Golden Journal No. 48:
Black Helicopters
Drawing-Board Helicopters
by Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
August 2022

In our Golden Journal No. 48: Black Helicopters, we add a whole array of German helicopters to Panzer Grenadier. Some of them actually flew (though not enough of them to have an impact on the war), while others never even made it to the flying prototype stage. Let’s have a look at the latter machines, some of them promising great technological leaps forward that only came after the war.

The Heavy Helicopter

Heinrich Focke had built a cargo-lifting variant of his Fa.223 “Drache” transport helicopter, and this concept fascinated him more than any other. During the Fa.223’s mountain warfare trials, German troops had slung howitzers and pallets of ammunition under the helicopter’s fuselage and raised or lowered them with winches.

Focke believed from the start that this method could allow a large helicopter to carry outsized loads: tanks, other vehicles, artillery pieces, or segments of bridges. He submitted his concept in 1941 and received approval to draft detailed plans. Since the project had a low priority, the Air Ministry assigned a team of French engineers at the Bregeut works to assist in the technical details and the actual drafting.

One of the Fa.223 Drache assigned to the Mountain Warfare School hauls a load via winch.

The big new helicopter showed some of its Fa.223 lineage, but had a much more modern and streamlined look. As in the Fa.223, a pair of outriggers each held a rotor, each rotor driven by its own engine. These outriggers, unlike the Fa.223, had a fabric skin over them and looked like stubby wings. From the outriggers, long, fixed landing gear extended to the ground.

Like the Fa.223, the Fa.284’s fuselage resembled contemporary German bombers, though in this case the next generation of airplanes like the He.177 heavy bomber. A glassed-in canopy at the nose held two pilots.

Between the high legs, a detachable cargo container was slung under the fuselage. This had big clamshell doors modeled on those of the Me.323 transport. The container could carry several tons (from two to seven, depending on the stage of the design) including small vehicles. The cargo container could be removed and the winch used to loft awkward loads like artillery pieces. In this configuration, with small downward-looking canopy toward the rear would be installed for a cargo specialist to oversee the winch. The helicopter could be quickly reconfigured from one variant to the other.

Focke saw the cargo containers as the key to the machine’s versatility. These would be pre-loaded with ammunition, other supplies, offices, field workshops, a small field hospital or whatever else the troops needed, then flown to the site by the helicopter. There they’d stay as long as needed while the helicopter performed other tasks and moved other containers. Afterwards, the Fa.284 would come back for the container and take it to be reloaded. This notion predated containerized freight by several decades.

As with the Fa.223, Focke continued his obsession with bridge-building helicopters. He saw the military engineers as the prime user of the machine, hefting pieces of pontoon bridges quickly and efficiently into place. It would also be used much like the Fa.223, to ferry troops behind enemy lines and bring them their weapons and vehicles.

The huge rotors of the Fa.284 caused mechanical problems in the design stage, and in 1943 some of the designers proposed an alternative based on the Drache. This Fa.233 (sometimes called the Fa.223D) would double the original aircraft’s engine and rotors, with two sets of outriggers and a much larger fuselage. This had the virtues of using proven designs, and some sources state that construction began on the aircraft. This report may be mistaken, based on sightings of parts intended for incomplete Fa.223 airframes under construction at Tempelhof.

Helicopter Plus Airplane

For more than 70 years, aircraft designers have tried to combine the vertical take-off and landing and hovering capabilities of the helicopter with the speed and range of the airplane. Whether Boeing finally met the challenge when its V22 Osprey deployed after more than 20 years of development, is still disputed by many observers.

The helicopter's limited range meant that it could only insert ground troops within a narrow radius of its base. But an aircraft with the same landing performance and the ability to fly like an airplane could deliver airborne forces over hundreds of miles, without the massive scatter of a traditional parachute drop.

