Submarines and their Weapons - Aircraft of World War II

ROCKET-POWERED AIRCRAFT
using hydrogen peroxide. Earlier versions (more
accurately, existing He 112 fighters with auxiliary
motors) had used a power unit developed by Wernher
von Braun (qv), which used liquid oxygen and alcohol,
a rather more volatile mixture. The near-explosive
decomposition of hydrogen peroxide into superheated
steam when it comes into contact with a catalyst
such as calcium, potassium or sodium permanganate
was to become a mainstay of German propulsion
programmes in a number of very different areas,
as we shall see. The He 176 flew for the first time on
30 June 1939. The aircraft probably never exceeded
the standard it had been designed to beat, 700km/h
(435mph), which was below the world speed record
of the day. It was essentially too heavy both for its
powerplant and for its short, stubby wings. The RLM
showed little interest in it, favouring the design which
would become the Messerschmitt Me 163 'Komet'
(qv). Heinkel abandoned the project.
ALEXANDER LIPPISCH
Alexander Lippisch was a self-taught aerodynamicist
who had worked at Zeppelin/Dornier after World War
1, then at Rhön-Rossitten-Gesellschaft (RRG - which
Below: The Messerschmitt Me 163 'Komet' interceptor
first went into action in August 1944. It accounted for only
about a dozen Allied bombers in six or seven months.
developed gliders for meteorological research,
amongst other things), and later, when RRG was
absorbed into it, at the Deutsches Forschungsinstitut
für Segelflug (DFS - German Glider Research Institute).
Lippisch maintained that had Heinkel had even
a narrow understanding of the nature of gliders, he
would have realised that he needed a large wing area
(and a small wing loading) to make an aircraft such as
the He 176 fly adequately, as it had only very
marginal power reserves. Instead, Heinkel had given
his proto-rocket aircraft short, stubby wings which
were really little more than control surfaces, and his
experiments failed in direct consequence. Lippisch
went further than that, of course. Like the Horten
brothers, he was a staunch and unremitting advocate
of the tailless, delta-pianform flying wing, and was
the first to fly such a design, in 1931. Three years
before that, however, Lippisch had produced a rocketpropelled
glider for automobile manufacturer Fritz
von Opel, who saw the new technology mostly in
terms of its ability to attract crowds, but who was
interested enough (and rich enough) to provide seed
money for would-be pioneers. Opel lost interest in the
early 1930s, after rocket-powered gliders had been
the death of a number of pilots. Lippisch's 'Ente'
('Duck') became the first rocket-powered aircraft to
fly, with Fritz Stammer at the controls, on 11 June
1928. By 1933, Lippisch had designed a variety of