The Fastest Luftwaffe Fighter That Never Saw Combat !

In the late 1930s, as war clouds gathered over Europe, sleek German fighter aircraft broke through the sound barrier of its time, shattering world speed records and leaving engineers from London to Tokyo in awe.

The Hankl 100 was faster, more elegant, and more technically advanced than anything else in the sky.

It was a masterpiece of engineering, a fighter that promised to dominate the coming war.

Yet, despite all its brilliance, this aircraft never fired a shot in anger.

The Luftwaffer rejected it.

The factories that should have been churning out thousands of these machines stood silent.

And in one of history’s most audacious propaganda campaigns, the dozen aircraft that did exist were painted and repainted, photographed and refoggraphed to create the illusion of an entire phantom air force.

This is the story of the Hanklh 100, the fastest fighter that never was, and the bitter rivalry, political intrigue, and Tim and technical gambles that conspired to keep it grounded.

The story begins not with the H 100, but with defeat in 1936, Ernst Hankl, one of Germany’s most respected aircraft designers, suffered a devastating blow.

His company had submitted the E12 fighter to compete for the contract to build the Luftwaffer’s next generation air superiority fighter.

It was a beautiful aircraft, a gullwinged monoplane with clean lines and promising performance.

But when the smoke cleared from the competition, it was Willie Messid’s BF 109 that won the day.

The 109 was slightly faster, could turn a bit tighter, and though it had landing gear that looked like toothpicks and was notoriously difficult to handle on the ground, it had that edge the Luftvafer was looking for.

Hankl’s fighter was sent home, and only a hundred or so would ever be built.

Most sold to foreign air forces desperate for modern aircraft.

For Ernst Hankl, this wasn’t just a business setback.

It was personal.

Hankl and Messmid loathed each other with a passion that went beyond mere professional rivalry.

Messa, in Hankl’s view, was nothing more than a glider builder who’d gotten lucky.

Hankl himself had designed hundreds of aircraft during World War I.

He’d built seplanes, bombers, reconnaissance aircraft.

He was a true aviation pioneer.

And here was this upstart Messid stealing what should have been his contract.

But Hankl wasn’t the type to accept defeat gracefully.

If Messodmid had won this round, Hankl would design something so advanced, so revolutionary that the Luftvafer would have no choice but to recognize his genius.

He would build a fighter that made the BF 109 look like yesterday’s news.

And so in his design offices, Hankl assembled his team.

The project that emerged was designated project 1035, and it was ambitious from the very first sketch.

The goal was simple but audacious.

create a fighter faster than anything flying with longer range than the competition and wrapped in an airframe so aerodynamically clean it would slice through the air like a knife through water.

The design team led by the brilliant GA brothers obsessed over every detail.

They knew that to beat the 109 they needed to squeeze every possible advantage from their design.

The landing gear, including even the tail wheel, would retract completely into the fuselage, leaving no bumps or protrusions to create drag.

The wings would be thin and elegant, mounted low on the fuselage.

The cockpit would be fed seamlessly into the body with a canopy that provided the pilot with excellent visibility in all directions.

But the real innovation, the gamble that would either make or break the design, was the cooling system.

Every piston engine generates enormous amounts of heat.

And in 1938, the standard solution was a radiator, usually hung under the fuselage or built into the wing roots.

These radiators worked, but they created drag, and drag was the enemy of speed.

The Gunter brothers had a different idea.

What if instead of using a conventional radiator, they could cool the engine using the skin of the aircraft itself? The concept was called evaporative cooling, and it was based on a principle of physics.

When water turns to steam, it absorbs enormous amounts of heat.

If you could spray the hot coolant from the engine into a chamber, let it flash into steam, and then condense that steam back into water by running it through pipes built into the wings and fuselage, you could cool the engine without any external radiator at all.

It was brilliant in theory.

The system would be completely drag-free, hidden inside the aircraft’s skin.

The He would slip through the air with nothing to slow it down, but it was also risky.

The system required no fewer than 22 small electric pumps to move the coolant through the network of pipes.

Each pump had its own failure indicator light in the cockpit because if even one Fwell failed, the whole system could overheat.

And if a single bullet punctured those pipes running through the wings, the cooling fluid would spray out, the engine would overheat in minutes, and the pilot would be forced to either bail out or crash land.

Still, Hankl believed it was worth the risk.

