Aviation History

Almost 75 YEARS have gone by since the Rocket Age and the Jet Age began! In the beginning there were names such as Wernher von Braun, Hans Pabst von Ohain and Ernst Heinkel, and especially Flugkapitän Erich Warsitz, who bravely climbed into the new designs of aircraft and flew them at the risk of his life. He tested new propulsion systems which were a generation ahead of contemporary aeronautics: he was the first man to fly an aircraft driven by a liquid-fuel rocket engine, the Heinkel He 176, and a jet, the Heinkel He 178. He laid the foundations from which today's flight technology has bridged space and time.

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Presse

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mWernher von Braun - August 30, 1971

.......................Audio Translation: click

Flugkapitän Erich Warsitz

On 18 October 1906, Erich, son of senior engineer Robert Warsitz, was born at Hattingen in the Ruhr. In his youth he learned flying with the academic group of fliers at Hangelar near Bonn. At Rechlin, test centre of the embryonic Luftwaffe (1934-1936), he flew every type of machine which the German aeronautical industry, working flat out, could manufacture. This activity familiarized him with the historic developments in aviation then afoot.

A few years before, in 1931, the Army Weapons Office testing ground at Kummersdorf had taken over research into liquid-fuel rockets. In 1932, Wernher von Braun, after the Second World War a world famous rocket scientist in the United States, designed a rocket of this kind which used high percentage spirit and liquid oxygen. With this he made the first experiments. In 1934 he fired his second rocket type, the A2, from the North Sea island of Borkum.

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