My newest finished airplane model {#38 hanging from my basement’s ceiling): Dornier 335 Pfeil (Arrow). If you don’t know this one, don’t worry: It’s a weird one made at the end of World War II and only aviation freaks like me know it 😁
In the middle of the war, the German government made a request for a heavy fighter. Dornier (one of the main airplane manufacturers) came up with this innovative and interesting solution: One engine pushing and the other one pulling. Each engine had 1,800 horsepower (3,600 hp total). That big amount of power made it become WW2’s fastest piston engine with a top speed of 474 mph (763 km/h) or about 26 km/h (16 mph) faster than the famous P-51D Mustang.
From the Wikipedia: “There are many advantages to this design over the more traditional system of placing one engine on each wing, the most important being power from two engines with the frontal area (and thus drag) of a single-engine design, allowing for higher performance. The presence of the rear pusher propeller also mandated the provision for an ejection seat for safe escape from a damaged aircraft”.
There’s an interesting anecdote: Along with the ejection seat mentioned earlier, they designed the airplane with a tail assembly that could separate from the rest of the airplane in case of emergency. In order to separate it, they put an explosive charge that the pilot would activate right before ejecting to separate the tail from the rest of the aircraft. When it was brought to the US, one of the assembly technicians from the Dornier factory was present. It was then that he freaked out and almost got a heart attack when he found out that this explosive charge was still in place 40 or so years later… YIKES!!!
Only one Do-335 remains in existence. You can see it at the Udvar-Hazy Center (the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum (NASM)'s annex at Washington Dulles International Airport). This link https://pbase.com/diezphotography/image/94688958 will take you to a picture I took of it a few years ago. There’s one more picture after that one.