Speed was everything in a fighter.

The faster you were, the more you could choose when to engage and when to run.

You could climb higher, strike harder, and survive longer.

And the H 100, freed from the drag of a conventional radiator, would be the fastest fighter in the world.

The first prototype designated H100 V1 took to the air on January 22nd, 1938.

From the very first flight, it was clear this aircraft was special.

It was fast, responsive, and when the test pilots pushed the throttle forward, it accelerated like nothing they’d ever flown.

But there were problems, too.

The evaporative cooling system was temperamental.

Pumps failed.

The engine overheated.

During testing, flights were cut short again and again as warning lights flashed in the cockpit.

And then there were the landing gear failures.

The wide set gear should have made the H100 easier to land than the 109, but the struts were built thin and light to save weight, and they kept collapsing.

Four of the first eight prototypes were damaged in landing accidents at various points during testing.

The Luftvafa test pilots who flew the aircraft weren’t impressed.

They complained about the high-wing loading, which made the aircraft feel heavy and sluggish at low speeds.

But Hankl pressed on because despite the problems, the H100 had one thing going for it that mattered more than anything else.

It was blindingly fast.

On February 26th, 1939, test pilot General Ernst Udet took the H100 V2 up for a record attempt.

Over 100 km closed circuit, he averaged 394.6 mph, setting a new world record.

It was a stunning achievement, and it put the H 100 on the map.

The aviation world took notice.

Here was a German fighter that could outrun anything in the sky.

But Hankl wasn’t satisfied.

He wanted more.

He wanted a record so spectacular, so unassalable that the Luftvafer would be forced to put his aircraft into production.

For the next record attempt, Hankl’s team took the He00 and stripped it down for maximum speed.

They clipped the wings to reduce span and drag.

They removed unnecessary equipment.

They optimized every surface, polishing the skin to a mirror finish.

And on March 30th, 1939, test pilot Hans Ditaly climbed into the cockpit and took off.

What happened next was aviation history.

Flying a course barely longer than the time it takes to boil an egg, Detail pushed the He to its absolute limits.

The evaporative cooling system, designed for short bursts of maximum power, kept the engine from cooking itself during the approximately 3-minute flight.

When Dtole landed and the timers were checked, the result was staggering.

463.92 mph.

It was the fastest any piston engine aircraft had ever flown, a record that would stand for years.

The Fed Aeronautic International, the world’s governing body for aviation records, ratified it as the new absolute world speed record for land planes.

The previous record set by an Italian sea plane in 1934 had been demolished.

The H 100 was officially the fastest aircraft in the world.

Surely Hankl thought this would be enough.

Surely the Luftwaffer would see what he’d accomplished and order his fighter into production.

He already had plans for a production version, the AV 100D1, with a more conventional cooling system to address reliability concerns.

The aircraft would still be fast with a top speed around 400 mph fully equipped.

It had better range than the BF 109, about 900 to,000 km compared to 600.

It could carry heavier arament.

It was by any any objective measure a superior aircraft.

But the Luftvafer said no.

The official explanation was rationalization.

Germany, the Reich Aviation Ministry announced, needed to consolidate its fighter production.

The BF 109 was already in mass production.

Thousands were rolling off assembly lines.

Switching to a new fighter would mean retooling factories, retraining workers, disrupting the supply chain.

And there was another problem.

The He used the same engine as the 109, the Dameler Benz DB601.

This engine was already in short supply with production barely keeping up with demand for the 109 and the BF- 110 twin engine heavy fighter.

If Hankl wanted to build the H100 with a different engine, the only option was the Junker’s Jumo 211, but the early Jumo 211 didn’t use a pressurized cooling system, which meant it was incompatible with the He’s evaporative cooling design.

Redesigning the aircraft for the Jumo would have taken time and money, and in the end, the performance would have been worse than the Biff 109 anyway.

So, the official story was simple logistics.

There weren’t enough engines to go around.

The 109 was good enough.

The He 100, for all its speed and elegance, was surplus to requirements.

But there were whispers of another reason.

Politics.

Willie Messesmidt, whatever his technical abilities, was politically connected in a way Ernst Hankl never was.

Messesmidt had cultivated relationships with key figures in the Nazi hierarchy.

His factories were in Bavaria, in the south of Germany, away from the concentration of aviation firms on the northern coast.

