Heinkel He 177 Greif
Germany's only heavy bomber to reach operational service in WWII — advanced, long-ranged, and so prone to engine fires that its own crews called it the "Luftwaffe's cigarette lighter."
The Heinkel He 177 Greif: Germany's brilliant, burning heavy bomber
On paper, the Heinkel He 177 Greif ("Griffin") should have been one of the most formidable aircraft of the Second World War. It was big, aerodynamically clean, and could carry a heavy bomb load farther than almost anything in the Luftwaffe. In practice it became a byword for how a promising design can be strangled by a single flawed idea — and by the shifting demands of the men who ordered it.
Germany entered the war without a true four-engine strategic bomber. The Luftwaffe had been built around fast, medium, twin-engine machines meant to support the army, and the visionary who had championed a long-range "Ural bomber," General Walther Wever, died in a 1936 flying accident. When the air ministry (the RLM) finally issued a requirement for a long-range heavy bomber in 1936, it handed the job to Heinkel — and then loaded the specification with contradictions.
The most fateful of these was drag. To hit the demanded speed and range, the design team under Siegfried and Walter Günter chose to bury four engines behind just two propellers. Each propeller was driven not by one engine but by a "power system" that bolted two Daimler-Benz V12s together side by side into a single unit — the DB 606, and later the more powerful DB 610. The result looked, from the front, like a twin-engine aircraft. It flew like nothing anyone had built before, and it caught fire with terrible regularity.
"The engines were mounted so close together, and ran so hot, that oil pooling in the bottom of the cowling could ignite in flight. Crews learned to watch the nacelles as closely as they watched the sky."— Summary of accounts collected by wartime and post-war aviation historians
Worse still, in 1937–38 the head of Luftwaffe development, Ernst Udet, insisted that even this enormous bomber must be able to perform medium-angle dive-bombing — a tactic that made sense for a Stuka, not a 30-tonne aircraft. Meeting that demand forced Heinkel to strengthen the entire airframe, adding weight, complexity, and delay. The requirement was eventually relaxed, but the damage to the timetable and the structure was done.
The Greif finally reached front-line units in 1942–43 and saw action on several fronts: night raids on Britain during the "Baby Blitz" of early 1944, bomber and improvised transport work on the Eastern Front (including the doomed Stalingrad airlift), and — arguably its most effective role — long-range maritime strikes launching Hs 293 radio-guided anti-ship missiles at Allied convoys. But chronic unreliability, a punishing training burden, and Germany's collapsing fuel supply meant many He 177s never flew a combat mission at all. Large numbers were destroyed on the ground or left grounded for lack of aviation fuel.
By the end of the war the Greif was effectively finished. Around 1,169 were built — a huge industrial effort for an aircraft that rarely delivered on its promise. Today, uniquely among the major bombers of the war, not a single complete He 177 survives anywhere in the world.
What makes the story so poignant is that the failure was not really the aircraft's fault. Strip away the coupled engines and the dive-bombing demand, and the underlying design was excellent: clean, fast, long-legged and heavily armed, with modern remotely sighted defensive positions and, in the maritime role, a guided missile that pointed straight at the future of naval warfare. Ernst Heinkel and his engineers had built a good aeroplane around a bad idea, and then been ordered to make the bad idea worse. Every serious attempt to fix it — most obviously by fitting four separate engines — ran aground on official indecision and, later, on the simple exhaustion of German resources.
That is why the He 177 occupies such a peculiar place in aviation history. It is not remembered as a triumph like the Lancaster, nor as an honest workhorse like its own smaller cousin the He 111. It is remembered as a cautionary tale: proof that raw engineering talent and industrial muscle count for little when the requirement itself is flawed, when priorities keep shifting, and when the strategic thinking behind a weapon never quite catches up with the weapon itself.
01Why Germany had no heavy bomber: the He 177's origins and the "Ural bomber" that never was+
The Luftwaffe of 1939 was a tactical air force. Its doctrine, shaped by the needs of a fast-moving army, favoured twin-engine medium bombers such as the He 111 and Do 17 that could strike battlefield and near-rear targets. A small group of officers, led by the Luftwaffe's first Chief of Staff Walther Wever, had argued for a genuine long-range strategic bomber — the so-called "Ural bomber" that could reach industry deep inside the Soviet Union. Wever's death in a 1936 crash removed the concept's most powerful advocate, and the early four-engine prototypes (the Dornier Do 19 and Junkers Ju 89) were cancelled.
The He 177 grew out of the requirement that replaced them, issued by the RLM as "Bomber A" in 1936. It called for a bomber able to carry a substantial load over very long range at high speed — but the ministry's insistence on a low-drag, effectively twin-nacelle layout, combined with later demands for dive-bombing capability, set the programme on a collision course with the laws of engineering. The Greif was, in a sense, Germany's belated attempt to build the strategic bomber it had talked itself out of building years earlier.
02The He 177's coupled engines explained: how four engines drove only two propellers+
This is the single most important thing to understand about the Greif. To reduce drag, Heinkel did not hang four separate engines under the wings. Instead it created two "power systems," each formed by coupling two Daimler-Benz inverted-V12 engines together side by side so they drove a common gearbox and a single large propeller. Early aircraft used the DB 606 (two DB 601s); later production used the DB 610 (two DB 605s), each unit producing roughly 2,900 hp.
