Heinkel He 119

The Heinkel He 119 was an experimental single-engine monoplane developed in Germany. A private venture by Heinkel to test radical ideas by the Günter brothers, the He 119 was originally intended to act as an unarmed reconnaissance bomber capable of eluding all fighters by reason of its high performance.

Development
Design was begun in the late summer of 1936. A notable feature of the aircraft was the streamlined fuselage, most likely as an evolutionary descendant of the 1932-vintage Heinkel He 70 record-setting single-engined mailplane design, but without the He 70's protruding canopy-enclosed crew accommodation existing anywhere along the exterior. Instead, the He 119's forward fuselage featured an extensively glazed cockpit forming the nose itself, heavily framed with many diagonally braced windows immediately behind the propeller spinner's rear edge. Two of the three man crew sat on either side of the driveshaft which ran aftwards to a coupled "power system" pair of Daimler-Benz DB 601 engines mounted above the wing center-section within the fuselage, forming a drive unit known as the DB 606, the first German aircraft to use the "high-power" (>1,500 kW) aviation powerplant system, of some 1.5 tonnes weight.

The DB 606 was installed in the fuselage, just behind the aft wall of the cockpit near to the center of gravity with an enclosed extension shaft passing through the centerline of the extensively glazed cockpit to drive a large four-blade variable-pitch airscrew in the extreme nose. A surface evaporation cooling system was used on the He 119 V1, with the remaining prototypes receiving a semi-retractable radiator directly below the engine system to augment engine cooling during take-off and climb.

Only eight prototypes were completed and the aircraft did not see production mainly because of the shortage of Daimler-Benz DB 601 engines. The first two prototypes were built as land planes with retractable landing gear. The third prototype, He 119 V3, was constructed as a seaplane with twin floats. This was tested at the Erprobungsstelle Travemünde military seaplane test facility on the Baltic coast, and was scrapped in 1942 at Marienehe (today's Rostock/Schmarl neighborhood), northwest of the city centre.

On 22 November 1937, the fourth prototype, He 119 V4, made a world class record flight in which it recorded an airspeed of 505 km/h (314 mph), with a payload of 1,000 kg (2,200 lb), over a distance of 1,000 km (620 mi). The four remaining prototypes were completed during the spring and early summer of 1938, the He 119 V5 and V6 being A-series production prototypes for the reconnaissance model, and the He 119 V7 and V8 being B-series production prototypes for the bomber model.

These four aircraft were three-seaters with a defensive armament of one 7.92 mm (.312 in) MG 15 machine gun in a dorsal position, the V7 and V8 having provision for a normal bombload of three 250 kg (550 lb) bombs or maximum bombload of 1,000 kg (2,200 lb). Eventually, the V7 and V8 were sold to Japan in May 1940, and extensively studied; the insights thus gained were used in the design of the Yokosuka R2Y. The remaining prototypes served in the role of engine test-beds, flying with various prototype versions of the DB 606 and DB 610 (twinned DB 605s) "power systems", and the solely experimental DB 613 (twinned DB 603) "power system".