This geographic distribution appealed to the regime’s leadership who worried about having too much industrial capacity in one vulnerable region.

More importantly, Messid had friends.

Ernst Udet, the same pilot who’d flown the He to its first record, was now head of the Luftvafer’s technical office, and he was a fan of Messmid’s designs.

There were allegations never proven but widely believed that personal animosity played a role.

That messes used his political connections to ensure Hankl’s fighter never got the support it needed.

Whether it was politics or logistics or simply bad timing, the result was the same.

By mid 1939, it was clear the He would never enter mass production.

Hankl had built approximately 25 aircraft in total, mix of prototypes and pre-production models.

Three were sold to Japan which was interested in using them as patent aircraft for a domestic production line.

Six went to the Soviet and beast union which wanted to study the evaporative cooling system for their own research.

And 12 aircraft, the HeD1 fighters with conventional radiators remained at Hankl’s factory near Rosstock in northern Germany.

These 12 aircraft became Hankl’s private air force flown by company test pilots and designated as factory defense fighters.

It was a strange arrangement.

A private company maintaining its own armed aircraft.

But in the chaos of the early war years, stranger things were happening all over Germany.

And then someone had an idea.

If the He couldn’t serve as a real weapon, perhaps it could serve as a psychological one.

In late 1939, with war now underway, Joseph Gerbal’s Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda approached Hankl with a proposal.

The H 100 was already famous for its speed record.

British intelligence knew about the aircraft and feared it.

What if they could use those 12 leftover fighters to create the illusion of a much larger fleet? The plan was audacious and remarkably simple.

Take the 12 He00 or D1 aircraft and paint them with fictitious squadron markings.

Photograph them at Hankl’s factory airfield, staging the images to look like operational Luftwuffer bases.

then repaint the aircraft with different markings and photograph them again and again and again.

To anyone looking at the photographs, it would appear that dozens, perhaps hundreds of these super fighters were in service.

They’d see aircraft with different unit insignia, different identification numbers, different paint schemes.

They’d see them dispersed on airfields being prepared for night missions lined up ready for combat.

And they’d assume Germany had deployed an entire fleet of the world’s fastest fighter.

Better still, the propaganda ministry decided to give the aircraft a new designation.

They would call it Hankl 113.

Never mind that only 12 tons aircraft existed.

All of them He 100D1s.

Never mind that not a single one would ever fly a combat mission.

The He113 would become one of the most successful deceptions of the early war.

Hankl employees posed as pilots and ground crew for the photographs.

The aircraft were repainted between shoots, sometimes multiple times, to give the impression of greater numbers.

The photographs were carefully staged.

In some, the aircraft appeared to be preparing for a night fighter mission despite lacking even a landing light.

In others, they were supposedly photographed at bases in Denmark and Norway, though in reality all the images were likely taken at Rosstock with nothing in the backgrounds to definitively prove otherwise.

These photographs were published in D Adler, the official Luftvafa magazine, and in newspapers across Germany.

The stories accompanying them were dramatic.

The H113, readers were told, had proven itself in combat during the invasions of Denmark and Norway.

It was faster than any Allied fighter, could outclimb anything in the sky, and was now entering service in squadron strength.

The deception worked beyond anyone’s wildest expectations.

British intelligence took the bait completely.

The Air Ministry included the Hankl 113 on official recognition charts, listing its top speed as 390 mph and noting it was in production and equipping frontline squadrons.

A secret Royal Air Force intelligence report from 1940 concluded the aircraft represented a serious threat.

Not everyone was fooled.

Robert Sornby, the senior air staff officer at RAF Bomber Command, looked at the photographs and noticed the H113 had no visible space in the wings for guns or ammunition, a rather critical emission for a fighter.

Another observant RAF officer pointed out the supposed night fighter version lacked even a landing light, but these skeptical voices were drowned out by the bull flood of intelligence suggesting the H113 was real.

And then Allied pilots started reporting encounters with it.

During the Battle of France, a Huracan pilot claimed to have shot down an H113 over Dunkirk in May 1940.

Several more were reported during the Battle of Britain in August and September.

Air Chief Marshall Hugh Dowing, commander of RAF Fighter Command, noted that the He113 had made its appearance in limited numbers and that its main attributes were high performance and ceiling.

American bomber crews joined in.

