In 1940, the British aviation press started yammering about a new German fighter, the Focke-Wulf FW 198. The design was unconventional but straightforward, with a layout similar to the Lockheed P-38 but with a single engine and prop at the rear of the stubby, extensively glazed, fuselage pod. Artists impressions and drawings, including the one below (from Model Airplane News, May, 1941), were used to illustrate this new threat.
Small problem: there was no such thing as the FW 198. The aircraft was, instead, actually the Dutch De Schelde S.21, a single-seat fighter and ground attacker that got as far as the prototype before the Dutch were overrun. The plane never flew; it was taken back to Germany and apparently used for some destructive testing.
The drawing is not entirely accurate, but it’s reasonably close. How the av press of the time could have this much info and get not only the name, but the nationality, of the plane wrong is a bit of a head-scratcher. At least when Aviation Week got it wrong about the Soviet atomic-powered bomber, the design they showed was actually a Soviet design. Just not atomic-powered.
8 Responses to “Gettin’ It Wrong: FW 198”
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They may have learned that Focke-Wulf was working on a twin boom aircraft design (the FW-189) and assumed that the Luftwaffe had put the S.21 into production for their own forces like they did with the Czech 38T tank.
The similarity of the design numbers (189/198) makes something along these lines seem likely.
In fact, the design of the “FW-198/S.21” in side view looks a lot like the FW-189 if you were to take the engine off of the tail and replace it with two on the wing booms, and give it a tail wheel rather than nose gear: http://www.aviastar.org/pictures/germany/fw-189.gif The pointed rear gunner’s position may have fooled someone into thinking it was a prop boss.
There’s a lot of info on the “FW-198”, which was actually issued as a flying model kit by Megow, and a static display one by Maircraft (shades of Testor’s “F-19”) around a fourth of the way down this webpage: http://www.collectair.com/Model_Airplanes.html
It looks like the XP-52 or the XP-59. Pusher props were fashionable for a while.
Sweden had a small pusher fighter back then that actually got into service in December of 1945 – the Saab J 21; this later was successfully converted into a jet powered version, the J 21R:
http://www.aviastar.org/gallery/j21.html
I found a link that shows the Dutch prototype: http://www.ww2aircraft.net/forum/aviation/de-schelde-s-21-a-8538.html
Visibility for the pilot would be great, but I’d feel awfully vulnerable in that big glazed nose on a ground attack mission.
The Germans went just the other way with their ground attack version of the FW-189 (which lost out to the Hs-129 for a production contract) with the pilot and rear gunner peering out of tiny bullet-resistant windows:
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=69&t=67917
The story of the “Atomic-Powered” Bounder bomber and the Aurora model of it is over here:
http://modelarchives.free.fr/archives_P/Aplane/Aplane_Bounder_K.html
http://modelarchives.free.fr/archives_P/Aplane/Aplane_Bounder_S.html
I had the model as a kid.
Here’s a webpage that describes all the atomic-powered aircraft toys and models:
http://modelarchives.free.fr/archives_P/Aplane/index.html