The idea was elegant on the drawing board: the aircraft would have the power of four engines but the frontal area and drag closer to a twin, and only two large propellers to maintain. The reality was a nightmare of packaging. The paired engines were crammed into a tight nacelle with poor airflow. Fuel and oil lines ran through a cramped, hot space; oil tended to collect where it could be sprayed onto hot exhaust manifolds; and the engine bearings were overstressed. Fires broke out in flight so often that ground and air crews gave the aircraft a string of grim nicknames — "Luftwaffenfeuerzeug" (the Luftwaffe's cigarette lighter), "Reichsfeuerzeug," and the "flaming coffin." Heinkel and Daimler-Benz chased the problem for years with revised oil systems, better cowlings and firewalls, and the redesigned DB 610; the later A-5 was considerably safer, but the Greif never fully shed its reputation.
03The dive-bombing folly: how one RLM demand crippled a strategic bomber+
Perhaps the most self-defeating decision in the whole programme was the requirement — pushed by the technical office under Ernst Udet in the late 1930s — that the He 177 be stressed for medium-angle dive-bombing. Dive-bombing had delivered spectacular results with the small, purpose-built Ju 87 Stuka, and it briefly became an obsession in the RLM: even large bombers were expected to be able to do it.
For a heavy bomber this was close to absurd. To survive dive-recovery loads, the airframe had to be strengthened throughout, driving up empty weight and eating into range and payload. Dive brakes and associated systems added complexity. The requirement contributed to delays and to the aircraft's chronic overweight problems, and it was quietly abandoned as impractical — but only after it had shaped the structure. It is one of the clearest examples in aviation history of a specification demanding two incompatible things at once and getting a compromised aircraft as a result.
How the He 177 Greif was built — and why it kept catching fire
Two propellers, four engines
The defining feature: coupled DB 606/DB 610 "power systems" gave four-engine power with near-twin drag — and packed two hot V12s into one cramped, fire-prone nacelle.
Clean, modern airframe
A slim fuselage, high-aspect-ratio wing, evaporative-then-conventional cooling and remotely controlled defensive barbettes made the Greif aerodynamically advanced for its day.
Missile carrier
The A-5 could launch Hs 293 guided anti-ship missiles and carry Fritz X (FX 1400) and torpedoes — making it one of the war's most capable stand-off maritime strike platforms on paper.
04The He 177's structure and systems: wing, defensive barbettes and remote turrets+
The Greif was a genuinely modern aeroplane. It used a stressed-skin, all-metal structure with a long, slender fuselage and a high-aspect-ratio wing that gave it good range. Early prototypes experimented with surface evaporative cooling to cut drag further; this proved unworkable and production aircraft reverted to conventional annular radiators around the coupled engines, which is part of why the nacelles ran so hot.
Defensive armament evolved through the variants and typically combined 7.92 mm MG 81 machine guns, 13 mm MG 131 heavy machine guns and 20 mm MG 151 cannon distributed across nose, dorsal, ventral and tail positions — some in manned stations and some in remotely sighted barbettes. A crew of six operated the aircraft. For all its troubles, a healthy He 177 handled well and was fast for its size, which is exactly why the Luftwaffe kept trying to make it work.
05The He 177's engine fires: causes, nicknames and the fixes that came too late+
The fires had several overlapping causes. The DB 606/610 installation placed the two inner exhaust manifolds close together in a poorly ventilated space; oil and fuel unions in that hot zone could leak; oil collected in the lower cowling and could be flung onto hot metal; and the engine mounting left little room for the oil lines, encouraging chafing and failure. Prolonged high-power running — exactly what a heavily loaded bomber demanded on take-off and climb — made things worse. Bearing failures could throw connecting rods, and a thrown rod in a tank full of hot oil was a fire waiting to happen.
Heinkel and Daimler-Benz worked the problem hard. Revised oil systems, additional firewalls, better cowling ventilation, shortened fuel lines and the redesigned DB 610 all reduced the fire rate, and the definitive A-5 was markedly safer than the early A-1/A-3 aircraft. But the reputation stuck, and the underlying compromise — two engines feeding one propeller through one cramped nacelle — could never be fully engineered away. The nicknames "Luftwaffenfeuerzeug" and "flaming coffin" outlived every fix. It is worth stressing the honest nuance here: by 1944 the Greif was nowhere near as lethal to its own crews as the legend suggests, and thousands of sorties were flown without incident. But reputations, once earned in blood, are hard to unmake — and the early fires had done their damage to the aircraft's standing long before the engineers caught up.
06Variants of the He 177: from the A-1 to the four-propeller He 177 B / He 277+
Main production centred on the A-series: the early A-1 and A-3, and the definitive A-5, which had a strengthened structure, revised engine installation and full provision for the Hs 293 guided missile and other stand-off weapons. Specialised sub-variants were fitted for anti-shipping work, high-altitude reconnaissance and other roles.
Heinkel and its engineers repeatedly proposed the obvious cure — abandoning the coupled engines for four conventional ones. This led to the He 177 B / He 277, a true four-propeller derivative, and to other paper and prototype schemes. But by the time these matured, Germany lacked the fuel, resources and time to put a new heavy bomber into mass production, and they never entered meaningful service. The coupled-engine A-5 remained the Greif that actually went to war.
Heinkel He 177 A-5 specifications and cost
Figures below are for the definitive He 177 A-5 and are drawn from established reference works; wartime German figures vary between sources, so contested values are flagged as estimates.
