The Nazi Fighter Plane that Dissolved Its Pilots Alive

On July 28, 1944, a flight of P-51 Mustangs escorting a squadron of B-17 Bombers on a mission over Merseburg, Germany, spotted something strange in the distance: a pair of white contrails rising at tremendous speed into the stratosphere. As the contrails pitched over and dove onto the bomber stream, the fighters broke formation to intercept. Seconds later, a pair of tiny egg-shaped aircraft with short swept-back wings flashed by and plunged back into the clouds, travelling faster than anything the American pilots had ever seen. It was the Allied air forces’ first encounter with a new German secret weapon: the rocket-powered Messerschmitt Me-163 Komet, an aircraft so fast its performance would not be matched for nearly a decade, yet so horrendously dangerous to fly it would claim the lives of more German pilots in development and training than Allied aircrew it took down in combat. Experiments with rocket-powered aircraft have a long history in Germany. In a series of increasingly audacious publicity stunts, during the 1920s automobile manufacturer Fritz Opel experimented with fitting gunpowder rockets to a variety of vehicles from cars to railway wagons. These experiments culminated in the construction of the Lippisch Ente, or Duck, which on June 11, 1928 became the first manned aircraft to fly under rocket power. Later in the 1930s, aircraft manufacturer Ernst Heinkel undertook a series of experiments to develop a liquid-fuelled rocket engine for use in aircraft. Heinkel’s first success came in March 1937 when a modified He-112 propeller-powered fighter flew under rocket power for 30 seconds. Heinkel next constructed the diminutive He-176, which on June 20th, 1939, became the first aircraft to take off, fly, and land solely under rocket power.. But while Heinkel had high hopes for rocket aircraft... This is an abridged version of a video on our channel TodayIFoundOut which you can check out and subscribe to here:    / @todayifoundout