave to be reunited in the will take substantially longer.

Even then, there will beone task left: replication ofthe stag’s horn FuG 220 radardipoles and mast, which dis-appeared long ago. Though

Smithsonian restorers couldeasily mock them up fromlengths of tubing and fab-

ricated pieces based on oldphotographs, they insist oncreating functional replicas ofthe original units, and all thatis known about them is thatthey were made of steel, alu-minum and wood. No recordsof their actual constructionhave yet been found, thoughone original antenna arrayexists in a museum in Europe,which the Smithsonian willborrow and reverse-engineer.

Another example of the

workshop’s insistence onauthenticity is that during res-toration, removal of the Uhu’s original wave-pattern cam-ouflage paint still in perfectcondition. It has been leftuntouched so that futureresearchers and historianswill be able to examine it. back in place, museum visi-tors will never see that thereare areas of the airplane that

remain unrestored.The Smithsonian airplaneis an apt example of theHe-219’s unproductiveness. It exactly 3½ hours before beingferried to France for shipmentto the U.S. That time wouldaccount for a single produc-tion test flight plus the tripfrom the Heinkel factory toDenmark. In 10 months, itnever flew a single combatmission.

Contributing editor StephanWilkinson recommends for

further reading: Heinkel He219: An Illustrated Historyof Germany’s Premier , by Roland Remp;and He 219 Uhu Volume Iand Volume II , by Marek J.

Murawski and Marek Rys.

THE HE-219 COULDDO NOTHING BUTFLY AT NIGHT TOSHOOT DOWNLARGE, SLOWBOMBERS. DURINGTHE DAY IT WAS

ITSELF LARGEAND SLOW.

night owl aviation history - july 2016

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