The He 178 could have become the Luftwaffe's jet fighter

One lap – that’s all Erich Warsitz was supposed to fly on August 27, 1939. But the Heinkel aircraft factory’s test pilot didn’t follow these instructions: once he had launched the latest experimental aircraft, the He 178, and the machine flew through the When the air slipped, the 32-year-old made another circuit before landing and applauding his colleagues on the ground.

The first flight of the He 178 meant a revolution in aircraft technology: for the first time a purely jet-powered aircraft had demonstrated its flight capability. It has long been known that recoil was a suitable propulsion system for an aircraft - every rocket proved this. But the first real rocket plane, also a Heinkel design and also piloted by Warsitz, had only completed its maiden flight two months earlier.

Due to the principle, the possible flight duration of every rocket plane was strictly limited, but in addition to the fuel for the engine, the right oxidizing agent for combustion had to be carried along. It was different with the jet engine: It drew the necessary oxygen from the ambient air, so only had to carry the fuel with it.

Shortly before the outbreak of war, the pilot had proved that Germany was superior to all potential opponents of the war in this technology. Warsitz had started his career as a sports pilot, but switched in 1934 to become a Luftwaffe test pilot. There he was soon regarded as the most experienced man in the cockpit - and as one whose technical understanding went far beyond anything a pilot needed to know.

In the 1930s, two young inventors worked independently on a new engine for aircraft. The German physicist Hans-Joachim Pabst von Ohain, born in 1911, conducted practical experiments with the help of a car repair shop alongside his work as a doctoral student at the University of Göttingen. The pilot Frank Whittle, who was four years his senior, had already filed a patent in 1930 for what was, however, a very immature idea for a compressor turbine engine.

In this race, sometimes the British were ahead and sometimes the Germans. The first pure jet aircraft was not ready for testing until 1938: the Heinkel He 178 was a new design, a high-wing aircraft whose main landing gear was retracted into the fuselage. But at the same time she had a tail wheel like propeller planes. The air intake for the engine, which was installed centrally behind the cockpit, was in the bow, the air duct was carried out curved under the pilot. Since the hull construction was partly made of wood, a heat shield made of asbestos had to be used - the turbine got considerably hotter than a conventional piston engine.

Nevertheless, the maiden flight was successful on Sunday, August 27, 1939: without any major difficulties, with the landing gear extended and without pushing the engine to its limits, Warsitz flew at around 600 kilometers per hour at an altitude of 50 meters - for comparison: the standard fighter of the Luftwaffe at that time, the Messerschmitt Bf 109D, only reached 570 kilometers per hour under good conditions and at an altitude of 5000 meters.

But immediately after the German invasion of Poland in 1939, the Reich Aviation Ministry issued instructions to discontinue projects that were not directly useful for the war. However, the He 280 twin-engine jet fighter prototype developed from the He 178 completed its maiden flight at the end of March 1941.

Incidentally, the German Air Force was not able to make use of its time advantage, mainly due to several wrong decisions by General Air Force Master Ernst Udet, Air Force Chief Hermann Göring and Hitler himself: The first operational German jet fighter, the Messerschmitt Me 262, came to the front for the first time in the summer of 1944, but was at Hitler's instigation not - as originally planned - used as a fighter, but as a fighter-bomber.

Erich Warsitz flew every prototype available to him. As a test pilot, he never had to go to the front, but did train German bomber crews. In 1942 he suffered an accident in which he fractured his vertebrae and his active career was over. For Warsitz it was the starting signal for a middle-class career. He opened metal works in Lower Lusatia and in Saxony and founded the "Warsitz Werke" in Amsterdam, a factory for precision mechanics. There he also received the order to supply parts for the German A4 rocket (V2).

After May 8, 1945, the Russians became aware of him. During long interrogations, they tried to persuade him to help them with what he knew. But the former test pilot refused, even at the price of a sentence of 25 years of forced labor in Siberia.

At the mediation of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer (CDU), Warsitz came to the Federal Republic in 1950 and opened the Hilden machine factory in North Rhine-Westphalia. In 1965 he retired and moved to Lugano, Switzerland. He died there in 1983 after a heart attack as a man whose role in a criminal system was characterized by ambivalence - like so many members of his generation.

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