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Chocks away!
Senior Airman
Cool profile. What a neat plane she is!
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red admiral said:The He-100 is only good until it gets shot at. 1 hole in that evaporative cooling system and it is screwed in a very short time.
CC. the bob would definitely have been different with the He-100. The RAF could simply use AA guns instead of bothering with fighters. With the He-100 flying close escort and shrapnel flying through the air, the -100 would be screwed due to the reasons mentioned above.
Heinkel only build three pre-serial He 100D-0 and twelve He 100D-1 (bigger tail unit and cockpit).
Three He 100D-0 were sold to Japan, which planned a licence production,
Six prototypes and one He 100D-1 were sold to the UDSSR, where especially Jakovlev analized it for his
later fighters Jak-1 and the excellent Jak-3 (Jakovlev later said that the condensation
cooling system was too complex for the rough conditions on russian airfields and didn´t copy it.).
The other D-1 were used to defend the Heinkel facilities at Rostock, but never engaged an enemy.
Some planes were shown for propaganda purposes as Nightfighter He 113,
which was more a mislead for the german people than for the allies.
Some british pilots claimed to have encountered He 100 during the Battle of Britain, but they were wrong.
My comment:
The He 100 had some problems with its condensation cooling system, but these were solved with
an additional retractable normal cooler under the fuselage and the original condensation cooling
system proved that it was able to take as much battle damage as well as normal cooling systems.
The C serie proved that this fighter can carry a armament superior to all enemies of its time.
The expectable dogfight tactics would have been similar to the F4U Corsair and Fw190A (hit and run).
Why didn´t this plane succeed? Even with a standard cooling system (and no condensation cooling),
it would have been still fast enough to be state-of-the-art until at least 1942!
The only weakness I found was the small wing area of 14,50m2. It later would have limited the
amount of additional armour, horsepower, armament and fuel and resulted in a high landing speed.
In fact, the allies wouldn´t have had any chance in the Battle of Britain against
800 Heinkel 100D instead of 800 Me 109E!
Imagine a DB605 fiited to the Heinkel He 100, this would have been in 1942. With the speed of the DB601 and DB605 variants, the RAF may have needed a much faster fighter, sending out urgent requests for a fighter with laminar flow wings. In 1942, the P-51B Mustang could have become the standard RAF fighter, or a Spitfire with laminar flow wings may have been rushed into production as early as 1940/1941