Ernst Heinkel

German aeronautical designer

• Born: January 24, 1888
• Birthplace: Grünbach, Germany
• Died: January 30, 1958
• Place of death: Stuttgart, West Germany (now in Germany)

Heinkel was a major figure in the development of European military and commercial aviation in the first half of the twentieth century, noted for advanced designs and the first practical jet- and rocket-propelled aircraft.

Early Life

Ernst Heinkel (ehrnst HIN-kehl) was the son of the local plumber in the small south German town of Grünbach. As a child he showed a disposition toward mechanical pursuits. In 1907, Heinkel enrolled in the engineering program at the Technische Hochshule in Stuttgart, from which institution he eventually received several advanced degrees.

Heinkel shared with many in his generation a fascination for the achievements of early aviation. Shortly after he began studies at the Technische Hochshule, Heinkel witnessed one of the tragic incidents of that era when lightning struck a Zeppelin lighter-than-air dirigible, then regarded as the epitome of aviation technology, turning the hydrogen-filled balloon into a deadly inferno. For Heinkel, the explosion was a turning point: He became convinced that the future of aviation lay with heavier-than-air craft. The rest of his education, and his career, would be devoted to perfecting that technology.

Heinkel’s early experiments were less than successful. The prototype of his first aircraft design, patterned closely after the styles used by Wilbur and Orville Wright, crashed on its first test flight in 1910. During the succeeding year, however, several of his designs proved themselves in the air. Heinkel, like many European aviation pioneers, was deeply interested in developing aircraft that could take off from water rather than land, and several of his early models were so designed. His efforts attracted the financial support of Jacques Schneider, a Swiss industrialist, who enabled Heinkel to form his first modest aircraft company. Heinkel’s experiments culminated in 1913 in construction of the Albatross, a monoplane with advanced fuselage and wing design.

Life’s Work

In 1914, shortly before the start of World War I, Heinkel received an offer to become technical director of the Hansa Aircraft Company. A few months later, he was invited to head the important Brandenburgischer Flugzeugwerke, which had just been purchased by a consortium led by Camillo Castiglioni, an Austrian millionaire and aviation enthusiast. In this favorable environment, Heinkel produced hundreds of aircraft designs for the war effort. The light Brandenburg reconnaissance plane, soon to be armed with machine guns, became the scourge of the English Channel for the first two years of World War I. By the end of the conflict, Heinkel had established himself among a tiny handful of leading aircraft developers in Europe.

His career, however, fell on hard times after the war. International treaties severely limited the size and flexibility of the German military aircraft industry, and serious commercial aviation was still in its infancy. Anticipating these conditions, Castiglioni closed the Brandenburgischer Flugzeugwerke and dismissed the employees. Heinkel had to find work as a mechanic and automobile salesman until he could raise the funds to start a new aircraft company on his own.

Heinkel’s fortunes revived quickly as other governments sought his advice. In 1921, he signed contracts to design and build seaplanes for the navies of Sweden and the United States, a specialty for which he already had an international reputation. In December, 1922, Heinkel realized a lifelong dream by founding his own company, the Ernst Heinkel Flugzeugwerke, located at Warnemünde, near the northern coast of Germany. The firm was immediately successful in landing contracts from the Japanese air force. Throughout the 1920’s, the Heinkel firm supplied seaplanes and other aircraft to more than a dozen governments as well as many private companies throughout the world.

With his aircraft company financially secure, Heinkel returned in the mid-1920’s to his first love: experimental design. It was in this capacity that he revealed himself as a genius of aeronautics. In 1925, his company produced the prototype of the stunning He-70, a revolutionary, four-passenger transport that was nothing less than a leap into the future. The He-70 featured the streamlined, solid fuselage and large, elliptical forward wings that would become standard aircraft design for decades. The He-70 could reach air speeds of 355 kilometers per hour, nearly triple the average speed of World War I aircraft.

During the 1920’s, Heinkel also pioneered the technique of launching aircraft by steam catapult, all the while continuing the development of award-winning seaplane designs. In 1929, with aid and encouragement from Lufthansa and German steamship lines, he combined seaplanes and catapults to create an international air mail service long before the appearance of aircraft with transatlantic range. In one version of his method, steamships making the Atlantic crossing catapulted small mail planes into the air while still hundreds of miles from land, thus reducing the delivery time for overseas mail by several hours at each end of the crossing. Later, seaplanes launched many hours after the departure of transatlantic liners were used to catch up with the ships and deliver late mail.

By 1931, Lufthansa, using Heinkel seaplanes, developed all-aircraft international mail routes from Germany to the United States and Latin America. Small ships placed at regular points along the transatlantic routes served as fuel tenders and way stations. The seaplanes carrying the mail flew to each tender and landed on the water, were winched aboard, refueled, and then launched by catapult to the next ship hundreds of miles away. It was a kind of oceanic Pony Express, capable of delivering mail across the Atlantic in less than one third of the time required by the fastest steamship.

The ambitious military expansion program of the German government in the mid-1930’s transformed priorities in the Heinkel Flugzeugwerke, by now one of the largest aircraft plants in Europe. It quickly provided the highly successful He-111, an upgraded, much-enlarged version of the standard-setting He-70. The twin-engine He-111 was a versatile design easily converted into a commercial airliner, military transport, or bomber. In the latter guise, it appeared in the Spanish Civil War in 1936, helping decide the outcome on behalf of the German-supported Loyalists.

In 1935, Heinkel met Wernher von Braun , a brilliant aeronautical engineer obsessed with the possibilities of rocket-powered flight. Heinkel already had sensed that the technology of propeller-driven aircraft, using reciprocating piston engines, was approaching its theoretical performance limits, and that revolutionary thinking about new power plants and methods of propulsion was necessary for the industry to advance. He and von Braun began a fruitful collaboration. Heinkel specialized in propulsion design while von Braun developed aircraft structure. By 1937, their tests demonstrated the feasibility of power flight without propellers.

