The Dornier Do 335 Pfeil, the Push-Pull Fighter That Outran the War, and the Only Survivor at the Smithsonian

The Dornier Do 335 Pfeil was the fastest piston-engine fighter of the Second World War, capable of 474 mph in level flight - faster than any Allied fighter then flying. Only 37 production examples were completed before Germany’s collapse, and just one survives intact today at the Smithsonian’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia.

What Made the Do 335 Different From Every Other Fighter?

The Pfeil - German for “Arrow” - used a centerline thrust configuration: one Daimler-Benz inverted V-12 in the nose driving a tractor propeller, and a second identical engine mounted behind the cockpit driving a pusher propeller through a driveshaft running the full length of the aft fuselage.

This wasn’t an unusual aesthetic choice. Conventional twin-engine aircraft place their powerplants on the wings, creating asymmetric thrust the moment one fails. Lose an engine at low altitude and you’re immediately fighting the surviving engine’s yaw. Centerline thrust eliminates that problem entirely - both engines share the same thrust axis as the fuselage. Lose one, the airplane stays straight, and the pilot has time to think.

How Did the Do 335 Compare to Allied Fighters in Speed?

The Do 335 recorded 474 mph in level flight during testing - a figure that got Allied technical evaluators’ attention after the war. The P-51 Mustang, the most capable Allied fighter in the European theater, topped out at approximately 437 mph under ideal conditions. The Hawker Tempest, the fastest front-line RAF type, was in the same range.

The Pfeil wasn’t matching the best Allied fighters. It was walking away from them.

For a piston-engine aircraft in 1944, that performance was without precedent.

How Did Dornier Develop the Push-Pull Layout?

Claude Dornier had spent decades building unconventional aircraft - flying boats, twin-boom designs, configurations that deviated from standard practice at every ramp he’d worked on. His engineering team at Dornier Flugzeugwerke began serious development of the push-pull concept around 1941.

The first prototype flew in the fall of 1943 from the airfield at Oberpfaffenhofen. Test pilots at Rechlin - the Luftwaffe’s primary flight test center - found handling characteristics that were surprisingly conventional for an aircraft that looked like nothing else in the inventory. Forward visibility from the cockpit was excellent. Controls were responsive. The airplane delivered what its performance projections promised.

What Engineering Problem Did the Driveshaft Create?

The aft engine transferred power to the pusher propeller through a driveshaft running beneath the cockpit and through the entire aft fuselage. That shaft had to spin without wobbling, losing power, or turning the rear section of the airplane into a vibration problem. Dornier’s team solved it, but it was a genuine engineering challenge - and one that shaped other design decisions throughout the program.

How Did Pilots Bail Out With a Propeller at the Tail?

In any fighter of the era, the emergency exit sequence was straightforward: open the canopy, clear the aircraft, pull the ripcord. With the Do 335, step two put the pilot directly into a spinning propeller disc at combat power.

Dornier’s engineers built a solution. When a pilot initiated the emergency sequence, explosive charges fired in a specific order: first, the aft propeller assembly was jettisoned clear of the tail; then the overhead canopy hatch was blown off; then a cartridge charge fired the seat - with the pilot still strapped in - upward and clear of the aircraft.

This is, functionally, an ejection seat, developed in 1944 not as a conceptual advance being pursued for its own sake, but because the airplane’s geometry left the designers no other option. They had created a problem that required an entirely new category of solution.

Why Were So Few Do 335s Actually Built?

By early 1945, the Luftwaffe had placed orders exceeding 1,000 Do 335s across multiple variants: a single-seat interceptor with heavy nose armament, night fighter and ground attack adaptations, and a two-seat trainer to check pilots out in an airplane unlike anything else in the inventory. The production planning was detailed and serious.

What came off the assembly lines was approximately 37 completed aircraft.

The same forces strangling every German production program in that final year applied here: Allied bombing of factories and rail corridors, fuel shortages that disrupted ferry flights and training, raw material constraints at every stage of assembly. The program wasn’t canceled. It simply ran out of war.

What Did Allied Evaluators Find After the War?

After Germany’s surrender in May 1945, Allied technical intelligence teams moved quickly to locate and evaluate advanced German aircraft. The Do 335 was on the priority list. American, British, and French teams each acquired examples. Every team that flew it reported similar conclusions.

Evaluation flights at Wright Field, Ohio confirmed the performance figures. American test pilots found the airplane fast and stable, with better forward visibility than expected. The pusher engine behind the cockpit produced sounds and vibrations with no equivalent in any American aircraft - but the airplane’s capability was real. The word appearing consistently in evaluation reports was capable.

The consensus across every Allied team: had the Do 335 arrived in operational numbers a year earlier, it would have represented a genuine challenge to Allied air superiority over Germany.

Where Can You See the Only Surviving Do 335 Today?

The Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia - the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum annex near Dulles Airport - holds the sole complete surviving Do 335. Out of 37 production aircraft and the prototypes that preceded them, one has made it to the present day.

The others went the way of most captured postwar hardware: damaged during technical evaluation, cannibalized for parts, left outdoors until weather made restoration impossible, lost in accidents. Resources for preservation follow the shooting, not the hardware.

The Udvar-Hazy aircraft is displayed at floor level in the main hangar bay. The finish is restoration work - original wartime surfaces don’t survive eight decades unchanged - but the structure is there. The configuration is there. The fundamental geometry that produced 474 mph from a piston engine is intact and visible from every angle.

Walk around it from the nose, where the narrow purposeful snout tells you exactly what the designers were solving for. From the side, where the long clean profile explains how those numbers were achievable. From the tail, where the pusher propeller hub sits and reminds you that this was not a conventional answer to conventional problems.

The best aircraft designs - from any era, any manufacturer, any side of any conflict - have a coherence to them. A sense that the people who drew the lines understood precisely what they were trying to do. The Do 335 is in that company.

Key Takeaways

• The Do 335 Pfeil achieved 474 mph in level flight, outpacing the P-51 Mustang (~437 mph) and every other front-line Allied piston fighter of the war
• Its centerline thrust layout solved conventional twin-engine asymmetric thrust problems by placing both powerplants on the fuselage centerline
• The pusher propeller’s bailout hazard directly drove the development of a functional ejection seat in 1944 - not as an innovation pursued in the abstract, but as the only workable solution to the problem the design itself created
• Despite orders exceeding 1,000 aircraft across multiple variants, only approximately 37 were completed before Germany’s surrender in May 1945
• The sole surviving example is on permanent display at the Smithsonian’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia, accessible at floor level in the main hangar bay