RLM Aircraft Designation System - The System

The System

When the Reichsluftfahrtministerium was given control of the country's aviation activities in 1933, it set out to catalog both the aircraft already in production by various German manufacturers as well as new projects approved for development by the ministry. The RLM made necessary improvements to a designation system which had been set up in 1929/30 by the Heereswaffenamt (Army Weapons Office) in the Reichswehrministerium (Defense Ministry), together with other institutions related to the industry. The former system had caused confusion in the use of aircraft designations among the different manufacturers; six aircraft of different firms used the number 33.

The improved designation system was introduced in order to provide a simple and unambiguous identification of every airplane. The heart of the new system was a (theoretically) unique number assigned by the RLM. In internal paperwork, this number was simply prefixed "8-" (or, in the case of sailplanes, subject to a separate numerical list, "108-"), while "9-" indicated aircraft engines, with 109 prefixing reaction engines (gas turbines, pulse-jets and rockets). The new standardized type designation added two letters representing the manufacturer; Dornier (Do) and Rohrbach (Ro) already used this practice. The first of these two letters was shown in upper case, the second always in lower case, no matter its origin – so Fw for Focke-Wulf or Bf for Bayerische Flugzeugwerke. The very first exemption from this rule was granted several years later to Blohm & Voss when they renamed their aircraft manufacturing operation – which had been split off from Hamburger Flugzeugbau (Ha) – to Blohm & Voss and received the designation BV for their new aircraft, the first of which was the BV 138 Fliegende Holzschuh trimotor flying boat.

As such the RLM referred to a Messerschmitt twin-jet fighter project internally as type "8-262", although the same aircraft in service would be more generally known as the "Me 262". Originally, these numbers were assigned sequentially and wherever possible attempted to take into account the manufacturers' own in-house design numbers for types already existing in 1933. Duplication resulted from the fact that when one manufacturer abandoned a project, the same number was occasionally re-allocated, with an appropriate time delay, to another manufacturer, with one known case being the number "8-163", used both for the Messerschmitt Bf 163 liaison design, and later the much more famous Komet rocket-powered interceptor, where the same firm (under a new name) re-used the same number.