Arado Ar 234 Blitz
The Arado Ar 234 Blitz was the world's first operational jet bomber and reconnaissance aircraft. Built by Arado in Germany and first flown in 1943, it was designed for high-speed reconnaissance and adapted to carry bombs; in service from August 1944, its speed made it almost impossible to intercept. It equipped a single bomber unit and flew reconnaissance to the end of the war. The sole survivor is displayed by the Smithsonian in Virginia.
Why It Mattered
The Ar 234 was the world's first operational jet bomber and reconnaissance aircraft. At a maximum speed of about 735 km/h (459 mph), it could outrun the piston-engined fighters of its day, and for most of its short career it operated virtually immune to interception. Its reconnaissance gave the German high command a current picture of Allied positions late into a war it was losing. It arrived too late and in too few numbers to have any significant impact on the war's outcome.
Design Notes
Development began in 1940, when the German Aviation Ministry asked Arado to design a reconnaissance aircraft propelled by the turbojet engines then under development at BMW and Junkers. The design team, led by Rüdiger Kosin, produced a clean high-wing monoplane with two turbojets in nacelles under the wings. To save weight and make room for fuel, the prototypes dispensed with a conventional landing gear: they took off from a wheeled trolley that the pilot jettisoned as the jet left the runway, and landed on retractable skids. The first prototype's airframe was complete by late 1942, but engine problems slowed flight testing, and it did not fly until July 30, 1943. Before that first flight, the ministry had already ordered a redesign: a conventional tricycle landing gear and a bombing capability. The pilot also acted as bombardier, aiming through a Lotfe 7K bombsight set into the cockpit floor while an autopilot held the aircraft steady on the run. The prototype of the revised design, designated V9, flew on March 12, 1944. Arado built only the B-2 version of the B series, converting some B-2 airframes into reconnaissance aircraft.
Operational History
Arado delivered 200 B-series aircraft by the end of December 1944 and 20 more before the war ended; the four-engine C model reached only 14 aircraft. The type's combat career had begun earlier, on August 2, 1944, when Erich Sommer piloted the V5 prototype on a reconnaissance sortie over the Allied beachhead in Normandy — the type's first combat mission — and encountered no opposition. In a two-hour flight Sommer gathered more useful intelligence than the Luftwaffe had obtained in the previous two months, and the Ar 234 went on providing reconnaissance until nearly the end of the war. As a bomber the type served with one unit only, KG 76, which flew its first operations in December 1944 in support of the Ardennes offensive. Typical missions were pinprick attacks by fewer than twenty aircraft, each carrying a single 500 kg bomb; on December 24, 1944, nine of them bombed a factory complex at Liège, and Allied fighters could not catch them. In mid-March 1945 KG 76 joined the attacks on the Allied bridgehead at Remagen, but failed to drop the Ludendorff railway bridge and lost aircraft to anti-aircraft fire. Shortages of fuel and spare parts then cut the unit back to a handful of sorties; its last missions were flown against Soviet forces encircling Berlin in the final days of April 1945.
Afterlife
One Ar 234 survives: the B-2 with Werk Nummer 140312, which served with KG 76 from December 1944 and was among the nine aircraft British forces took over at Sola, outside Stavanger in Norway, in May 1945. It was one of four Ar 234s collected by the USAAF's "Watson's Whizzers" group and shipped to the United States aboard the British aircraft carrier HMS Reaper. Flight-tested at Freeman Field and Wright Field, it finished testing on October 16, 1946, and was transferred to the Smithsonian Institution on May 1, 1949. The Smithsonian restored it from 1984 to February 1989 and showed it in the downtown museum in 1993. It is now on display at the museum's Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia.