Mistel 5

Heinkel He 162A-2 and Arado E 377a (Revel model kit #04145 - 1/72 scale)

The Mistel aircraft combinations were a late and desperate response of Germany to its lack of heavy bombers during World War 2. Instead of building an aircraft that would carry a bomb, the philosophy behind the Mistel combinations was that one of the aircraft - a nimble fighter - would be put atop another aircraft - the 'bomber' - and that the fighter would 'carry' the powered bomber to its target, aim and lock it on a collision course, release itself... leaving the unmanned bomber to crash onto the target.

While the first Mistels used Junkers 88 bombers with a heavy warhead mounted instead of its cockpit, later designs anticipated the use of converted Me 262 bombs, or the purpose built E 377 bomb. However, the war came to its close before any of these later Mistels could actually be built.

The Heinkel He 162 'Salamander', also known as 'Volksjager', was a stop-gap fighter aircraft built in the last desperate months of the war. It was intended as a 'disposable' fighter, easy to build and easy to replace, which could be flown by relatively inexperienced pilots. Heinkel designed a wooden (!) aircraft with a jet engine mounted on top of it. It was designed and built in less than 3 months, with the first drawings made on September 8th 1944, and first flight on December 6th, 1944. In all, over a hundred were built before the war's end, while over 600 more incomplete airframes were found in the assembly plant by allied troops. Ironically, in its four months of service, the He 162 managed to score only a single (unconfirmed) enemy kill, while inflicting many more kills on its own pilots because of airframe failures...

The Arado E 377 was a design for a pilotless flying bomb, to be flown with a He 162 mounted atop. It was never built.