Baseline: the Heinkel He 177 A-5/R2 of 1943–44 — two Daimler-Benz DB 610 coupled power systems, the lengthened fuselage, the strengthened wing and the external racks that turned the Greif into a missile carrier — because 826 of the roughly 1,169 airframes built were A-5s and the fullest and most consistently reproduced data tables describe that mark. Deltas for the A-1, the A-3, the four-engined He 177 B and the He 274 are in grey. Three warnings before the figures. First, almost every published He 177 number is a clean-airframe factory figure taken at a rated power the Luftwaffe subsequently forbade its own crews to use: from the A-3/R2 onward the DB 610 was deliberately de-rated to stop it setting itself alight, so the aeroplane that flew Operation Steinbock was slower and heavier-handed than its data card. Second, the English-language literature on this type descends from a small number of post-war accounts that repeat one another, including two claims that will not quite survive checking — that the RLM demanded a full 60° dive-bombing capability of a thirty-tonne bomber, and that the designation He 177 B was invented purely as a cover name to hide the He 277 from Göring. Both are more complicated than the standard telling, and both are flagged in place below. Third, and most important, the numbers flatter the aircraft. The Greif was fast, it had genuine range, and it had the most aerodynamically efficient wing of any heavy bomber of the Second World War. What it did not reliably have was engines that stayed alight, and no specification table has ever recorded that.
Dimensions & weights
- Crew
- 6 — pilot, co-pilot doubling as flight engineer, navigator or bomb-aimer, radio operator, and two gunners Five is also widely printed, and the fit varied with role. Missile-carrying A-5s of KG 40 flew with an extra man to work the Kehl guidance joystick and watch the flares on the tail of the weapon, and reconnaissance and pathfinder fits carried a specialist observer. Unusually for a heavy bomber, the whole crew sat together in one pressurised-in-intention, unpressurised-in-practice glasshouse forward of the wing.
- Length
- 22.00 m (72 ft 2 in) The A-0 and A-1 measured 20.40 m (66 ft 11 in). Flight testing in the summer of 1942 found the aircraft deficient in stability about both the yaw and pitch axes, so a 1.60 m (5 ft 3 in) plug was inserted in the rear fuselage of the third A-1, which cured it. Every A-3 and later airframe was built long. The He 274 was longer still at 23.80 m.
- Wingspan
- 31.44 m (103 ft 2 in) Narrower than a Lancaster (102 ft) by a whisker and far narrower than a B-29, on an aircraft of comparable weight. The He 274 stretched this to 44.19 m (145 ft) for high-altitude work; the He 177 B kept the A-5 wing.
- Height
- 6.67 m (21 ft 11 in)
- Wing area
- 100.0 m² (1,076 sq ft) Small. A Lancaster carried 1,300 sq ft and a Halifax 1,275 sq ft at similar weights. The Greif made up the difference with span-efficiency rather than area, which is a harder and better piece of engineering and which is why the aircraft cruised fast and far.
- Aspect ratio
- 9.9 This is the single most flattering number in the table and it deserves to be. Against roughly 8.0 for the Lancaster, 7.6 for the B-17 and 7.7 for the Halifax, the He 177 had a markedly higher-aspect wing than any of its contemporaries, and high aspect ratio is exactly what buys low induced drag at heavy weight and high altitude. Siegfried Günter's aerodynamics were not the problem with this aeroplane. Nothing else about it was as good.
- Propellers
- Two 4-blade VDM constant-speed units, 4.50 m (14 ft 9 in) diameter, one per coupled power system Two propellers on a thirty-tonne aircraft, each absorbing nearly 3,000 PS. That concentration is the whole design gamble stated in one row: two propeller discs instead of four meant two nacelles, less wetted area and less cooling drag, but it also meant that losing one power system was equivalent to losing half the aircraft's thrust rather than a quarter of it, and there was no such thing as feathering half an engine.
- Empty weight
- 16,800 kg (37,038 lb) Figures between 16,000 and 18,000 kg appear depending on which radio, radar and armament fit is counted, and A-5s carrying FuG 200 Hohentwiel, the Kehl transmitter and full missile provision were at the top of that band.
- Useful load
- 15,200 kg (33,510 lb) of fuel, crew, ammunition and ordnance
- Maximum take-off weight
- 32,000 kg (70,548 lb) Almost exactly a Lancaster's maximum, on two-thirds of the propeller discs and three-quarters of the wing area. That is the arithmetic that made the DB 610 installation non-negotiable and, in the end, fatal.
- Wing loading
- 320 kg/m² (65.5 lb/sq ft) at maximum weight High for a 1940s bomber and much higher than the British heavies, which is the cost of that small, clean wing. It made the Greif a fast cruiser and an unforgiving aircraft to land at weight, and it is one reason the type never had a comfortable margin for an engine-out approach.
- Bomb bay
- A single long ventral bay divided into three sections, taking up to 7,000 kg (15,430 lb) internally in the fullest fits The A-5, built around external carriage of guided weapons and torpedoes, had part of the bay volume given over to structure and fuel, and in practice the standard operational load was a fraction of the nominal maximum. The A-5/R6 restored a full-length bay. Unlike the Stirling, the Greif's bay was not divided lengthwise by spars, so it could physically accept large single stores — the limit was weight and range, not geometry.
- Internal fuel
- ~9,000 litres (~1,980 imp gal; ~2,380 US gal) in wing and fuselage cells, with provision for auxiliary tanks in the bomb bay Published capacities for the He 177 vary widely and none is well attested in English-language sources; treat this row as an order of magnitude, not a figure. What is not in doubt is that fuel was never this aircraft's limitation. From the summer of 1944 the limitation was that Germany no longer had any.
