The Dornier Do 335 Pfeil, the Fastest Piston-Engine Fighter of World War Two, and the Only Surviving Example on Earth at the Smithsonian Udvar-Hazy Center

The Dornier Do 335 Pfeil (“Arrow”) was the fastest piston-engine fighter aircraft ever built, capable of 474 miles per hour in level flight - faster than the P-51 Mustang, the Hawker Tempest, and the Focke-Wulf 190 D-9. Only one complete example survives anywhere in the world. It is on permanent display at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia, serial number 240163.

The Problem Dornier Set Out to Solve

By the summer of 1944, the Luftwaffe was in serious trouble. P-51 Mustangs were escorting bombers all the way to Berlin and back. Allied fighters controlled the sky over Western Europe. Germany needed decisive speed - not marginal improvements.

Claude Dornier had been building aircraft since before the First World War, accumulating three decades of work across flying boats, bombers, and transport designs. He returned to a problem that had nagged aircraft designers since the beginning of powered flight: how do you extract more power without making the airframe wider and draggier?

The conventional answer - adding engines on wing pylons - gained power with one hand and surrendered half of it back to drag with the other. Dornier’s answer was to place both engines on the aircraft’s centerline.

How the Push-Pull Configuration Works

One Daimler-Benz 603 engine sat in the nose, driving a conventional three-blade propeller. A second Daimler-Benz 603 sat behind the cockpit, driving a long extension shaft that ran aft to a second three-blade propeller mounted at the tail. Each engine produced approximately 1,800 horsepower.

The two propellers rotated in opposite directions, canceling the torque that would otherwise twist the aircraft. The fuselage stayed slim, frontal area stayed small, and the result was an airplane with exceptional straight-line stability and handling that surprised every pilot who flew it.

Dornier was not the first engineer to sketch this configuration on paper. He was the first to build it into a functioning combat aircraft.

The Performance Numbers

The Do 335 first flew on October 26, 1943. Test pilots returned from early flights visibly stunned - that specific word appears in multiple contemporary accounts. The data confirmed the impression.

In level flight at altitude, the Do 335 reached 474 mph. Some cleaned-up test configurations approached 500 mph. The comparison to its contemporaries is stark:

P-51 Mustang, the best Allied fighter then flying: approximately 437 mph under ideal conditions
Hawker Tempest, among Britain’s fastest designs: similar performance range
Focke-Wulf 190 D-9, which the Germans themselves considered exceptional: low 400s

The Do 335 was faster than all of them - on piston engines, in 1944. German pilots nicknamed it the Ameisenbär (“anteater”) for its long tapering nose and oversized spinner. The profile makes the name obvious. There is something almost prehistoric about the shape, as if the aircraft evolved specifically for a medium it wasn’t supposed to inhabit.

The Ejection Seat Problem - and Its Solution

The push-pull configuration created a serious bailout problem. In most fighters of the era, a pilot in distress opened the canopy, rolled inverted, and fell clear. In the Do 335, a spinning propeller sat directly ahead and another spun immediately above and behind the cockpit. A conventional exit meant flying into one or the other. The rear propeller arc was particularly lethal.

Dornier’s solution was shockingly modern for 1944. The Do 335 was equipped with an ejection seat incorporating a fully automated multi-stage sequence:

A pyrotechnic charge blasts the rear propeller clear of the aircraft
A second charge blows off the upper tail fin, clearing the space above the cockpit
The seat fires, projecting the pilot straight up through the cleared path

The pilot pulled the handles. The aircraft managed the geometry. In a factory in southern Germany, in the middle of a losing war, engineers were designing propeller-clearance timing systems and multi-stage automated ejection sequences that the rest of the world would spend another decade working through.

Armament

The Do 335 carried substantial firepower for its role. Two 20mm cannon were mounted in the upper cowling, synchronized to fire through the forward propeller arc. A single 30mm cannon fired from the nose hub down the centerline.

