Discover the Heinkel He 119: Germany’s Experimental Single-Engine Monoplane

• 1 de April de 2016
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The Heinkel He 119 was an experimental single-engine monoplane developed in Germany. A private venture by Heinkel to test radical ideas by the Günter brothers, the He 119 was originally intended to act as an unarmed reconnaissance bomber capable of eluding all fighters due to its high performance.

Design was begun in the late summer of 1936. The He 119’s forward fuselage featured an extensively glazed cockpit forming the nose itself, heavily framed with many diagonally braced windows immediately behind the propeller spinner’s rear edge. Two of the three-man crew sat on either side of the driveshaft, which ran aft to a “power system”, a coupled pair of Daimler-Benz DB 601 engines mounted above the wing center-section within the fuselage, mounted together within a common mount (the starboard component engine having a “mirror-image” centrifugal supercharger) with a common gear reduction unit fitted to the front ends of each component engine, forming a drive unit known as the DB 606, the first German aircraft to use the “high-power” powerplant system. meant to provide German aircraft with a aviation powerplant design of over-1,500 kW (2,000 PS) output capability.

The DB 606 was installed just behind the aft cockpit wall, near the center of gravity, with an enclosed extension shaft passing through the centerline of the extensively glazed cockpit to drive a large four-blade variable-pitch airscrew in the nose. An evaporative cooling system was used on the V1, with the remaining prototypes receiving a semi-retractable radiator directly below the engine to augment cooling during take-off and climb.

Only eight prototypes were completed and the aircraft did not see production, mainly because of the shortages of DB 601 “component” engines to construct the 1,500 kg (3,300 lb) “power systems” they formed. The first two prototypes were built as land planes, with retractable landing gear. The third prototype (V3) was constructed as a seaplane with twin floats (image). This was tested at the Erprobungsstelle Travemünde military seaplane test facility on the Baltic coast, and was scrapped in 1942 at Heinkel’s factory airfield in the coastal Rostock-Schmarl community, then known as Marienehe.

On 22 November 1937, the fourth prototype (V4) made a world-class record flight in which it recorded an airspeed of 505 km/h (314 mph), with a payload of 1,000 kg (2,205 lb), over a distance of 1,000 km (621 mi). The four remaining prototypes were completed during the spring and early summer of 1938, the V5 and V6 being A-series production prototypes for the reconnaissance model, and the V7 and V8 being B-series production prototypes for the bomber model. (wikipedia)