After the United States entered the war and began flying missions over Europe, B7 pilots reported being attacked by the mysterious super fighter.

One pilot after an encounter over the French coast in 1942 noted it was a very pretty plane.

What had they actually seen? Most likely they’d misidentified Messid BF 109s.

The later models of the 109 with their refined lines and polished finishes could look quite different from the earlier versions Allied pilots were used to seeing.

In the confusion and adrenaline of combat with aircraft flashing past at hundreds of miles hour, it’s easy to understand how a pilot might mistake a 109 for the fear to 113 they’d been briefed about.

The psychological effect was exactly what Gerbles had hoped for.

Allied pilots went into combat worried they might encounter this supposedly superior aircraft.

Intelligence analysts spent time and resources trying to track a 113 squadrons and British leadership, particularly during the desperate days of the Battle of Britain, worried that Germany was holding back squadrons of super fighters for a decisive blow.

Ironically, this may have actually helped the British.

Air Marshal Dowing’s fear that he13s were about to be deployed contributed to his insistence on always holding back reserves, never committing his entire force to a single battle.

This conservation of strength turned out to be one of the key factors in the RAF’s eventual victory.

The propaganda campaign continued for years.

Reports of he13 encounters persisted throughout 1941 and42.

There was even an erroneous intelligence report claiming one had been shot down at Pearl Harbor on December the 7th, 1941, thousands of miles from any actual E 100.

Meanwhile, the real aircraft, all 12 of them, sat at Hankl’s factory, flown occasionally by test pilots on local defense patrols, but never seeing actual combat.

No Allied bomber ever ventured far enough into northern Germany in the early war years to threaten Rostock, so Hankl’s private air force never fired its guns in anger.

By 1943, the deception had run its course.

Allied intelligence analysts working with more concrete information from captured documents and interrogated prisoners began to realize the H113 was a phantom.

Postwar examination of German records confirmed it.

There were no production line serial numbers, no operational unit assignments, no combat loss reports.

The H13 had never existed as anything more than a propaganda exercise.

But what of the real aircraft, the He that had inspired the hoax? What happened to those dozen actual fighters sitting at Rosstock? Their fate remains a mystery.

None of the Hecraft.

Not the prototypes, not the Japanese purchases, not the Soviet acquisitions, and not Hankl’s factory defenders are known to have survived the war.

Whether they were destroyed in bombing raids, scrapped for materials, or simply abandoned and left to rust, we don’t know.

Not a single example exists in any museum anywhere in the world.

Even the blueprints were lost, destroyed in a bombing raid on Hankl’s offices.

So, we’re left with questions.

What if the Lufafa had put the H100 into production? Would it have made a difference in the war? The answer is complicated.

The H100D1 with its conventional cooling system was certainly a capable aircraft.

Its top speed of around 400 mph was excellent for 1939.

Its range of 900 to 1,000 km was superior to the BF 109 and its clean low drag airframe meant it had room for development, potential for improved engines and heavier armorament.

But it also had limitations.

complex cooling system, even in its simplified form, was difficult to maintain under field conditions.

The landing gear remained prone to failures throughout testing.

And perhaps most critically, by the time a production version would have been ready, the war had already begun, and Germany needed fighters immediately, not after months of factory retooling and production delays.

The Fauler Wolf 190, which entered service in 1941, proved to be the second great fighter Germany needed.

Unlike the He used a radial engine, the BMW 801, which meant it didn’t compete for the precious DB 601 engines.

Its air cooled engine was simpler to maintain and less vulnerable to battle damage than liquid cooled designs.

and Kurt Tank’s design team had learned from the mistakes of others, creating an aircraft that was both high-erforming and practical for mass production.

Could the He have filled the role the 190 eventually took? Possibly.

But it would have required solving the cooling system reliability issues, addressing the landing gear problems, and most importantly, finding an alternative engine that didn’t compete with BF 109 production.

It’s not clear Hankl ever could have made those changes in time to matter.

There’s also the human element.

Ernst Hankl, for all his genius, was not as politically adept as Willie Messmitt.

In the Byzantine world of Nazi Germany’s military-industrial complex, political connections mattered as much as technical merit.

Hankl’s outspoken nature and his ongoing feuds with key figures in the Luftvafa hierarchy didn’t help his cause.

By 1942, Guring had seized control of Hankl’s company, forcing Ernst Hankl to sell controlling interest and effectively sidelining him from his own firm.

