Heinkel He 119
| He 119 | |
|---|---|
| Role | Reconnaissance bomber |
| Manufacturer | Heinkel |
| First flight | July 1937 |
| Primary user | Luftwaffe |
| Number built | 8 |
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 due to its high performance.
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 aft to a "power system", a coupled pair of Daimler-Benz DB 601 engines mounted above the wing center-section within the fuselage, mounted together within a common mount (the starboard component engine having a "mirror-image" centrifugal supercharger) with a common gear reduction unit fitted to the front ends of each component engine, forming a drive unit known as the DB 606, the first German aircraft to use the "high-power" powerplant system. meant to provide German aircraft with an aviation powerplant design of over-1,500 kW (2,000 PS) output capability.
The DB 606 was installed just behind the aft cockpit wall, near 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 nose. An evaporative cooling system was used on the V1, with the remaining prototypes receiving a semi-retractable radiator directly below the engine to augment cooling during take-off and climb.
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