His Early Life

Ernst Heinkel was born in Grunbach and as a young man became an apprentice machinist at a foundry. He initially became interested in aviation through a fascination with zeppelins, and in 1909 attended an international airshow in Frankfurt am Main. The following year, he built his first aircraft, working from a set of plans by Henri Farman.

 

His Career

Soon afterwards, he gained employment at Luft Verkehrs Gesellschaft (LVG) who were building Farman aircraft. From there, he went to Albatros, where Heinkel designed the Albatros B-II, a reconnaissance aircraft used during the early stages of the First World War. After leaving the Albatros, Heinkel designed several land- and seaplanes for the Hansa-Brandenburg company starting in 1914.

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Heinkel He 59

Heinkel He 115

Heinkel He 111.

In 1921, Heinkel was appointed head designer of the recently re-established Caspar-Werke, but soon left after a dispute over ownership of a design. In 1922 he established the Heinkel-Flugzeugwerke company at Warnemünde. Due to the restrictions placed on German aircraft manufacturing by the Treaty of Versailles, Heinkel looked overseas for contracts, with some seaplane designs being license-built in Sweden and working on catapult-launched seaplanes for the Imperial Japanese Navy. Back in Germany, he installed a similar catapult on the ocean liner Bremen for launching mail planes.

After Adolf Hitler came to power, designs by Heinkel's firm formed a vital part of the Luftwaffe's growing strength in the years leading up to the Second World War. This included the Heinkel He 59, the Heinkel He 115 and the Heinkel He 111.

Heinkel was passionate about high-speed flight, and was keen on exploring alternative forms of aircraft propulsion. He donated aircraft to Wernher von Braun who was investigating rocket propulsion for aircraft, as well as sponsoring the research of Hans von Ohain into turbojet engines.

Heinkel had been a critic of Hitler's regime from the time that he had been forced to sack Jewish designers and staff in 1933. In 1942 the government "nationalized" the Heinkel works. In practice, this meant that Heinkel was detained until he sold his controlling interest in his factories to Hermann Göring. Heinkel moved to Vienna and started a new design bureau there, working on the Heinkel He 274 design until the war ended.

At the end of the war Heinkel was arrested by the Allies but evidence of anti-Hitler activities and his treatment by the regime led to his acquittal and he was allowed to go free, although his company (along with the rest of Germany's aviation industry) was initially forbidden to produce aircraft.

In 1956 he introduced the Heinkel Kabine, one of a number of European bubble cars. Over 5,000 were produced at two plants in Germany before production ended in 1958. Production continued under license in Argentina until 1961, but an attempt to start production in Ireland ended due to quality control problems. The Trojan Ltd company of Croydon, England, produced 6000 or so Kabine cars under license. They produced four variants and prototypes for several more between 1961 and 1965. Their price reduced the demand in the face of cheap ordinary cars so production ceased.

 

His Death

Ernst Heinkel died in 1958 in Stuttgart. His autobiography, Stürmisches Leben was published in 1956 and translated into English as He1000 in its British edition and Stormy Life: Memoirs of a Pioneer of the Air Age in its US edition.

 

 

Hinkel Aircraft

 

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The Heinkel He 111 was an important twin-engine bomber.

Model of a Heinkel He 178, a jet-propelled airplane.

Ernst Heinkel (left) and Hans Von Ohain.

Ernst Heinkel, founder of Heinkel Aircraft Works, was born in the German province of Swabia in 1888. He began his technical career as an apprentice, working for a year in a machine shop and then taking a job in a foundry. He then supplemented this hands-on experience by attending a technical institute in the city of Stuttgart. He fell in love with aviation in 1908, inspired by the flight of Count Zeppelin's earliest dirigibles. He learned what he could from his school in Stuttgart, and then set out to learn more.

An international flying exhibition was to be held in Frankfurt in 1909. To raise money for the train fare so he could attend the show, Heinkel pawned a cherished book, The Elements of Machinery. The next year, he built his own airplane, working from blueprints prepared by France's Henri Farman. In 1911, his plane crashed and left him seriously injured. Even so, he now was one of the few people in Germany who had actually built and flown an aircraft. This meant that there was demand for his talents.

Heinkel won a position as an engineer at a newly formed company, LVG. He soon became chief designer at the firm of Albatros, a leading builder of fighter planes during World War I. In 1914, he joined the Brandenburg Aircraft Works, where he soon attracted attention from a wealthy industrialist, Camillo Castiglioni. During the war, he designed some 30 aircraft that went into production, including most of the warplanes used by Austria-Hungary, Germany's principal ally.

Defeated in 1918, Germany was stripped of its aviation industry by the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. Heinkel set up a small factory that built electrical equipment, but he was eager to return to building airplanes. Then, in 1922, the victorious Allies began to lift their restrictions, allowing Germany to build aircraft as long as their speeds did not exceed 105 miles per hour (169 kilometers per hour). Heinkel soon established his own firm: the Ernst Heinkel Aircraft Works.

Earlier at Brandenburg, he had built a number of seaplanes. He continued designing such aircraft within his new company. To dodge ongoing Allied restrictions, he arranged to have a manufacturer in Stockholm, Sweden build them. This company, Svenska Aero AB, sold the planes to Air Forces in Sweden and other countries, paying royalties to Heinkel on each sale.

Japan was also interested in seaplanes. Such aircraft might fly from a battleship to find an enemy a long distance away, then return to land next to its ship. To do this, the seaplane needed a catapult to launch it into the air. Heinkel visited Japan and installed an experimental device aboard the battleship Nagato. He also placed a catapult on the passenger liner Bremen. This enabled that vessel to launch a mail-carrying plane while still at sea, resulting in faster delivery.

