Heinkel He 277 - Competing Bomber Designs

Competing Bomber Designs

Throughout the time that the He 277 design was being worked on, Ernst Heinkel was facing competition from other developing heavy bomber designs, and large four-engined aircraft proposals that showed promise as heavy bombers, from Focke Wulf (the Fw 300, and later, the Ta 400), Junkers (the Ju 390), from Messerschmitt AG (the Me 264), and from his own firm's He 274 four-engined, high-altitude development of the He 177.

The first of these designs that the He 277 was pitted against, mostly to determine the "most producible" bomber that could also be license-built, given Germany's limited aircraft production capacity to arm the Luftwaffe with, and partially to determine the best long-range bomber design to fulfill the needs of the spring 1942-issued Amerika Bomber program documents, the Messerschmitt Me 264 ended up being the first design to challenge the He 277's chance for production. The Me 264 was a purpose-built long range bomber, using a tricycle landing gear configuration from the start. The Me 264 prototypes were already flying their test programs with four engines as early as late December 1942, a full year after Nazi Germany had declared war on the United States, five months after the Eighth Air Force had begun flying bomber missions against Nazi-occupied France, and two months before the earliest-known mention of RLM approval of the 277 itself.

The four-engined Me 264's development, because of the need to use scarce strategic materials in its construction, and because of the better performance estimates that the Focke-Wulf Ta 400 and He 277 possessed, was stopped in May 1943.

Because of the US involvement in the European Theater, the Luftwaffe now found that it had a serious need for a well-armed, long range bomber, which the Luftwaffe found could not be achieved with the 1,120 kW (1,500 hp) class engines it had for such a four-engined bomber, and that six engines of that same class would be needed on a strategic bomber design for a successful mission from Europe to attack the US and safely return to base, with enough of an offensive bombload to be effective, and to have enough defensive firepower for protection for a safe return. The Blohm & Voss firm's aviation division had already settled on six engines with success, as early as 1940, on the prototypes of the Bv 222 Wiking flying boat maritime patrol aircraft. This emerging need for six engines for such an aircraft was also recognized by Messerschmitt AG, when that firm fielded a paper project for a six-engined "Me 264B", that had a stretched wingspan outwards to 47.5 meters (155 ft 10 in), with two additional BMW 801 radial engines outboard of the existing four powerplants.

In March 1943, Focke-Wulf came up with a six-engined version of their proposed Fw 300 bomber, originally powered with just four BMW 801E radials. Their more advanced Ta 400 design, first proposed in October 1943 with a tricycle landing gear setup and meant to be powered with a half-dozen of the same engines as the 277 was meant to use, was joined by the Ju 390, a Junkers six-engined version of the developed version of their early-war Junkers Ju 90 airliner, the operational Junkers Ju 290 maritime patrol bomber, and also using six of the same BMW radials as the 277.

By October 1943, Ernst Heinkel had compared the Messerschmitt and Junkers four-engined designs, and the six-engined Bv 222, Ju 390 and Ta 400 designs to his own He 277 project, with the following conclusions:

"In our opinion, the Me 264 is a record-breaking aircraft, and does not come up to service requirements for operations in large numbers. The Bv 222 and Ju 290 are far too big and are not bombers, in addition to which the Ju 290 has to be altered to Ju 390 (six engines). This would make the construction effort bigger still. Thus, only the Ta 400 and the He 277 remain as useful operational aircraft".

— Ernst Heinkel

Of these competing types, only three of the Me 264 design, and a verified pair of the Ju 390 aircraft were ever built, solely as flyable prototypes, and none of these aircraft saw any action against the Allies.

The He 274, because of its own intended high-altitude role, was only a potential competitor with the He 277 for Heinkel's own company engineering and production staff, and the He 274's production had already been outsourced by the end of 1941 to the French Societe Anonyme des Usines Farman, or "SAUF" firm in Suresnes to partially allow Heinkel to work on other projects, like the He 277 and the more advanced Heinkel He 343 jet powered medium bomber design, both of which each had a few airframe components in the process of manufacture for prototype airframes, but with both designs never able to be completed as flyable aircraft.