The Dornier Do Three Thirty-Five Pfeil, the Push-Pull Twin That Was the Fastest Piston Fighter of World War Two, and the Only Complete Survivor at the Smithsonian Udvar-Hazy Center

The Dornier Do 335 Pfeil (“Arrow”) was the fastest piston-engine fighter to reach operational status in World War II, capable of approximately 475 miles per hour in level flight - faster than both the P-51D Mustang and the Spitfire Mk XIV. Its unconventional tandem engine arrangement, with one propeller pulling from the nose and one pushing from the tail, solved a fundamental aerodynamic problem that conventional twin-engine designs never could. The only complete surviving example hangs today at the Smithsonian’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia.

Why Germany Needed More Than One Engine in a Fighter

By 1942, the Luftwaffe was fighting on multiple fronts with single-engine fighters that were approaching the hard limits of what piston technology could deliver. The Messerschmitt Bf 109 and Focke-Wulf Fw 190 were outstanding aircraft - fast, agile, and combat-proven - but extracting more horsepower from a single engine ran into a wall of physics: torque, cooling, and propeller diameter all imposed ceilings.

The conventional answer was a twin-engine layout, one powerplant per wing. But this created its own penalties. A wider, draggier frontal area, and the engine-out handling problem that has troubled twin-engine pilots ever since. Lose one engine on a conventional twin and asymmetric thrust makes the aircraft extremely difficult to control at low speed and high power.

The Push-Pull Concept Claudius Dornier Had Been Developing Since the 1930s

Claudius Dornier had been working on an alternative since the late 1930s, filing a patent for a centerline-thrust, or push-pull, configuration. The concept placed two engines in tandem inside the fuselage: one in the nose driving a conventional tractor propeller, one in the rear fuselage driving a pusher propeller at the tail.

The theoretical advantages were compelling. Two engines’ worth of power within the narrow frontal profile of a single-engine fighter. And critically, if one engine failed, both thrust vectors remained on the aircraft’s centerline - no asymmetric yaw, no violent departure. Just a reduced but entirely manageable situation.

To prove the concept would actually fly, Dornier built a small wooden proof-of-concept aircraft called the Göppingen Gö 9. It flew. The push-pull arrangement performed as predicted, and serious development of what would become the Do 335 began around 1942.

What the Aircraft Actually Looked Like

The airframe that emerged was clean and purposeful, built around two Daimler-Benz DB 603 engines, each producing approximately 1,800 horsepower, buried in tandem inside the fuselage. The pilot sat in a roomy cockpit positioned above the forward engine. With a wingspan of roughly 45 feet and a fuselage of similar length, the aircraft had a long, narrow, almost predatory look from any angle.

Luftwaffe pilots nicknamed it Ameisenbär - “the Anteater.” The stretched nose made the reason immediately obvious.

Armament was formidable: a 30mm cannon firing through the nose propeller hub, plus two 20mm cannons in the nose cowling. Three cannons pointed simultaneously at whatever the pilot was tracking.

The Speed Numbers That Still Impress

The Do 335 was tested at approximately 475 miles per hour in level flight at altitude, with some test results suggesting slightly higher figures. For context:

The North American P-51D Mustang, the finest American piston fighter of the war, topped out at around 437 mph.
The Supermarine Spitfire Mk XIV reached roughly 450 mph.

The Do 335, in level flight, could outrun both. Evaluation pilots reported acceleration unlike anything they had flown before and a climb rate that felt a decade ahead of its time.

The Ejection Problem No Production Aircraft Had Faced Before

The rear pusher propeller created a survival problem that no designer had previously needed to solve at scale. In any conventional fighter, a pilot opens the canopy and jumps clear - the propeller is ahead, and the aircraft continues forward and away. In the Do 335, a standard bailout would place the pilot directly in the path of the spinning rear propeller.

Dornier’s engineers designed a two-stage system. On the pilot’s command, explosive charges fired simultaneously at two points: one blowing the rear propeller free of the aircraft, one blowing the upper vertical tail fin clear - which would otherwise block an upward ejection path. With those two hazards removed, the pilot could eject safely upward.

This made the Do 335 one of the earliest operational aircraft to require and feature what we would recognize as a true ejection system. It was purpose-built escape engineering for a problem the push-pull design itself had created, and it was sophisticated work for 1944.

Why the Do 335 Never Changed the War

The first prototype flew on September 26, 1943. That date tells the story. By autumn 1943, the Allied strategic bombing campaign was already targeting German industrial capacity. The Dornier factories at Oberpfaffenhofen were hit. Subcomponent suppliers were being destroyed, materials were running short, and skilled workers were being conscripted or killed.

Pre-production A-0 series aircraft reached Luftwaffe evaluation units in autumn 1944 - a handful, perhaps a dozen or slightly more completed examples, in a war that was consuming entire conventional fighter squadrons every week. The Do 335 never formed a cohesive operational unit. Some sources suggest a small number flew defensive missions in the war’s final weeks, but the evidence is fragmentary. The aircraft the Allies might have feared never appeared in meaningful numbers.

When American and British forces swept into southern Germany in April and May 1945, they found several Do 335s at Luftwaffe bases - some damaged, some partially complete, and a few that were essentially airworthy. American test pilots flew the captured examples and returned consistent reports: it was fast, it handled cleanly, and the centerline thrust characteristics performed exactly as the theory had predicted.

The Only Complete Survivor at Udvar-Hazy

One example eventually entered the Smithsonian Institution’s collection, sitting in storage for years before careful restoration work brought it to proper display condition. Today that Do 335 A-0 hangs in the Boeing Aviation Hangar at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, the Smithsonian’s annex in Chantilly, Virginia, adjacent to Washington Dulles International Airport. The center opened in 2003.

It is the only complete Do 335 anywhere on earth.

The Udvar-Hazy collection is dense with significant aircraft - Space Shuttle Discovery, an SR-71 Blackbird, a Concorde, dozens of fighters from every twentieth-century conflict. The Do 335 is among them: long, narrow, cruciform tail, the pusher propeller still fitted at the rear spinner.

The story it represents is not one of what Germany achieved in the Second World War. It is a story about what timing takes away. The engineers solved the configuration problem. They hit the speed numbers. They designed an ejection system for a problem that had never existed before. And then the industrial capacity simply wasn’t there to build the aircraft in numbers that could have mattered. The right airplane arrived in the wrong war.

Key Takeaways

The Do 335 Pfeil was the fastest piston-engine fighter to reach operational status in WWII, with a tested top speed of approximately 475 mph - faster than the P-51D Mustang and the Spitfire Mk XIV.
Its push-pull tandem engine layout delivered twin-engine power with a single-engine frontal area and none of the asymmetric thrust problems of conventional twin designs.
The geometry of the design forced engineers to create a purpose-built two-stage ejection system - explosive charges that blew the rear propeller and upper tail fin clear before the pilot could safely eject upward.
Development started too late: the first prototype flew September 26, 1943, and pre-production aircraft didn’t reach evaluation units until autumn 1944, with the war already decided by industrial attrition.
The only complete surviving example is on permanent display at the Smithsonian’s Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia, opened 2003.