Weser-Flugzeugbau, a small German firm owned by the Deschimag combine and specializing in licensed production of planes designed by other German companies, began work on a tilt-rotor design in 1938. The design never progressed beyond drawings and models, so there's no way to tell if the German engineers would have solved the problem of crafting the complicated gearing necessary to tilt the rotors.

Unlike the Osprey, with only tilts its engine nacelles, about half of the P.1003's wing would have changed orientation. With only a single 900 horsepower Daimler-Benz 600 radial engine driving both propellers, power would probably have been lacking. The P.1003 was not a large plane, and the fuselage had to accommodate the engine (mounted in the center of the aircraft) and the landing gear, leaving precious little room for cargo.

After the war, Weser picked up the concept again, proposing a new generation of tilt-rotor aircraft including the P.16 "helicopter hunter" in 1963.

Attack Helicopters

World War Two helicopter designers saw the machines as useful for transport, spotting and medical evacuation. Armed helicopters did not enter world arsenals until much later, when experience in the Korean War and in the Algerian revolt against French imperialism showed helicopters to be very vulnerable to small-arms fire. To carry out their missions, helicopters needed an ability to shoot back.

Anton Flettner’s post-Fl.282 developments continued toward a more versatile reconnaissance helicopter. He sought to reduce weight and increase range and endurance, rather than a machine that could carry weapons. Some of his later designs were essentially one-man helicopter backpacks. Likewise, the Focke-Achgelis team worked to carry heavier and heavier loads.

Lacking wartime experience, these designers had no inkling of the need for armament. Had helicopters played a larger role in the war, their crews no doubt would have faced the same difficulties that led to the development of armed helicopters in the 1950’s. And because gamers like to play with pieces that can attack better than with those that can’t, we’ve provided some pieces for hypothetical armed versions of these helicopters.

The Fa.223 actually carried a machine gun in its nose, a holdover from the bomber airframe design transplanted to the helicopter medium. Its large and sturdy frame could have carried a number of weapons, and its high rotor framework gave a wide field of fire.

The first armed version of the Drache provided (Fa.223K) represents a standard Drache with a pair of 20mm MG151 automatic cannon in its doorframes. While the 20mm proved very reliable and gave punch to the Luftwaffe’s fighters, it could do little against most armored vehicles by the time the Drache flew, even given the helicopter’s ability to always find shots at a tank’s flank or rear.

The first armed version of the Kolibri (Fl.282M) sports a machine gun for the observer and a few fragmentation bombs. This would not have been a terribly difficult conversion and may have been possible even as a field expedient, though no one appears to have tried.

In modern times, helicopters are often expected to hunt enemy armor, and a more helicopter-conscious Wehrmacht would no doubt have sought the same capability. By late in the war, the Luftwaffe was using an 8.8 cm unguided anti-tank rocket called the “Panzerblitz,” and this weapon could easily have been adopted for helicopter use.

The second armed version of the Kolibri (Fl.282P) carries these rockets slung under its fuselage. This would have required a more extensive conversion, to strengthen the fuselage and to upgrade engine power to bear the extra weight. Flettner’s helicopters had little tolerance for “extras,” as he intended them to be as small as possible.

The second armed Drache (Fa.223P) sports the BK7.5 cannon, a 75mm piece carried in some models of the Hs.129B attack aircraft. Whether the F.a223’s tube-and-fabric construction could withstand the weapon’s use would require engineering tests that of course were never conducted. The Hs.129 was a rugged, armored airplane designed for heavy wear. But mounting the cannon on our fantasy helicopters makes for a powerful game piece, and given the ingenuity of Heinrich Focke and his team it’s probably not as far a stretch as it may seem.

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Mike Bennighof is president of Avalanche Press and holds a doctorate in history from Emory University. A Fulbright Scholar and NASA Journalist in Space finalist, he has published a great many books, games and articles on historical subjects; people are saying that some of them are actually good. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama with his wife, three children, and new puppy. He misses his lizard-hunting Iron Dog, Leopold.

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