Performance
- Maximum speed
- 488 km/h (303 mph; 263 kn) at 6,000 m (19,700 ft) Faster than a Lancaster (454 km/h), faster than a B-17G (462 km/h) and faster than a Halifax. On this number alone the He 177 was the fastest heavy bomber in operational service in Europe, and Soviet interceptors optimised for low-level work over the front genuinely struggled to reach the 1944 Eastern Front raids. The number is real. It is also a clean, unladen, full-power figure, and full power was the setting most likely to start a fire.
- Cruising speed
- 415 km/h (258 mph; 224 kn) at 6,000 m (19,700 ft)
- Rate of climb
- 3.2 m/s (630 ft/min) at weight Poor, and the honest counterweight to the speed row above. A loaded Greif took the better part of half an hour to reach its operating altitude, and it did so on de-rated engines that were being watched for smoke the entire time. Climb was the flight regime in which the DB 610 was most likely to fail, which is why Steinbock crews were briefed to cross the Channel low and climb late.
- Service ceiling
- 8,000 m (26,250 ft) A clean figure. Operationally the type worked at 6,000 to 7,000 m. The whole point of the He 274, with turbocharged DB 603s and a 44 m wing, was to reach 14,000 m and be untouchable; the whole point of the He 177 A was to be fast enough that it did not need to.
- Maximum range, ferry
- 6,000 km (3,730 miles; 3,240 nmi) A genuinely long-legged aircraft by European standards and the reason the Greif was the only Luftwaffe bomber that could reach far into the Atlantic with a guided weapon under each wing. It is nonetheless a ferry number and should never be read as an operational radius.
- Radius of action, useful load
- ~1,200 km (~750 miles) with a war load, allowing for climb, formation assembly and a reserve Missile sorties over the Bay of Biscay stretched well beyond this on reduced ordnance, which was exactly the trade the Hs 293 role was designed around: one or two heavy stores, a very long transit, and a stand-off release that meant the aircraft never had to overfly the target.
- Maximum ordnance
- Up to 7,000 kg (15,430 lb) internally, plus up to 2,500 kg (5,510 lb) on underwing racks The two are not additive at range. A typical Eastern Front load in 1944 was four SC 250 or two SC 500 bombs — between 1,000 and 1,000-odd kilogrammes — because fuel, altitude and a margin of engine life mattered more than tonnage.
- Typical operating altitude
- 6,000–7,000 m (19,700–23,000 ft) on operations Higher than RAF Bomber Command flew at night and high enough that the Soviet air defence system of 1944, built for low-level interception over the battle line, could do very little about a wedge of thirty Greifs over the railway yards at Velikiye Luki.
- Power loading
- 5.4 kg/PS (11.9 lb/hp) at maximum weight Comparable to a Lancaster on paper. The difference is that a Lancaster losing one Merlin retained three-quarters of its power and a symmetric-ish drag picture, while a Greif losing one power system lost half its thrust and gained the asymmetry of a dead 4.5 m propeller disc. This is the number that explains why so many He 177 losses were total losses.
- Handling
- Light, responsive and well harmonised for the size Captain Eric Brown flew a captured A-5 at Farnborough in September 1944 and found the control response positive and the controls remarkably light for a thirty-tonne aircraft — but the elevator dangerously light, which he treated with great care because British intelligence had reports of He 177s breaking up in the air. His overall verdict was that the aeroplane conveyed an impression of fragility despite its size and was one of the very few German types he tested that he did not enjoy flying. That is close to the fairest single sentence written about the Greif.
- Dive limit
- Cleared for medium-angle diving attack; shallow high-speed dive runs were standard Steinbock tactics The Greif was structurally strengthened for diving, at very great cost in weight, and then was almost never dived in anger. Several prototypes and early production aircraft were lost to structural failure or to dive-induced flutter during exactly the trials meant to prove the capability. Göring formally rescinded the dive requirement on 15 September 1942, by which point the airframe had been designed, tooled and put into mass production around it.
- Serviceability
- Chronically poor until 1944, then acceptable and irrelevant Not a performance figure, but the number that decided the type's history. On the night of 13/14 February 1944, thirteen He 177s were despatched against London: one aborted with a burst tyre, eight turned back with overheating engines, four bombed, and one was lost. That is a 62 per cent abort rate from mechanical causes on a single raid, and it was not unusual.
Propulsion & systems
- Engines
- Two Daimler-Benz DB 610 A/B coupled power systems, each a pair of inverted-V12 DB 605s geared to a single propeller shaft The A-0, A-1 and early A-3 flew behind the DB 606, the same idea built from a pair of DB 601s. The He 177 B and the He 274 abandoned the concept entirely for four separate DB 603s.
- Take-off power
- 2,950 PS (2,170 kW; 2,910 hp) per power system at 2,800 rpm and 1.2 ata, sea level The DB 606 gave 2,700 PS (1,986 kW). Both figures are rated maxima. In service from the A-3/R2 the DB 610 was deliberately power-limited as a fire precaution, and crews were instructed to avoid sustained high boost. A very large amount of the Greif's paper superiority was a setting the Luftwaffe would not let its pilots select.
- Displacement
- 71.5 litres (4,365 cu in) per power system, 143 litres (8,730 cu in) total Twenty-four cylinders turning one propeller. For scale, a Lancaster's four Merlins totalled 108 litres.
- Power system dry weight
- 1,580 kg (3,483 lb) for the DB 610 A; about 1,500 kg for the DB 606 Well over three tonnes of engine hanging on two mountings, which drove the very substantial nacelle and wing-root structure and left almost no room inside the cowling for anything else, including air.
