Heinkel He 178
A small Heinkel testbed built around Hans von Ohain's HeS 3 turbojet, the He 178 made the world's first turbojet-powered flight on 27 August 1939. Demonstrated to the German Air Ministry, it was rejected as impractical and never entered service.
Why It Mattered
On 27 August 1939, the Heinkel He 178 became the first aircraft in the world to fly under turbojet power. Heinkel funded the machine itself, as a private venture, to put Hans von Ohain's turbojet engine into the air. It made that flight days before the Second World War began in Europe, and it remained what it was built to be: a proof-of-concept machine, not an operational military aircraft. Few aircraft so small, and flown so briefly, have mattered so much: the jet age begins with this flight.
Design Notes
The He 178 was designed around von Ohain's third engine design, the HeS 3, carried inside the fuselage. Von Ohain's first engine, the hydrogen-powered HeS 1, had run successfully in early 1937. The HeS 3B that powered the first flight evolved the following year; it at first gasified its fuel internally, rather than spraying in atomised liquid fuel as later engines would. Everything else about the aeroplane was subordinate to the engine test: it was a flying test bench, not the prototype of a fighter.
Operational History
Its whole operational history is a test programme: Erich Warsitz made the first flight on 27 August 1939. Flight testing amounted to a short series of test flights, none longer than about ten minutes — a combat-impractical endurance that marked it as an experiment. Demonstrated to the German Ministry of Aviation, the aircraft was rejected as impractical. The ministry was already backing its own jet programmes, built around axial-flow turbojets it judged more promising. It carried no armament, flew no missions and equipped no unit. Testing ended without the type entering service or production of any kind. When war came, days after the first flight, official attention turned to aircraft that could fight at once, and the He 178's moment passed.
Afterlife
After its brief test career, the V1 prototype was placed on display in Berlin, where it was destroyed in an Allied air raid in 1943. No original He 178 survives. What survives is the engine rather than the aeroplane: the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum holds a non-working reproduction of the HeS 3B, built from plans drawn by von Ohain. Full-size replicas of the aeroplane are also displayed, among them the example at the Planes of Fame Air Museum in California.