In 1947 a German with a false passport stepped off a ship in Buenos Aires. The name on the document read Pedro Matthies. The man was Kurt Tank — former technical director of Focke-Wulf, the designer of the Fw 190, and the head of the team behind the Ta 183, the swept-wing jet fighter Germany drew up but never built.

Argentina, flush with ambition under Juan Perón, wanted a jet fighter of its own. Tank had the blueprints of a machine years ahead of its time. What followed was one of aviation’s strangest and most tragic what-ifs: the FMA IAe 33 Pulqui II, the first swept-wing jet fighter designed and built anywhere in Latin America — and a project that killed two of its test pilots and never reached a single squadron.

A Nazi blueprint, reborn on the Pampas

The Ta 183, drawn by Focke-Wulf engineer Hans Multhopp, had won Germany’s 1945 emergency fighter competition on paper and gone no further than the wind tunnel. Tank brought its ideas to Córdoba and rebuilt them around a British engine — the Rolls-Royce Nene, larger and heavier than the German turbojet the Ta 183 had been meant to use. The fuselage grew a fatter cross-section to swallow the Nene’s centrifugal compressor, the wings were swept a dramatic 40 degrees, and the tail was perched high in a T.

To prove the shape, the exiled German glider genius Reimar Horten built two full-size gliders that Tank himself flew in 1948 and 1949. They exposed the flaw that would haunt the whole programme: the Pulqui II was unstable in roll, and its swept wings liked to stall at the tips before the roots — a recipe for a sudden, vicious wing-drop.

The first flying prototype took off on 27 June 1950 with Captain Edmundo Weiss at the controls. On its second flight, ex-Focke-Wulf test pilot Otto Behrens hit severe lateral instability above 700 km/h and nursed it home, only for the jet to bounce so hard on landing that the undercarriage collapsed. Tank, an accomplished test pilot in his own right, took over the flight programme to chase down the stall.

Two pilots, two fatal flights

On 8 February 1951 Tank demonstrated the fighter before Perón and a huge crowd in Buenos Aires, and the air force asked for a pre-production batch of twelve. But the aircraft was still dangerous. During acceptance flying, Captain Vedania Mannuwal ignored a warning not to stress the airframe, threw it into a high-g turn near Córdoba, and the wing tore off. The joint pin holding wing to fuselage had been welded rather than forged — Argentina lacked the heavy presses to make it any other way. Mannuwal ejected inverted at low altitude; his parachute never fully opened.

The third prototype flew in September 1952. Otto Behrens, slated to display it before Perón, had no illusions about how the jet behaved at the edges of its envelope.

Two days before the exhibition, practising his routine, Behrens stalled the Pulqui II at low level and was killed in the crash. Two of the four flying prototypes were now gone, and with them two experienced pilots.

Killed by politics, not just aerodynamics

The fourth prototype, flown in August 1953, finally carried the definitive four 20 mm cannon, and the air force sketched plans for a hundred afterburning interceptors. But Argentina’s economy was cracking. Perón turned the aircraft factory over to building cars, trucks and motorcycles, and Tank’s team was pulled onto other designs. When Tank’s contract expired in January 1955 he asked for nearly double his pay; Perón simply cancelled it.

Then history turned strange. In September 1955 the last flying Pulqui II was pressed into the Revolución Libertadora — the coup that overthrew Perón — flying combat missions against the very government that had funded it, then taking part in the victory flypast over Córdoba.

A fifth and final prototype, flown in 1959, at last cured the instability. It was too late. The jet was now obsolete, and politically toxic for its Perónist associations. Argentina bought surplus F-86 Sabres from the United States instead — twenty-eight of them, delivered in 1960 in poor condition and without the uprated engine they had been promised. The remaining Pulqui tooling was destroyed.

And yet the Pulqui II earned its place in history. It made Argentina only the eighth nation on earth to develop jet-fighter technology, and the first anywhere in Latin America to fly a swept-wing jet of its own design. The industry Tank helped build survives today as Fábrica Argentina de Aviones. A fighter that never fired a shot in anger still put a whole continent on the jet-age map.

Sources: William Green; Santiago Rivas, “Pioneers & Prototypes” (International Air Power Review); Wikipedia.