- The coupling
- Two complete engines mounted side by side at a shallow included angle, crankshafts geared together into a common reduction gear, 0.413:1 on the DB 610 A, driving one shaft The starboard component engine had a mirror-imaged supercharger so the two units could sit shoulder to shoulder. This was not a crude bodge: the coupled system worked well in the He 119 and the Me 261, and on a test bed it was a sound and rather elegant way of getting 3,000 PS through one propeller in 1938, when no single German engine came close. The failure was not the coupling. It was the installation.
- Cooling
- Annular radiators in the nose of each nacelle, ahead of the propeller reduction gear, giving the coupled units the deceptive look of radials Aerodynamically excellent and part of why the aircraft was fast. It also meant a very tight, very deep cowling with almost no through-flow around the engines themselves, no room for a mechanic's hands, and no way of finding a weeping fuel union before it found the exhaust.
- Why it burned
- Six causes, compounding This deserves stating precisely rather than as folklore. (1) The twelve cylinders of the two inner banks exhausted into a common central manifold that ran between the coupled engines and habitually overheated. (2) Oil and grease accumulated in the cramped nacelle and ignited on it. (3) The fuel injection pumps lagged on throttle-back and delivered excess fuel, which pooled unburned. (4) Fuel lines leaked frequently and the firewall protection was inadequate. (5) The oil pump was badly designed and let the oil foam at altitude, which starved the connecting-rod bearings; failed rods burst through the crankcase and punctured the oil tank, which was originally mounted hard against the firewall in the hottest part of the installation. (6) The cowling was so tight that none of this could be inspected, ventilated or reached. Crews called the aircraft the Luftwaffenfeuerzeug — the Luftwaffe lighter — and also the Reichsfeuerzeug. Göring's own recorded verdict in August 1942 was that the coupled unit was a misbegotten monster, idiotically welded together.
- What fixed it
- The DB 610 installation package from the A-3/R2 The oil tank was moved away from the firewall, the oil flow pipe was rerouted, a better oil cooler was fitted, the engine mountings were lengthened by 20 cm (8 in) to move the mass forward and open the bay, the exhaust system was completely redesigned, flame dampers were added for night work, and the engine was de-rated. This worked. By 1944 the A-5 was a broadly serviceable aeroplane, and its loss rate during Steinbock — under ten per cent, against a campaign average approaching seventy — made it the most survivable bomber the Luftwaffe put over England that winter. The fix arrived roughly three years after it was needed, which is the programme's epitaph rather than the engine's.
- Undercarriage
- Twin main units per wing: two separate legs and wheels on each side, one retracting inboard and one outboard into the wing, plus a retractable tailwheel An ingenious answer to a real problem. The wing was too thin and the aircraft too heavy for a single conventional main leg and wheel of adequate size, so Günter split the load across two narrower legs that each folded into the space available. It worked, it kept the wing clean, and it is one of several places where the He 177 shows first-class engineering thinking in the service of an unsound premise.
- Defensive fire control
- FDL 131Z remotely operated forward dorsal barbette, two 13 mm MG 131, laid from a hemispherical periscopic sighting station in the cockpit roof Germany and the United States were the only combatants to put genuinely remote-controlled powered gun mountings into service on bombers in this war, and the Greif was the Luftwaffe's main carrier of the idea. Günter's original scheme had three such barbettes worked from the cockpit; German remote-turret development could not keep pace, so the aft dorsal position and the tail reverted to manned mountings. The four-gun Hecklafette HL 131V tail quadmount, which would have been the heaviest defensive installation on any bomber of the war, never reached production.
- Radio, radar and bombing systems
- FuG 10 and FuG 16 radio, PeilG 6 direction finder, Lotfe 7D bombsight; FuG 200 Hohentwiel search radar on maritime aircraft; FuG 203 Kehl transmitter for guided weapons The Kehl transmitter and the FuG 230 Straßburg receiver in the weapon formed the manual command-to-line-of-sight link that made the Hs 293 and the Fritz X work. It was also the system's weakness: a Kehl set recovered from a He 177 that crashed on Corsica gave the Allies what they needed to build effective jammers, and from April 1944 the guided-weapon campaign was largely finished.
- Fire protection
- Firewalls, an extinguisher system, and after 1943 a substantially revised nacelle layout Worth recording that Heinkel and Daimler-Benz did not ignore the problem; they worked at it continuously and in the end largely solved it. What no amount of engineering could recover was the two years in which the type was unusable, the aircrew killed proving it, and the confidence of a Luftwaffe leadership that had by then decided the Greif was a joke.
07The He 177 Greif's operating costs: why no cost-per-hour figure exists today+
Unlike post-war jets, wartime German aircraft were not costed in a way that translates into a modern cost-per-flight-hour number, and reliable programme accounting for the He 177 has not survived in any comparable form. Reichsmark unit prices quoted for other Luftwaffe types are of limited use and are not consistently recorded for the Greif.
More fundamentally, there is no He 177 flying anywhere in the world, and no complete airframe exists to restore. That means there is quite literally no operator, no maintenance programme and no fuel bill to measure — so any "cost per hour" figure would be fiction. We record it honestly here as not applicable. If you want to know what flying a genuine historic military jet actually costs today, MiGFlug's live pricing is the place to look.
08He 177 numbers built and losses: how many Greifs were made, and how many were wasted+
Production totals for the He 177 are usually given as roughly 1,169 aircraft across all variants, though sources differ (figures in the ~1,137–1,169 range are common). That represents an enormous diversion of German industrial capacity into an aircraft that, for much of its career, could not be used to full effect.