The following year, Heinkel and von Braun established themselves at a new test site at Peenemünde, on the Baltic Sea, destined to be the birthplace of future German military rocket programs. In June, 1939, they tested the world’s first successful rocket plane, the He-176, which reached the then astonishing speed of 800 kilometers per hour. By the end of 1939, Heinkel and von Braun also had tested their first turbojet aircraft, the He-178, as well as ramjet vehicles of the sort that later would be developed as the V-1 “buzz bomb” used against London and other British cities.

The outbreak of World War II in September, 1939, was, for Heinkel, the beginning of a period of irony and frustration. Materially the contributions of the Heinkel Flugzeugwerke to the German war effort were enormous. Thousands of He-111’s rolled off the assembly lines, together with huge numbers of the highly successful He-162 “Volksjager” fighter-bombers. However, these were perfected aircraft; the promising work with von Braun, which might have resulted in timely technological innovations crucial to the war effort, encountered only political roadblocks. While Heinkel awaited government support, his competitor and bitter rival, Willy Messerschmitt, developed practical ramjet and turbojet power plants and by 1942 brought them into production.

From the beginning, Heinkel had difficulty convincing the German general staff of the potential of rocket planes and jet aircraft. In July, 1939, he demonstrated the He-176 rocket plane to an official audience, including Adolf Hitler, Hermann Göring, and a host of high-ranking officers. The plane performed flawlessly; the pilot even buzzed the onlookers at near-supersonic speed. Strangely, Hitler was unimpressed; he left the demonstration without a word. Göring, despite being in charge of the Luftwaffe, only expressed concern for the safety of the pilot. At a later demonstration of the He-178 turbojet, Göring displayed no interest whatsoever. When the government finally did turn to Heinkel, he embarked on a crash program resulting in the first production-line jet fighter, the He-280. It was, however, too little, too late. Only a few could be produced before Germany surrendered in April, 1945.

Administrative obstinacy no doubt combined with the success of Messerschmitt drove Heinkel into a position of outspoken criticism for Luftwaffe leadership in the waning months of World War II, which served only to remove him further from official favor. In 1944, Heinkel casually associated with the anti-Hitler clique led by Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, former chief of German counterintelligence. Although nothing came of this contact during the war, when Heinkel was brought before an Allied tribunal in 1948, charged with aiding the German war effort, his involvement with Canaris was instrumental in winning acquittal.

The division of Germany devastated Heinkel’s industrial complex. Most of his plants and equipment, as well as some of the most important technicians, ended up in East Germany and the Soviet Union. Heinkel himself, though in West Germany, was reduced once more to trivial pursuits. In 1950, he and his son opened a small factory for bicycles, motorcycles, and midget automobiles. Heinkel was determined that this experience, like that of the early 1920’s, would be only a temporary setback. By 1955, he was back in aviation as a codirector of the Fokker aeronautics combine. In January, 1958, he joined forces with his old rival Messerschmitt in a new venture to manufacture antiaircraft missiles and modern jet aircraft. The day following announcement of this enterprise, Heinkel died.

Significance

Heinkel was a man of two different generations. Like the Wright brothers, Alberto Santos-Dumont, Louis Blériot, and many others, he was a gritty pioneer of early aviation who designed his own aircraft and often risked his life testing them. Unlike some of these pragmatic, intuitive tinkerers, however, Heinkel possessed a singular genius that enabled him to perceive technological frontiers far beyond his time. His work with catapult launches, for example, helped make possible the modern aircraft carrier. His rocket plane experiments were the basis of jet-assisted takeoff (JATO), which made it possible to store combat aircraft in widely dispersed bunkers without runways. Above all, his conception of the limitations of propeller-driven craft presaged not only the jet age but also the first steps in modern rocket development.

It was not only some of his colleagues in aviation whom Heinkel eclipsed in foresight. The outcome of World War II may have been determined, in part, by the fact that Heinkel was far more the visionary than any of the German political or military leaders who professed to be so fond of novel weapons.

Bibliography

Crouch, Tom D. Wings: A History of Aviation from Kites to the Space Age. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, 2003. Crouch, a curator at the Smithsonian Museum, includes information about Heinkel’s airplanes in this history of aviation.

Galland, Adolf. The First and the Last: The Rise and Fall of the German Fighter Forces, 1938-1945. Translated by Mervyn Savill. New York: Henry Holt, 1954. A fascinating account of the interplay among politics, strategy, personalities, and technological developments in the Luftwaffe, written by an officer in the German Condor Legion attached to the Spanish Loyalists, later a staff officer in the German Air Ministry. Galland’s account justifies much of Heinkel’s bitterness about decision making in the government.

Hanniball, August. Aircraft, Engines, and Airmen: A Selective Review of the Periodical Literature, 1930-1969. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1972. More than eight hundred pages of annotations and summaries of technological and biographical histories during the period when Heinkel flourished.

Josephy, Alvin M., Jr., ed. The American Heritage History of Flight. New York: American Heritage, 1962. Typical of many general histories of aviation organized to emphasize the overall development of industry and technology rather than the careers of individuals.

Sunderman, James F., ed. Early Air Pioneers, 1862-1935. New York: Franklin Watts, 1961. Deals with the careers of many early aviators, arranged so that the interconnections among these figures are stressed. Particularly useful for its international perspective on technological developments.

Taylor, John W. R., and Kenneth Munson. History of Aviation. London: New English Library, 1972. Heavily illustrated and detailed accounts both of major milestones in aviation technology and of contributors to early aviation. One of the best organized sources of biographical accounts.