The Heinkel He One Seventy-Eight, Erich Warsitz, and the Morning the Jet Age Was Born

On August 27, 1939, German test pilot Erich Warsitz took off from Rostock-Marienehe aerodrome in an aircraft with no propeller and flew for approximately six minutes - the first time in history a manned aircraft flew under pure turbojet power. That flight, conducted in near-total secrecy five days before Germany invaded Poland, launched an era that would compress the Atlantic crossing from days to hours.

What Made the Heinkel He 178 Different

The Heinkel He 178 was a purpose-built test vehicle, not a combat aircraft. Its metal fuselage was designed around a single turbojet, with a round intake at the nose and exhaust exiting beneath the tail. The airframe was conventional. The innovation was entirely inside.

Powering it was the HeS 3 engine, producing roughly 1,100 pounds of thrust. By modern standards that is almost nothing - a single commercial turbofan today produces ten times that figure - but the physics it proved was unlimited. Draw air in, compress it, burn fuel continuously, expel exhaust at high velocity. Newton’s third law, made into a flying machine.

The Physicist Who Hated Piston Engines

Hans von Ohain was a physics student at Göttingen University in the early 1930s when he began developing his concept. Flying as a passenger on piston-engine aircraft, he was struck by the noise, the vibration, the mechanical roughness of the whole experience. He was convinced there had to be a smoother way.

He sketched out the physics of continuous combustion and brought the idea to Ernst Heinkel in 1936. Heinkel - competitive, ambitious, and hungry to do something nobody else had done - put the 26-year-old on the payroll and gave him a workshop at Rostock-Marienehe. Their first engine, the HeS 1, ran on hydrogen rather than kerosene, making bench testing safer while they worked out combustion dynamics. It ran successfully in March 1937. Nobody outside the facility knew.

The program moved through the HeS 2 and into the HeS 3, shifting to kerosene and improving efficiency at each step. The entire program was known to a small circle of engineers, to the Luftwaffe Research Division, and essentially no one else.

The Man Who Was Right Too Early

What Ohain didn’t know was that a British RAF officer had already filed a patent for almost exactly the same concept. Frank Whittle submitted his turbojet patent in January 1930 - four years before Ohain began his work. Two men, two countries, the same breakthrough, neither aware of the other existed.

The difference between their stories wasn’t the idea. It was what happened next.

Whittle took his patent to the British Air Ministry. Official opinion described it as of low importance. He scraped together private investors, formed a small company called Power Jets, and kept working - nearly broke for years, fighting bureaucracy as a serving military officer trying to build a revolution in his spare time. The strain nearly broke him physically and mentally.

His engine finally flew on May 15, 1941, in the Gloster E.28/39 - nearly 21 months after the He 178 had already flown in secret at Rostock. He had been right for over a decade before a single government official admitted it.

The Morning of August 27, 1939

Warsitz was already Heinkel’s chief experimental test pilot, and he had flown things that should have killed him. He had taken up the He 176, Heinkel’s rocket-powered experimental aircraft, which ran on liquid propellants that could burn through an engine casing if the plumbing went wrong. He flew it anyway.

His main concern with the He 178 was engine response time. Turbojet spool-up was slow compared to anything piston-driven - if you needed power and needed it now, you waited several seconds for the turbine to build RPM. Low and slow on final, that lag could be the difference. He planned to fly with extra margin and manage energy more deliberately than a piston pilot would need to.

He taxied to the runway that morning. The HeS 3 made a sound unlike anything Rostock-Marienehe had heard before: no bark, no hammering cylinders, just a rising, continuous whine as the turbine spun up.

He released the brakes. The acceleration was smooth - no torque to fight, no vibration through the controls, just a steady push from behind. The wheels left the ground.

He flew around the aerodrome for approximately six minutes, feeling the aircraft out, then came back with extra margin on approach and put it down. Ernst Heinkel was there to shake his hand. Not a soul outside that circle knew.