A striking share of that output was effectively wasted. Chronic engine unreliability grounded aircraft for maintenance; the training burden of the complex machine kept crews and airframes out of action; and from 1944 the collapse of Germany's aviation-fuel supply left whole units unable to fly. Many He 177s were destroyed on the ground, dispersed and abandoned, or captured intact and unused at war's end — a bomber built in the hundreds that flew relatively few effective missions.
Armament & payload
The He 177 was the only aircraft Germany had that could carry a guided missile to the middle of the Atlantic, and it arrived after the Atlantic had been lost
As a bomb carrier the Greif was ordinary. It could lift a great deal on paper — up to 7,000 kg internally — and in practice it flew Eastern Front sorties with four SC 250s, because fuel, altitude and the wish not to run the DB 610s hard mattered more than tonnage. Its defensive battery, one 7.92 mm MG 81, three 13 mm MG 131 and two 20 mm MG 151/20, was heavier in calibre than any RAF heavy bomber's eight rifle-calibre Brownings and was disposed intelligently, with a remotely worked dorsal barbette that the British and Americans could not match in 1943. None of that is why the aircraft matters.
What made the He 177 historically significant is that it was one of only three types — with the Do 217 and the Fw 200 — ever to launch the Henschel Hs 293 in anger, and the only one of the three with the range and the load to do it deep into the Atlantic. The Hs 293 was a rocket-boosted glide bomb steered by an operator with a joystick watching flares on its tail; it was the first guided missile in history to sink a ship in combat, and in He 177 hands it did the single most consequential thing the type ever achieved. On 26 November 1943, off the Algerian coast, an Hs 293 launched by a He 177 of II./KG 40 struck the troopship HMT Rohna. Over a thousand American soldiers died. It remains the heaviest loss of United States troops at sea in the nation's history, and almost nobody has heard of it.
Against that stands the arithmetic. The stand-off campaign lasted roughly nine months. Allied jamming of the Kehl-Straßburg link — built partly from a transmitter recovered off a crashed He 177 on Corsica — had largely defeated it by April 1944. Fits varied enormously by mark, R-number, unit and month, and the sub-variant designations in German records are applied inconsistently; a 1943 A-3 with a 75 mm gun in the gondola, a 1944 A-5 with two Hs 293 and Hohentwiel radar, and an A-5 Großzerstörer with thirty-three rocket tubes in its fuselage were three different aircraft wearing one designation.
Gun
- Nose: one 7.92 mm MG 81 machine gun on a flexible mounting in the glazing, worked by the bomb-aimer — a token weapon, and known to be one
- Forward dorsal: FDL 131Z remotely operated barbette with two 13 mm MG 131, laid from a periscopic sighting dome in the cockpit roof. The most advanced defensive installation on any bomber the Luftwaffe flew operationally
- Aft dorsal: one manned 13 mm MG 131 in a hand-worked turret — the position Günter had intended to be a second remote barbette, reverted because German remote-turret development could not keep up
- Ventral Bola gondola: one 20 mm MG 151/20 forward and one 13 mm MG 131 aft, covering the belly and the shallow-astern quarter
- Tail: one 20 mm MG 151/20. The four-gun HL 131V quadmount that would have replaced it never entered production Six to eight guns of three calibres, in five positions, on an aircraft with six men aboard. The calibre mix was better than the RAF's and the coverage was thoughtful, but the Greif still had to be defended by a crew who were mostly also flying, navigating and guiding a missile.
Air-to-air
- No guided air-to-air weapon ever entered service on the type. The Hs 298 and the Ruhrstahl X-4 were trialled from Ju 88s and Fw 190s, not from the Greif
- The He 177 was nonetheless repeatedly recast as a bomber-destroyer, because the RLM could not stop redefining what it was for. The A-1/U2 Zerstörer carried a pair of 30 mm MK 101 cannon for attacking formations from outside defensive range
- The A-5 Großzerstörer of January 1944 took the idea to its conclusion: thirty-three 21 cm rocket tubes mounted obliquely in the fuselage, to be fired upward into an American daylight box. Five aircraft were converted
- None of it worked. A thirty-tonne bomber with a 630 ft/min climb is not an interceptor, and by 1944 the escorting P-51 had made the whole class of heavy Zerstörer obsolete
- These conversions are worth listing precisely because they are symptoms. Every month the Greif spent being redesigned as a dive bomber, a torpedo aircraft, an anti-tank platform or a bomber-destroyer was a month it did not spend becoming a reliable strategic bomber, which is the only thing Germany actually needed it to be.
Air-to-surface guided
- Two Henschel Hs 293 on underwing racks, one beneath each inner wing. Launch weight about 1,045 kg with a 295 kg warhead, boosted by a Walter or BMW rocket motor of roughly 590 kgf for ten seconds, then gliding; range up to about 8.5 km from altitude
- Guidance was manual command to line of sight: the operator flew the weapon onto the target with a joystick over the FuG 203 Kehl transmitter and the FuG 230 Straßburg receiver, watching five coloured flares on its tail. The mother aircraft had to fly straight and in sight of the target throughout, which made a heavy bomber into a very large, very slow observation post
- Two Hs 294, a larger anti-ship development designed to enter the water short of the hull and run on to strike below the waterline, were cleared for carriage; combat use was marginal
- Two FX 1400 Fritz X armour-piercing guided bombs of 1,362 kg were within the aircraft's clearance. Operationally the Fritz X was a Do 217 K-2 weapon of III./KG 100, and firm attributions of Fritz X releases to He 177s are thin
- This card is the type's genuine claim on history, and the honest verdict is mixed. The Hs 293 damaged or sank at least twenty-five ships across all launch platforms through 1944, and the He 177 was the platform with the reach. But individual sinkings are frequently impossible to attribute between He 177 and Do 217 launches, and Allied jamming closed the window within months of it opening.
Bombs
- Up to 7,000 kg (15,430 lb) internally in the fullest fits, plus up to 2,500 kg (5,510 lb) on underwing racks — not additive at any useful radius
- Internal fits ran from 48 × SC 50 through mixed loads of SC 250 and SC 500 general-purpose bombs up to 2 × SC 2500 Max, the largest German bomb in general service
- Typical Eastern Front load, summer 1944: four SC 250 or two SC 500, carried by wedges of about thirty aircraft against Soviet rail targets at 6,000 m
- Steinbock loads over England were mixed high-explosive and incendiary containers, delivered from a shallow high-speed dive begun at altitude and held through the target
- Note the gap between 7,000 kg and 1,000 kg. The Greif could lift a great deal and habitually did not, because the fuel to reach anything worth bombing, the altitude to survive, and the margin to keep the DB 610s below the settings that set them alight all came out of the same budget.
Rockets
- Thirty-three 21 cm Wfr.Gr. 21 spin-stabilised rocket mortars in oblique fuselage tubes on the five A-5 Großzerstörer conversions of January 1944, intended to be salvoed upward into USAAF formations
- The Wfr.Gr. 21 was an adapted army Nebelwerfer round of about 112 kg with a 40 kg warhead and a time fuze — a formation-breaking weapon rather than an aimed one
- No unguided air-to-ground rocket armament was ever standard on the type. The Greif attacked ground targets with bombs, with guided missiles, or in a handful of cases with a very large gun
- The oblique-tube installation is a fair index of how far the programme had drifted: a strategic bomber designed in 1938 to reach the Urals, being fitted in 1944 with adapted infantry rocket launchers to shoot at aeroplanes
- Numbers converted are small and the sub-variant records are inconsistent; five is the figure most often given and none of these aircraft achieved anything.
Pods & other stores
- Two LT 50 aerial torpedoes on underwing racks. The Greif was cleared as a torpedo bomber, another role added by the RLM to a design already carrying too many
- One 75 mm BK 7,5 cannon — the anti-tank PaK 40 adapted for air use, with an autoloader — in the ventral gondola of the A-3/R5, sometimes called the Stalingradtyp, for anti-armour and anti-shipping work. Built in very small numbers and effectively unused
- FuG 200 Hohentwiel search radar in the nose of maritime aircraft, with its distinctive dipole array; FuG 203 Kehl guidance transmitter; flame-damped exhausts for night operations
- Auxiliary fuel tanks in the bomb bay for the very long Atlantic missile sorties, and a camera fit for the long-range reconnaissance role flown by a handful of aircraft
- One store the He 177 never carried, and this bears saying plainly: it was never armed with the German nuclear or chemical weapons of popular legend, and the persistent claim that it was earmarked as a strategic delivery vehicle for either has no documentary basis.
Three typical loadouts
- Atlantic stand-off strike, II./KG 40, late 1943
- Two Hs 293 on the inner underwing racks, FuG 200 Hohentwiel search radar, FuG 203 Kehl transmitter, auxiliary fuel in the bay, full defensive ammunition, seven men aboard including a dedicated missile operator. Transit at low level, climb to release altitude on contact, run in straight and level in visual range of the convoy, launch at six to eight kilometres, then fly the weapon by joystick to impact while the ship's escorts do everything they can to make that impossible.
- Eastern Front area attack, KG 1 "Hindenburg", July 1944
- Four SC 250 or two SC 500 internally, no external stores, full internal fuel, cruise at 6,000 to 7,000 m in a wedge of about thirty aircraft. This was the Greif used as designed — fast, high and out of reach of a Soviet fighter force built for low-level interception — and it worked. Some eighty-seven aircraft went against rail targets in the Velikiye Luki area in a single operation. It was also, by then, entirely beside the point.
- Night raid on London, I./KG 100, Operation Steinbock, February 1944
- Mixed SC 1000 high-explosive and incendiary containers, flame-damped exhausts, Düppel chaff. Cross the Channel low and in loose formation, climb late to spare the engines, then a shallow high-speed dive begun above the target and held beyond it. On the night of 13/14 February, thirteen were despatched, one aborted with a tyre, eight turned back with overheating engines, and four bombed. That is the aircraft and the campaign in one sentence.
Sourcing caveat: German sub-variant designations of the R- and U-series are applied inconsistently in surviving records and in the post-war literature, and figures for the number of aircraft converted to any given fit should be treated as approximate. Guided-weapon attributions between He 177 and Do 217 launches are frequently uncertain in Allied damage reports, and claims for individual ships sunk by the Greif specifically should be read with that in mind. The HMT Rohna attribution is among the better attested.
Variants
The He 177's production list is short, its project list is long, and the aircraft that would have worked never left the drawing office
The Greif's variant history divides cleanly in two. On one side are the A-series aircraft actually built — roughly 1,169 airframes, of which more than eight hundred were A-5s, most of them assembled by Arado at Warnemünde rather than by Heinkel — distinguished from one another mostly by fuselage length, engine installation and progressive attempts to stop the nacelles catching fire. On the other side is a long queue of four-engined derivatives, all of them plainly better aircraft, none of which was allowed to become real in time.