Hankl moved to Vienna and opened a new design bureau, continuing to work on aircraft projects throughout the war.

His 177 bomber, plagued with engine problems from an ill-advised coupled power plant design, became one of the Luftvafer’s greatest failures.

His E219 knight fighter was brilliant but produced only in limited numbers again due to political interference and his E280 twin jet fighter which flew before the Messid M262 and showed great promise was passed over in favor of Messid’s design.

The pattern repeated throughout the warl would create something innovative even revolutionary and politics would prevent it from reaching its potential.

Whether this was justified based on practical manufacturing and logistical concerns or whether it was the result of personal animosity and political maneuvering depends on who you ask.

What we do know is this.

The Hankl 100 was one of the fastest fighters of its era.

It set records that stood for years.

It demonstrated innovations in aerodynamics and cooling systems that influenced designs from Japan to the Soviet Union.

The Kawasaki K61 and Yakovv Yak 9 both owed debts to Hankl’s work, even if neither adopted the troublesome evaporative cooling system.

But the H 100 never got its chance to prove itself in combat.

Instead, it became a footnote, remembered more for the propaganda campaign it inspired than for its actual capabilities.

The mythical H13 achieved more fame than the real He 100 ever could.

A testament to the power of perception in warfare.

After the war, Hankl, like Messid, was prohibited from manufacturing aircraft.

He turned to bicycles and motor scooters for a time, building the Hankl cabina bubble car that competed with Messid’s own microcar offerings.

Even in peace time, it seemed the two rivals couldn’t escape each other.

By the mid 1950s, restrictions had eased enough for Hankl to return to aviation, working with other companies and eventually helping to build Lockheed F104 star fighters for the West German Luftvafer.

In 1958, in a twist of fate that must have amused both men, Hankl joined forces with his old rival Messid in a new venture to manufacture anti-aircraft missiles and modern jet aircraft.

The day after this partnership was announced, Ernst Hankl died.

He was 69 years old.

Today, aviation historians look back at the Hei 100 with a mixture of admiration and frustration.

It represents what might have been a fighter that had the potential to be truly exceptional, but was undone by a combination of technical challenges, political machinations, and terrible timing.

The evaporative cooling system, for all its promise, was simply too complex and vulnerable for combat use.

Every nation that experimented with the technology eventually abandoned it in favor of more conventional solutions.

The British used surface radiators on racing sea planes, but never on combat aircraft.

The Soviets studied it extensively, but never put it into production.

Even Hankl himself eventually gave up on it, fitting conventional radiators to later versions of his designs.

And yet, the H100’s low drag airframe design influenced countless aircraft that came after it.

Its sleek lines and attention to aerodynamic detail set a standard that other designers aspire to match.

The lessons learned from its development, both the successes and the failures, informed the next generation of high performance fighters.

Perhaps the greatest irony is that the aircraft’s most successful mission was one it never flew.

As the fictitious H113 photographed and refed, painted and repainted, it convinced Allied intelligence of German air superiority that didn’t exist.

It tied up resources, created anxiety among Allied pilots, and contributed to strategic decisions based on a threat that was nothing more than smoke and mirrors.

12 aircraft, a paint booth, and a camera.

That’s all it took to create one of World War II’s most successful deceptions, the legacy of the Hankl.

He is complicated.

It was a triumph of engineering that never reached its potential.

A record-breaker that never saw combat.

A phantom that was more famous in fiction than in fact.

None survived today.

The metal that once flew faster than any fighter in the world was likely melted down for scrap or rust somewhere in a forgotten corner of what was once the Third Reich.

The blueprints that could have told us exactly how it was built were destroyed in the chaos of war.

All we have left are photographs, performance specifications, and the memories of test pilots long since passed.

But the story endures.

It’s a reminder that in war, as in peace, innovation alone is not enough.

You need timing.

You need political support.

You need luck.

The He had the innovation, but lacked everything else it needed to succeed.

So the next time you hear about a revolutionary new weapon that never quite made it to production, remember the He remember that sometimes the fastest, most advanced, most innovative solution still isn’t the right answer.

And remember that in the highstakes world of military procurement, politics can matter just as much as performance.

The Hankleh 100, the fastest fighter that never was, the Phantom that fooled a generation, the masterpiece that history forgot.