How the Luftwaffe Missed Its Moment

Heinkel arranged a demonstration for Luftwaffe high command that November 1939. By then Germany was at war. Erhard Milch and Ernst Udet - the men running Luftwaffe aircraft programs - watched Warsitz fly the He 178, listened to the unfamiliar engine sound, and shrugged. Germany had the Messerschmitt Bf 109. The Focke-Wulf 190 was coming. Why invest heavily in an unproven technology that might not deliver for years?

It remains one of the great miscalculations in the history of air power.

German jet development did continue. The Heinkel He 280, a twin-jet fighter, flew in April 1941. Then came the aircraft that gave Allied pilots a cold feeling when they first saw it: the Messerschmitt Me 262, with twin Junkers Jumo engines, swept wings, and a top speed above 500 mph. It was faster than anything the Americans or British had in the air, and in skilled hands it was nearly impossible to catch in a straight fight.

But it arrived too late. Hitler insisted on configuring it as a bomber when his commanders wanted a fighter. Factory dispersal to avoid Allied bombing slowed production to a fraction of what it could have been. Fuel shortages grounded squadrons that should have been flying. The Me 262 scored kills, but never in numbers that could reverse the arithmetic of the air war over Europe.

The jet age was born in Germany. Germany could not use what it had.

How the Jet Reached America

The Americans entered the jet age from the side. Whittle’s engine design was shared with General Electric in 1941 as part of a classified wartime agreement. The Americans adapted it and flew the Bell P-59 Airacomet on jet power in October 1942. The learning curve was steep, but American manufacturing capacity was something no other country could match.

After the war, Ohain came to the United States under Operation Paperclip, the program that brought German scientists and engineers to America rather than let their knowledge disappear. He went to work at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, eventually rising to chief scientist for aerospace propulsion. Whittle was knighted in 1948 and spent the rest of his life in something between recognition and quiet frustration. He had been right. The record made that clear.

In 1991, more than 50 years after the He 178 flew, Ohain and Whittle met in person for the first time at a symposium at Wright-Patterson. Two engineers who had independently arrived at the same revolution, each working in isolation, each fighting to be believed, sat down together. By all accounts, it was a warm meeting.

Whittle died in 1996. Ohain died in 1998.

Why This Six-Minute Flight Still Matters

Every commercial airliner, business jet, and military fighter flying today traces its propulsion directly to what Ohain proved at Rostock-Marienehe. Modern high-bypass turbofans are engineering masterpieces with pressure ratios and thermal efficiencies Ohain could not have imagined. The underlying principle is the same principle Warsitz felt pushing him down the runway before the world went to war.

The Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk in 1903. The first jet flight came 36 years later. By October 1958, Pan American World Airways was flying Boeing 707s across the Atlantic on schedule. Fifty-five years from Kitty Hawk to routine transatlantic jet service - one of the fastest technology transitions in recorded history.

The Boeing 737, the Airbus A320, every business jet, every modern fighter - at their core, all of it traces back to that six-minute flight on a quiet Baltic airfield, the last peaceful morning the world would know for six years.

Primary sources include aviation historian Bill Gunston’s work on jet engine development, Richard Hallion’s research on the origins of jet propulsion, and records preserved at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.

Key Takeaways

On August 27, 1939, Erich Warsitz flew the Heinkel He 178 for approximately six minutes at Rostock-Marienehe - the first turbojet-powered flight in history, conducted five days before WWII began.
Hans von Ohain developed the HeS 3 engine for Heinkel; Frank Whittle had independently patented the same turbojet concept in January 1930 but received no government support for over a decade.
The Luftwaffe’s failure to prioritize jet technology after a demonstration in November 1939 is considered one of the significant air power miscalculations of the Second World War.
The Me 262 - the world’s first operational jet fighter - arrived too late and in insufficient numbers to change the outcome of the air war in Europe.
Every turbofan engine flying today operates on the identical physical principle Ohain proved on that Baltic airfield: continuous combustion, high-velocity exhaust, reaction thrust.