The 30mm rounds used Minengeschoss - thin-walled shells packed with high explosive. A single hit could destroy a heavy bomber. This was not a defensive aircraft. It was designed to arrive fast, hit hard, and be gone before anyone could respond.

Why It Never Changed the War

Production came too late. By the time the Do 335 reached any meaningful output, the German industrial base was fracturing. Factories had been bombed. Material shortages were constant. Skilled workers were being conscripted into ground combat. The Reich was attempting to build too many programs at once with too little of everything.

When Germany surrendered in May 1945, approximately 37 complete aircraft had been delivered - some records place the figure slightly higher, but not by much. The few Do 335s that flew operational missions were used primarily for reconnaissance, where speed mattered most and the aircraft could work alone.

Contemporary Allied reports describe interceptors unable to close on a Do 335 that was not even attempting to evade. It was simply faster at cruise than most fighters were at full throttle.

What Allied Test Pilots Discovered

When Allied ground forces pushed into southern Germany and Austria in the spring of 1945, intelligence teams followed immediately behind. Their job was to capture German technology before it could be destroyed, and the Do 335 was near the top of every priority list. American, British, and French teams all acquired examples and shipped them home for evaluation.

The test reports from Wright Field, Ohio were consistent: exceptional speed, better-than-expected handling, and one genuinely surprising safety advantage.

On a conventional twin-engine aircraft, losing one engine creates violent asymmetric thrust that can roll the aircraft and kill the pilot before a recovery is possible. On the Do 335, both engines were on the centerline. Lose the front engine, the rear one pushes you straight ahead. Lose the rear engine, the front one pulls you straight ahead. The asymmetric yaw that kills twin-engine pilots simply was not there. In that specific emergency, the Pfeil was safer than the aircraft it competed against.

As the jet age began in earnest, the urgency surrounding captured German hardware dissipated quickly. One by one, the surviving Do 335s were scrapped, cannibalized for parts, or left outside until they were no longer worth keeping.

The Last Surviving Example

Of all the complete Do 335s that survived the war, one remains anywhere in the world.

Serial number 240163 - one of the evaluation aircraft brought to the United States in 1945 - spent decades in storage and restoration before the Smithsonian placed it on permanent display at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, the National Air and Space Museum annex in Chantilly, Virginia, approximately one mile from Dulles International Airport.

Most visitors walk past it. They are heading for the Enola Gay, the SR-71 Blackbird, or Space Shuttle Discovery, and the big German fighter in the World War Two gallery does not demand attention the way those aircraft do.

Standing beneath it changes that. The 45-foot wingspan and nearly 46-foot fuselage are larger than photographs suggest. The lines are almost entirely functional - a round, tapered fuselage like a dart scaled to aircraft proportions, clean wings, and the unusual lower ventral fin positioned specifically to clear the rear propeller arc during normal flight. From the side, the whole aircraft reads as speed made solid. Two Daimler-Benz engines, their cooling systems and exhaust plumbing, heavy armament, fuel tanks, and a pilot, all folded into a shape that still looks like it belongs in the air. The elegance was not accidental.

Claude Dornier died in 1969, long enough to see the jet age come to full flower - an era his work helped make inevitable. Nothing else in the Dornier catalog carried quite the same combination of desperation, brilliance, and engineering pride.

474 miles per hour. Two piston engines on the centerline. 1944.

Key Takeaways

The Dornier Do 335 Pfeil reached 474 mph in level flight, making it faster than the P-51 Mustang, Hawker Tempest, and Fw 190 D-9 - on piston power alone
Its centerline thrust layout - one engine pulling from the nose, one pushing from the tail - delivered twin-engine output with minimal aerodynamic penalty
A multi-stage automated ejection system was required to safely clear the rear propeller and upper tail fin before firing the seat - an engineering solution ahead of its time
Only approximately 37 aircraft were completed before Germany’s surrender in May 1945, far too few to affect the air war
The sole surviving example in the world is serial number 240163, on display at the Smithsonian Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia