World War Two was the driving force for military innovation in the 20th century. The Cold War and its hot counterparts in Korea, Vietnam and Afghanistan may have had their own moments but nothing compares to the wild experimentation of WW2, particularly from the Axis powers.

World War Two was also special for another reason, as the first war to be truly fought in the air, alongside land and sea. The Great War had taken the first tentative steps towards battles in the sky, but the two decades following had seen aerial combat change from a sideshow to a mainstay.

Gone were the days of open-top canvas planes (unless you were a particularly unlucky Soviet gunner) and dropping grenades onto trenches. World War Two dogfights were a fully formed aspect of war, and as the Luftwaffe looked to take on the world these became as essential as any other theatre of battle.

Indeed the war was ultimately won from the air. As German defenses crumbled in Europe endless waves of Allied bombers reduced her cities to rubble with a campaign of indiscriminate bombing, whilst half a world away Japan found her aircraft carriers sunk, her top brass assassinated and her homeland devastated by nuclear bombs, all thanks to the US Air Force.

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In such battles finding an edge was of tantamount importance, and in these times of wild innovation almost nothing was off the table. It was this search for an advantage on this most open of playing fields which led to some truly strange aircraft.

Some experiments worked, to be sure: the Me 262, the first jet fighter to see service, is perhaps the most famous today. But there were a host of less successful ideas: giant gliders pressed into service as transport planes, strange asymmetrical bombers or planes with twin propellors fore and aft.

And it was this crucible of invention which gave rise to the plane that some have described as the most dangerous in the entire conflict. The danger, however, was not to its adversaries. It was its pilots who had the most to fear.

The Me163 was a far-out design even by the standards of the time, a rocket-powered delta with experimental weapons and fueled by a substance which could kill on contact. The Komet actually flew and saw service, which begs the question: was the risk its pilots faced worth it?

Rocket Power

The fact that the Komet is the only rocket-powered fighter aircraft ever to be put into service should give you an idea about how truly different this aircraft really was. The first clues to its strangeness come from its appearance.

Little more than a wing, the Komet was tiny at only 6 meters long. There was barely room for the pilot, and no room at all for landing gear: after take off the wheels fell away from the aircraft, and landing was accomplished on a ski-like skid under the center of the plane.

The Komet was fueled by a combination of two chemicals, known to the Nazis as C-Stoff and T-Stoff. The first, largely composed of methanol and hydrazine hydrate, would react violently with the second which was almost entirely hydrogen peroxide, producing a huge amount of thrust, generating a superheated stream of steam, air and nitrogen.

Both hydrogen peroxide and especially hydrazine hydrate were extremely dangerous, being volatile, corrosive and toxic, and required highly careful treatment to avoid accidents. Planes could not sit fully fueled for too long or else risk fuel leaks, and any damage to the plane during combat put the pilot at extreme risk given 120 liters of these chemicals were held to the sides and just behind them.

But it was this potent combination of a powerful chemical reaction and a tiny plane which gave the Komet its legendary performance. The Komet was the first plane ever to achieve 1,000 km/h on level flight, and it would be a full decade before jet-powered aircraft were able to match its performance.

This speed gave the Komet a significant advantage as an interceptor aircraft, able to quickly react to incoming waves of bombers and catch them with ease. But the plane’s design led to another problem once the bombers were in range: The Komet was too fast to shoot them down.

Pilots found that by the time they had lined up an accurate shot on their targets they had often simply overshot them, making aerial kills harder. The solution to this on later aircraft, called the Sondergerät 500 Jägerfaust, is perhaps the most innovative thing about this strange plane.

This weapon system was mounted to the roots of each aircraft wing five barrels on each side. Each contained a single shot 50mm gun, and all ten were pointed directly upwards.

These guns were connected to a photocell detector on top of the Komet, which was designed to detect changes in brightness. Komet pilots would fly under the wings of enemy bombers and the photocell would detect this, triggering the weapons to fire at precisely the right moment.

This actually worked, and resolved issues with pilot reaction times and accuracy at a stroke. So was the Komet everything it was cracked up to be?

The short answer is no, and this is pretty much the long answer as well. The rocket engine burned through its fuel in only seven and a half minutes, and although the speed of the Komet meant this translated into a useful range it was still extremely limited.

Combined with the Jägerfaust system, this small amount of fuel meant that the Komet had at most a single chance to take down an enemy bomber. But it was after it had fired its shot that the problems really began for the pilot.

The Komet was based on a glider design, which gave it excellent flight characteristics and meant that, once the fuel was gone, it could glide home unpowered. But this also meant it had a tendency to stay aloft during landing, and without fuel the pilots only had one chance.

The Komet quickly developed a reputation as a pilot killer. Given the corrosive fuel it used such deaths were particularly horrible, and it took bravery indeed to take one into combat.

By the end of the war Komets had been responsible for shooting down maybe 18 Allied aircraft, for the loss of ten aircraft in combat and dozens more in accidents. Nobody before or since has ever tried to build a fighter powered by a rocket. Only the Japanese came close, with their Yokosuka MXY-7 Ohka.

And that was a manned flying bomb.

Top Image: A rare and unrestored surviving example of the tiny and insanely dangerous Me 163 Komet. Source: HawkeyeUK / CC BY-SA 2.0.