Messerschmitt Me 163 Komet

The Komet was the work of Alexander Lippisch, who had spent the 1920s and 1930s building tailless gliders and delta-winged research aircraft. In 1939 he and his team moved to Messerschmitt at Augsburg to build a tailless aircraft around Hellmuth Walter’s new rocket motor, and the result was the Me 163: a stubby fuselage, a swept wing with fixed slots near the tips, a tall fin and no tailplane at all. The Me 163A prototypes were flown first as gliders and then under power at Peenemünde from August 1941, and on 2 October 1941 Heini Dittmar reached about 1,004 km/h in one, faster than any aeroplane had flown before. The secret was kept until the end of the war.

The Me 163B was the operational fighter. Its Walter HWK 109-509 motor burned two fuels that ignited on contact: T-Stoff, concentrated hydrogen peroxide, and C-Stoff, a mixture of methanol, hydrazine hydrate and water. It could climb to 12,000 m in about three and a half minutes, but its fuel lasted only seven or eight minutes under power. To save weight it took off from a two-wheeled dolly that was dropped once airborne, and it landed as a glider on a retractable skid. The fuels were so corrosive and unstable that a heavy landing could set off an explosion, and a leak could burn a pilot badly; pilots wore protective suits made of fabric that resisted the peroxide.

Jagdgeschwader 400 flew the Komet against American bombers from Brandis, near Leipzig, from the summer of 1944. It was so fast that pilots had only a moment to aim their two 30 mm MK 108 cannon before closing on the target, and the fighter shot down few bombers, while many Komets were lost in accidents. About 370 were built. After the war Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union took Komets home to study, and Japan had already built its own copy, the Mitsubishi J8M. In Britain the National Museum of Flight at East Fortune displays 191659, and the RAF Museum has 191614.