Heinkel He 274
| He 274 | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Heinkel He 274 | |
| Role | High-altitude heavy bomber Parasite aircraft mother ship (post-war French service) |
| Designer | Heinkel |
| First flight | December 1945 |
| Primary user | French Air Force |
| Number built | 2 |
| Developed from | Heinkel He 177 |
| Variants | Heinkel He 277 (as Amerika Bomber by February 1943, never built) |
The Heinkel He 274 was a German heavy bomber design developed during World War II, purpose-designed for high-altitude bombing with pressurized crew accommodation.
Due to the Allied advance through North-west Europe, the prototypes were abandoned at the French factory where they were being built. They were completed after the war by the French and used for high-altitude research.
On 17 November 1938, the owner of the Heinkel aviation firm, Ernst Heinkel, requested permission from the RLM that two of the requested eight prototype airframes for the nascent He 177 heavy bomber project, specifically the V3 and V4 airframes, be set aside for a trial installation of four separate Junkers Jumo 211 powerplants. Heinkel had foreseen that an individually engined version of his bomber would someday be preferred, quite unlike the requested fitment of the coupled pairs of Daimler-Benz DB 601 inverted V12 engines, each known as a DB 606 — weighing some 1.5 tonnes apiece — which ended up being fitted to all of the eight He 177 V-series prototypes at the request of the RLM, and the Luftwaffe High Command, with the concerned government agencies citing the desire for a dive-bombing capability to be present even with a heavy-bomber-sized offensive warplane, something Ernst Heinkel vehemently disagreed with.
By April 1939, interest in developing a high-altitude version of the He 177 had arisen, and on April 27, 1939, the first proposal for such an aircraft was presented to Heinkel by his firm's engineering staff. The aircraft was intended to have a reduced crew manifest of three people, with a fully pressurized nose compartment for the pilot and bombardier/forward gunner, and separate pressurized tail gun emplacement. The result, in December 1940, was the specification for the He 177A-2 high altitude bomber design, with a four-person crew manifest (pilot, bombardier, forward gunner and tail gunner) in the two specified pressurized compartments, and powered by the regular A-series pair of DB 606 coupled engines. The defensive armament had been reduced to a trio of Ferngesteuert-Lafette FL 81Z remote gun turrets, each with a twin-barrel MG 81 armament installation each in an upper nose mount, forward dorsal and (as part of the Bola casemate-style gondola under the nose) forward ventral location each, and a single MG 131 machine gun in an He 177A-1-style, pressurized manned flexible tailgun emplacement. The A-2 version had even been considered for a pioneering in-flight refueling capability, possibly using Ju 290 maritime patrol aircraft as the tankers - with such capability, the range of the A-2 would have been extendable to some 9,500 km (5,900 mi) of total flight distance.
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