In 1933, the Nazis came to power in Berlin. He did not like that they forced him to fire Jewish designers and analysts. However, the Nazis soon sponsored a major expansion of his company. Since 1922, he had owned a single factory in Warnemunde on the Baltic coast. He now built two more, near Rostock and Berlin. Two talented designers, the brothers Siegfried and Walter Gunter, took the lead in crafting airplanes for his expanding firm.

Their first important success was the He 70. Built initially as an airliner and mail plane, the Luftwaffe—the Nazi Air Force—also used it as a bomber. Highly streamlined, it had a top speed of 233 miles per hour (375 kilometers per hour) and cruised at 190 miles per hour (306 kilometers per hour) During 1933, it set eight world speed records for aircraft of its type.

Building on this achievement, the Gunters crafted a highly important twin-engine bomber: the He 111. It became a mainstay of the Luftwaffe, and Heinkel built some 7,300 of them. The Nazis used it extensively during the Battle of Britain, striking repeatedly at London and at other targets.

The British and their U.S. allies fought back with powerful four-engine bombers, which carried large bomb loads over long distances. Luftwaffe leaders preferred dive bombers, which lacked range and carried only modest bomb loads but which could hit targets with high accuracy. Heinkel nevertheless urged the Luftwaffe to build heavy bombers and offered one to them: the He 177. It was bigger than America's B-17, and Heinkel built more than a thousand. But its engines showed an unpleasant tendency to catch fire, while production was delayed by Luftwaffe insistence that it also serve as a dive bomber. It played no major role in the war.

Even so, with sales of the He 111 and He 177 providing a steady income, Heinkel could pursue his strong personal interest in high-speed flight. He built the He 100, a prototype fighter that set a world record of 464 miles per hour (747 kilometers per hour) in 1939. This was close to the attainable limit for propeller-powered aircraft. It was already clear that faster airplanes would demand entirely new types of engines, and Heinkel by then was building the first such aircraft. They took shape as the rocket-powered He 176 and the jet-propelled He 178.

The He 176 tested two different rocket motors in flight: a liquid-fueled version built by Wernher von Braun and one that used hydrogen peroxide, constructed by Hellmuth Walter, an independent engine-builder. The Walter approach proved superior. His rocket motors powered the Messerschmitt Me 163, which reached 624 miles per hour (1,004 kilometers per hour) in 1941, twice the speed of operational warplanes.

Heinkel also designed the He-219, which has been described as the best night fighter that the Luftwaffe used in World War II. It may even have been the best night fighter of the war on either side. The He-219 was fast, maneuverable, and carried devastating firepower. It was the only piston-driven Luftwaffe night fighter that could face the speedy British De Havilland "Mosquito" as an equal. It featured remote-controlled gun turrets, a pressurized cabin, the first steerable nosewheel on an operational German aircraft, and the world's first ejection seats on an operational aircraft.

Heinkel entered the field of jet propulsion through his acquaintance with the physicist Robert Pohl of the University of Gottingen. Professor Pohl had a graduate student, Hans von Ohain, who had invented a jet engine. It didn't work very well, but Pohl recommended Ohain to Heinkel, who hired him. With support from Heinkel, Ohain built a jet that ran successfully in March 1937. Two years later, he had one with twice as much thrust. Heinkel installed it in the He 178, which flew in August 1939. It was the world's first jet plane.

Heinkel also built the world's first jet fighter: the He 280. It first flew in April 1941, and went on to achieve a top speed of 578 miles per hour (930 kilometers per hour) and altitude of 49,200 feet (14,996 meters). During that same month, Heinkel took over the Hirth engine plant in Stuttgart, which put him in a position to manufacture Ohain's jet engines. However, Heinkel lacked the factory facilities to build the He 280 in quantity while still fulfilling his existing commitments. The Luftwaffe therefore abandoned it.

Very late in the war, Heinkel made one more attempt to darken the skies with German jet fighters. He set out to build the He 162, crafting it of plywood and assembling it in an underground plant. With Allied and Soviet armies already at Germany's borders, the schedule called for development and mass production in only a few months. Heinkel built some 300 of them before the Nazis surrendered. Only a few of them had to time to enter service, while most remained on the ground for lack of fuel.

After the war, Germany again saw its aviation industry dismantled. Heinkel kept his company in business by building bicycles and motorbikes. Then in 1955, the restrictions again were eased and West Germany once more could return to building airplanes. The revived firm of Heinkel found work by assembling aircraft of foreign design under license. These included America's F-104G, a fighter that flew at twice the speed of sound.

Ernst Heinkel died in Stuttgart in 1958. His company remained alive for a few more years before it merged with a large corporate association, VFW, in 1965. This merger erased the corporate name of Heinkel, which had first entered the industry some 42 years earlier. Still, as a division of VFW, it has continued to prosper.

—T.A. Heppenheimer

Bibliography

Boyne, Walter J. Clash of Wings: Air Power in World War II. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994.

Constant, Edward W. The Origins of the Turbojet Revolution. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980.

Heinkel, Ernst. Stormy Life: Memoirs of a Pioneer of the Air Age. New York: Dutton, 1956.

Hirsch, Robert Sidney. Heinkel 100, 112. Fallbrook, Cal.: Aero Publishers, Inc., 1967.

Schlaifer, Robert, and Heron, S.D. Development of Aircraft Engines and Fuels. Boston: Harvard University, 1950.

Turner, P. St. John. Heinkel: An Aircraft Album. New York: Arco, 1970.

 

 

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