History that never happened
The Arado Ar E.555 started out in late 1943 as an all-wing project intended to meet the RLM requirement of a high speed jet bomber capable of carrying a bomb load of at least 4000 kg and with a range of 5000 km. Arado took the challenge of producting a feasibility study and assigned a construction team to the project. The results were available by early 1944. The conclusion was that the project could best be fulfilled by using an all-wing design with a laminar high speed profile.
The study resulted in as many as fifteen possible aircraft configurations designated E.555-1 to E.555-15. The main differences between the designs lay in the propulsion layout; the first variants featured large numbers of BMW 003 or Heinkel S 011 turbojet engines clustered together, while most of the later designs were equipped with three powerful BMW 018 turbojets mounted either separately or together in different configurations.
