Heinkel He 277

The Heinkel He 277 was a four-engine, long-range heavy bomber design, originating as a derivative of the He 177, intended for production and use by the German Luftwaffe during World War II. The main difference was in its engines. While the He 177 used four engines in two coupled pairs which proved troublesome, the He 277 was intended to use four unitized BMW 801E 14-cylinder radial engines, in single nacelle installations.

The design was never produced and no prototype airframe was completed. The deteriorating condition of the German aviation industry late in the war and the competition from other long-range bomber designs from other firms, led to the design being cancelled.

For many years after the war, some aviation history books and magazine articles stated that Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, early in World War II, was becoming so frustrated by the 177A's problems with its twin DB 606 "coupled" powerplants, that he forbade Ernst Heinkel from doing any work on a four-engined version of the 177 airframe, or even mentioning a new "He 277" design with four separate engines – by one account, in the late autumn of 1941 – until Heinkel brought the disagreement directly to Adolf Hitler, who supposedly not only approved of calling the new version of the 177 the "He 277", but overruled Göring's prohibition on working on the design (which Heinkel referred to as "He 177B" as a "cover designation" to hide its existence from Göring, and the RLM.)

Statements by Göring in August 1942 in response to Oberst Edgar Petersen's reports – in his capacity as the Kommandeur der Erprobungstellen ("commander of all Luftwaffe test stations"), at Erprobungsstelle Rechlin – on solving the serious problems with the original Heinkel He 177A's powerplants, seem to directly contradict elements of that narrative. The statements seem to show that Göring thought that the He 177A actually had four separate engines, and in late August 1942 Göring derisively labeled the He 177A's coupled engine arrangements, the DB 606 and DB 610 "power systems", as monstrous zusammengeschweißte Motoren, ("welded-together engines",) He was anxious to see a four-engined version of the bomber developed and in production. The earliest-dated initiative to be undertaken by Ernst Heinkel himself to trial a true "four-engined" design format for the original He 177 dated back to 17 November 1938, before the construction of the He 177 V3 and V4 prototype airframes had even been started, when Heinkel had personally asked the RLM to set aside the He 177 V3 and V4 airframes for a trial installation of four separate unitized Junkers Jumo 211 powerplants to overcome the concerns that the RLM Technischen-Amt technical department's director Ernst Udet and Heinkel had expressed about the RLM's specific dive-bombing priority for the He 177A, but was turned down for the trial fitment. However, several publications listed the He 177B and He 277 as separate designs, including Nowarra (1972).

The erroneous assertion in some post-1945 aviation publications about He 177B being a cover designation for He 277" could have been due to the fact that the RLM, in listing the He 177 development projects that they approved of the Heinkel firm doing work on as of February 1943 — six months after Göring's recorded engine complaint statements, and 18 months after Heinkel conceived the paper-only "He 177H" high-altitude predecessor to the later He 274 in October 1941, only included the He 177 A-5 heavy bomber, A-6 high-altitude bomber, A-7 long-range version, and the He 277 itself, defining the February 1943 date as the earliest reliable date of any official RLM mention of He 277, as this date also indicates the time by which the RLM had issued the Heinkel firm the 8-277 number for the project. The RLM as of late spring of 1943 anticipated that three He 277 V-series prototype aircraft, and construction of ten pre-production He 277A-0 series service test machines would come from Heinkel's Schwechat southern plant complex in Austria beginning in 1944.

The He 277's fuselage design had been meant to originate with the last proposed "coupled-engine" variant of the He 177, the long-range A-7, which itself was to be the basis for a four-engined variant of the Greif as the He 177A-10 (redesignated He 177B-7 in the late summer of 1943). The considerable changes in the He 277's overall design philosophy evolved after the Amerikabomber requirement’s emergence in 1941, from the changes in the He 277's general arrangement proposal drawings during that time period, especially after Heinkel had worked out the earlier P.1064 project in 1942 for a six-engine strategic bomber. The original proposal, which was meant to use the He 177A-7's fuselage as the starting point, evolved into designing a dedicated, new and wider He 219-general pattern fuselage layout for the 277 from the Spring 1943 timeframe onward, which would be more capable of using a tricycle undercarriage then gaining favor with a few German aviation designers.

The main factor that seemingly required the lower-drag "coupled" powerplant format for the He 177A, the dive bomb attack mandated by the RLM (and which Ernst Heinkel had vehemently disagreed with from the late 1930s) was rescinded by Göring five months before approval of the "He 277's" by the RLM in February 1943. Heinkel started work on the He 177B as a straightforward, separately four-engined development of the 177A under the B-series designation at least as early as the late summer of 1943, when official Heinkel documents began referring to the He 177B, evidenced from an August 1943-dated, Heinkel factory-created general arrangement Typenblatt drawing of the He 177 V101 being labeled with the 8-177 RLM designation for the entire line of Greif airframes, and "B-5" elsewhere in the drawing's title block, as a fully RLM approved development of the original He 177 aircraft line, and not in any way directly related to the entirely separate He 277 advanced bomber project, which by the summer of 1943 was considered to be Heinkel's Amerikabomber aviation contract contender. The first development of the original He 177A to fly with four "individual" engines – using a quartet of He 219-style annular radiators to cool its likely-unitized Daimler-Benz DB 603 powerplants – was the second He 177B prototype, the He 177 V102, on December 20, 1943.

In total, there were four separate efforts, the movement toward which had been initiated by Ernst Heinkel as early as November 1938, to develop "true four-engined versions" of the A-series Greif: the unbuilt He 179 with four Jumkers Jumo 211s; the He 177B, which culminated in four prototype examples being built, with three getting airborne before the war's end; the He 274, of which only two prototypes were started before the end of World War II and completed and flown in France after the war's end; and the He 277, for which only a few airframe parts had been in the process of completion, with no completed prototypes at any time, before the project’s cancellation in May 1944.