Search for the Focke-Wulf Ta 183 Huckebein and you will find the same sentence over and over: this was the aircraft that became the MiG-15. The swept wing, the nose intake, the tail carried high on the fin — the Soviets took the drawings home in 1945 and built them.

It is a tidy story. It is also almost certainly wrong, and the reason it is wrong is more interesting than the myth.

Not one Ta 183 was ever completed. There were wind-tunnel models, a mock-up and a very large amount of paper. What actually crossed the Atlantic was not a blueprint but a person — and the thing he eventually designed came home from space.

A Fighter Made of Paper

Work began at Focke-Wulf in 1942 under the internal name Project VI. The design lead was Hans Multhopp, an aerodynamicist barely thirty years old who had come to the company from Göttingen.

What his team drew was remarkably modern for 1942. A wing swept back 40 degrees. A fuselage built around a single turbojet fed by a nose intake. A tailplane mounted right at the top of the fin, well clear of the jet efflux — an arrangement so associated with him that it acquired his name. Nine point four metres long, ten metres across, twenty-two and a half square metres of wing. Four 30 mm MK 108 cannon in the nose.

The intended engine was the Heinkel HeS 011, the turbojet that half the German industry was waiting for in 1945 and which never reached production in numbers. Early prototypes were to fly on the Jumo 004B instead. Sixteen prototypes were planned. The first flight was projected for May 1945.

On 28 February 1945, the Luftwaffe High Command examined the Emergency Fighter proposals and chose the Junkers EF 128. Focke-Wulf took second place. Accounts of what happened in the weeks after that do not agree — some hold that the Huckebein was favoured again as the war closed — but the argument is academic. On 8 April 1945, British troops reached the Focke-Wulf facilities. The Ta 183 was still a set of drawings and a wooden mock-up.

Where the Name Came From

Huckebein was not a Focke-Wulf invention. It comes from Hans Huckebein, der Unglücksrabe — Hans Huckebein, the Unlucky Raven — an illustrated story Wilhelm Busch published in 1867. Busch’s raven is a small black agent of chaos who brings misfortune to everyone he meets and eventually hangs himself in a ball of knitting wool.

As names for a last-ditch fighter go, it was not the luckiest choice anyone ever made.

The MiG-15 Question

The resemblance is real and it is not imagined. Put a photograph of a MiG-15 next to the Ta 183 drawings and you see a swept wing, a nose intake, a barrel of a fuselage and a tailplane carried high. Historians including David Myhra have argued that the Soviet fighter was at least inspired by the German project, on the reasonable grounds that the Soviets captured a great deal of German material in 1945 and were not shy about reading it.

That last part is not in dispute.

Studying swept-wing research is not the same as copying an aeroplane, though. The Russian aviation historian Yefim Gordon published a detailed design history of the MiG-15 that refutes any direct connection between the two aircraft. In his account the MiG-15 was an indigenous design, and the swept wing was chosen for a specific reason: the design bureau wanted a fighter that could exceed 960 km/h, and by 1946 everybody in the business knew that meant sweeping the wing.

It is worth remembering that the Germans had not exactly cracked this themselves. The Me 262 is often held up as the first swept-wing fighter, and it did have 18.5 degrees of sweep — introduced not to delay compressibility but to fix the centre of gravity after the engines turned out heavier than planned.

And there is a far more prosaic reason the MiG-15 worked, which has nothing to do with Focke-Wulf at all. In 1946 the British government sold the Soviet Union a licence for the Rolls-Royce Nene, the best centrifugal-flow turbojet in the world. The Klimov VK-1 that powered the MiG-15bis was developed from it.

No amount of captured German paperwork would have given the MiG-15 that engine. The aeroplane first flew on 30 December 1947, some two months after the North American F-86 Sabre.

The Man Who Left

Hans Multhopp was born in Alfeld in 1913 and studied aerodynamics at Göttingen under Ludwig Prandtl, who by the usual account regarded him as his best student. By 1943 he was running Focke-Wulf’s advanced design bureau. He was thirty-one when the Ta 183 was cancelled by the arrival of the British Army.

When Kurt Tank took a large part of the Focke-Wulf design team to Argentina after the war, Multhopp did not go. He was the one senior figure who stayed behind, and the accounts of his life agree on why: he wanted to work out of his mentor’s shadow. He spent four years at the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough instead, and in 1949 he moved to the United States and joined the Glenn L. Martin Company.

His first significant American aircraft was the XB-51, a tri-jet bomber with a variable-incidence swept wing and — inevitably — a T-tail. It lost the competition it was built for and only two were made, but it flew in 1949 and it was unmistakably his.

British Pathé newsreel from 1949. The XB-51 sequence opens the item; a US Navy missile trial follows it.

By 1963 Multhopp was chief scientist at Martin.

The Huckebein’s Real Descendant

The work that mattered most came at the end. Multhopp led the design of the Martin SV-5, a wingless shape that generated lift from its own body. The Air Force and NASA turned it into the X-24A.

Between 1969 and 1971 the X-24A made twelve glide flights, dropped from a modified B-52, and twenty-eight powered flights. It was ugly, it was tiny, and it answered the one question that mattered for everything that came after it.

One of the last X-24A flights simulated a Space Shuttle landing approach from around 71,400 feet. Hans Multhopp died in Cincinnati in October 1972, aged fifty-nine, nine years before Columbia came down that same way.

What the Ta 183 Actually Was

The Ta 183 was never an aeroplane. It was a set of ideas about how to make a fuselage and a swept wing and a high tail behave at speeds nobody had flown at yet, worked out by a young man in a design office in 1942.

Ideas of that kind do not get captured. They walk out of the building inside the head of the person who had them, and in this case they walked to Farnborough, then to Baltimore, and finally into a blunt little rocket glider that showed you could come back from orbit and land on a runway.

The MiG-15 is a better aeroplane than the Ta 183 would have been, and it got there on its own. The Huckebein’s real inheritance is parked in a museum in Ohio, and it does not look anything like a fighter.

Sources: Wikipedia (Focke-Wulf Ta 183; Hans Multhopp; Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-15); National Museum of the United States Air Force (Martin X-24A; Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-15bis). Three-view drawing by Nubifer, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.