The Heinkel He 176 and the morning of June twentieth, nineteen thirty-nine, when a man first flew on rocket power alone

On the morning of June 20, 1939, at the German test facility of Peenemünde on the Baltic island of Usedom, test pilot Erich Warsitz flew the Heinkel He 176 and became the first human being to fly an aircraft powered by a rocket motor alone. The flight lasted roughly 50 seconds. It was short, dangerous, and largely forgotten - but it marked the moment aviation proved it could move beyond the propeller.

Why Ernst Heinkel wanted to abandon the propeller

By the late 1930s, German aircraft builder Ernst Heinkel was obsessed with raw speed. He had already captured the world airspeed record twice, first with the piston-engined He 112 racer and again with the He 113.

But Heinkel could see a hard physical ceiling approaching. A propeller can only bite so hard. As the blade tips approach the speed of sound, they lose efficiency, cavitate the air, and risk tearing themselves apart.

Heinkel concluded that the propeller - the technology that had carried aviation for more than three decades - was running out of road. The question he set out to answer sounded like science fiction: could an aircraft be made to go fast by riding a controlled chemical explosion instead?

Wernher von Braun and the first rocket experiments

The young engineer who brought rocket propulsion to Heinkel was Wernher von Braun - the same von Braun who would later lead the American effort to reach the Moon. In the mid-1930s, von Braun was an engineer in his twenties developing rocket motors and searching for an airframe to test them in.

Their early experiments were extraordinarily risky. The team mounted a liquid-fuel rocket motor into the rear of an existing He 112 piston biplane. The plan was to take off on the propeller, then ignite the rocket in flight to measure its performance.

Early motors burned a hydrogen peroxide and catalyst mixture - so-called “cold” rockets that ran on chemical decomposition rather than combustion. Later motors moved to the “hot” combination of alcohol and liquid oxygen, the same basic recipe that would eventually power large rockets, including the later Saturn family.

These volatile chemicals sat in tanks inches from the pilot’s spine, in an era with virtually none of the safety culture taken for granted today. Motors exploded on test stands. Fires were common. On one flight, the hybrid piston-and-rocket aircraft caught fire in the air, and Warsitz had the composure to land it and walk away.

Who was Erich Warsitz?

Erich Warsitz was a Luftwaffe officer and trained engineer chosen specifically because he understood the machinery he was flying. He was not merely a stick-and-rudder pilot along for the ride - he could feel when something was wrong and describe it precisely to the engineers.

That combination of nerve and technical understanding made him invaluable to the program. He could sit atop an experimental machine capable of killing him in a dozen ways and keep both his pulse and his analytical mind under control.

What made the Heinkel He 176 unique

By 1938, the team had proven that a rocket could push an aircraft through the sky. But it was still a piston airplane with a rocket attached. Heinkel wanted an aircraft designed from the first rivet to fly on rocket power alone - no propeller, no backup. That aircraft became the Heinkel He 176.

The He 176 was tiny, roughly the size of a small sports car with wings. Everything about it was built around speed and the goal of packaging a pilot and a rocket motor into the smallest, most aerodynamic shape possible. The wings were short and thin; the fuselage was smooth and rounded like a teardrop or an artillery shell.

To preserve those clean lines, designers gave up a conventional raised windscreen. In the early configuration, the pilot lay almost flat and looked out through a molded transparent nose - essentially sealed inside a glass bullet.

The aircraft also featured a remarkable safety innovation: a jettisonable nose section designed to break away as an escape capsule. This was a forerunner of the escape-capsule concept decades before such systems became common. The engineers were inventing both the future and the safety equipment for that future on the very same airframe.

What happened on June 20, 1939

On that hazy Baltic morning, the ground crew prepared the He 176 with the slow, deliberate care that fueling a rocket aircraft demands. By most accounts, the motor was set to deliver only a fraction of its full thrust - because a first flight is no time to find the limits.

Warsitz was sealed into the glass nose. When he ignited the motor, there was no gentle spool-up. The rocket delivered thrust all at once, slamming into the pilot’s back as the small aircraft leapt forward. Witnesses described a tearing, thundering roar unlike anything they had heard from an aircraft.

Warsitz climbed, flew a short circuit, and - after the motor burned through its propellant - brought the aircraft back down to the grass and landed. The entire flight lasted about 50 seconds. In that span, the propeller stopped being the only way forward.

Why the He 176 was a failure - and still mattered

Honesty requires acknowledging that the He 176 was not a good aircraft. It was brutally difficult. It burned through its fuel in well under a minute, meaning takeoff, climb, maneuver, and landing all had to happen in a single short window. Its tiny wings demanded a dangerously high landing speed.

It was a flying laboratory and a flying hazard - neither a weapon nor a transport. When officials watched a demonstration later that summer, most were unimpressed. An aircraft that flies for under a minute wins no wars, and the program was canceled.

The single He 176 ever built was crated and stored in a Berlin museum, then lost - most likely destroyed in wartime bombing. No example survives. Only a handful of photographs, drawings, and eyewitness recollections remain.

Yet the underlying conviction was correct: the propeller really was running out of road. The same Heinkel team, drawing on what it had learned, flew the Heinkel He 178 - the world’s first turbojet aircraft - just weeks later on the same coast. The test pilot was again Erich Warsitz, making him the only man to fly both the first rocket aircraft and the first jet aircraft in a single summer.

The rocket-fighter concept also resurfaced later in the war as the Messerschmitt Me 163 Komet, a tailless interceptor that carried the same demons as the He 176: a murderous landing speed, corrosive fuel, and flights measured in moments. More Komet pilots were killed in ground and landing accidents than were ever lost to enemy fire.

But the principle endured. Strip away the politics and the war, and what remains is pure engineering nerve: a pilot sealing himself inside a glass shell and lighting a chemical fire a hand’s width from his spine, betting he would fly rather than die. That bet - and the relentless pursuit of speed behind it - helped open the door to the jet age, and eventually to the refined rockets that carried humans to the Moon three decades later.

Key Takeaways

On June 20, 1939, Erich Warsitz flew the Heinkel He 176 at Peenemünde, becoming the first person to fly an aircraft on rocket power alone.
The flight lasted only about 50 seconds, but it proved aviation could move beyond the propeller’s physical limits.
Ernst Heinkel and a young Wernher von Braun pioneered the rocket-propulsion experiments that led to the aircraft.
The He 176 was canceled as impractical; the only example built was later destroyed, leaving no surviving aircraft.
Warsitz also flew the Heinkel He 178, the first turbojet aircraft, weeks later - making him the only pilot to fly both the first rocket and first jet aircraft in one summer.