That queue is the heart of the indictment. Ernst Heinkel had proposed a four-engined version as early as 1938, before the coupled installation had killed anybody. The RLM refused. The He 177 B, with four separate DB 603s, flew in December 1943 and worked. The He 274, with four turbocharged DB 603s and a 44-metre wing, was a genuinely capable high-altitude bomber and was so nearly finished that the French completed it after the war and flew it as a research aircraft into the 1950s. The He 277 got as far as detailed design. Not one of them reached a squadron.
One myth needs killing here. It is routinely written that the designation He 177 B was invented purely as a cover name, to sneak a four-engined bomber past a Göring who had forbidden one. The documentary record does not support it. By late summer 1943 Heinkel and the RLM were treating the He 177 B as an approved DB 603-powered development in its own right, while the He 277 pursued a separate and more radical path around BMW 801E radials; and Göring's own recorded remarks of 1942 show him furious at the coupled engines and receptive to four separate ones. The truth is duller and worse: nobody forbade the sensible aircraft. It simply lost, for years, to institutional inertia and to a production line that could not be stopped without admitting the whole programme had been a mistake.
- He 177 V1 to V8 (1939–1941, 8 built)
- Prototypes. V1 first flew at Rechlin on 19 November 1939 in the hands of Carl Francke and landed after about twelve minutes with the engines overheating — a complete summary of the next four years delivered on day one. Several of the eight were lost in testing, including to structural failure during the dive trials demanded by the RLM.
- He 177 A-0 (1941–42, 35 built)
- Pre-production. First aircraft with the definitive fully glazed stepless "Cabin 3" nose, which gave the crew a superb view and became the Luftwaffe house style. Used almost entirely for trials and training; DB 606 powered.
- He 177 A-1 (1942, 130 built)
- First production series, short fuselage, DB 606. Sub-variants R1 to R4 varied the armament. The A-1/U2 Zerstörer carried two 30 mm MK 101 cannon. Effectively unusable as a bomber; the type's first operational sorties, including the Stalingrad supply and attack missions of I./KG 50 in January 1943, were flown on these and cost seven aircraft to fire without a shot fired at them.
- He 177 A-3 (1942–43, 170 built)
- Fuselage lengthened by 1.60 m to cure the yaw and pitch instability. From the A-3/R2 the DB 610 replaced the DB 606 together with the full revised nacelle package — relocated oil tank, redesigned exhaust, mountings lengthened 20 cm, de-rated power — which is the point at which the fire problem began genuinely to recede. The A-3/R5 Stalingradtyp mounted a 75 mm BK 7,5 in the gondola. A-3s flew Operation Steinbock.
- He 177 A-5 (1943–44, 826 built)
- The definitive Greif and the great majority of all production, built largely by Arado. Strengthened wing, revised and shortened engine mountings, external racks for guided weapons and torpedoes, and the missile-carrier fit that gave the type its one real operational identity. Sub-variants R1 to R8 covered armament and equipment; the R6 restored a full-length bomb bay and the R8 was to have carried the HL 131V tail quadmount. The A-5 Großzerstörer, five converted in January 1944, carried thirty-three 21 cm rocket tubes.
- He 177 A-6 and A-7 (1944, none completed)
- Projected long-range and high-altitude developments of the A-5 with revised armament and, on the A-7, an extended wing. Neither was completed before the type was abandoned.
- He 177 B / He 177 V101 to V104 (1943–44, four ordered, three built)
- The obvious aeroplane, five years late: four separate Daimler-Benz DB 603 engines in individual nacelles, on an otherwise recognisable He 177 airframe, with a revised tail. V102 first flew on 20 December 1943. V103 and V104 were destroyed on the ground by Allied bombing in July 1944 and the programme died with them. Not a cover name for the He 277, whatever the standard account says.
- He 274 (1943–47, two airframes)
- High-altitude four-engined derivative descended from the 1941 "He 177 H" studies, built by Farman at Suresnes: four DB 603A with DVL TK 11 turbochargers, wingspan stretched to 44.19 m (145 ft), pressurised cabin, designed to work at altitudes where interception was impractical. Incomplete at the liberation of France. The French finished both, flew the first as the AAS 01A on 27 December 1947, used them as mother ships for launching experimental jet and rocket aircraft, and broke them up in late 1953.
- He 277 (1943–44, none built)
- A more radical four-engined design around BMW 801E radials, projected at 570 km/h and, in Amerikabomber configuration, ranges beyond 11,000 km. It competed against the Me 264, Ju 390 and Ta 400 for the trans-Atlantic role and lost ground when the RLM began favouring six-engined layouts. Work was ordered stopped in April 1944 and the components scrapped. No prototype airframe was ever completed.
- Licence production and exports (none)
- There were none. No He 177 was exported, none was built under licence abroad, and no foreign air arm operated the type. The nearest thing to licence manufacture was domestic sub-contracting: Heinkel built at Oranienburg, and Arado at Warnemünde produced most of the A-5s, which is why so many surviving works numbers trace to a firm whose name is not on the aeroplane.
Survivors: none, and the phrasing matters. Not one complete or substantially complete He 177 airframe exists anywhere in the world. The aircraft that survived the war in Allied hands — the Farnborough machine Eric Brown flew, the examples taken to the United States, the airframes captured on French and German airfields — were all reduced to scrap by the end of the 1950s; one A-5, Werknummer 550 256, was taken to the United States and is believed to lie buried beneath what is now Chicago O'Hare International Airport. What remains is excavated wreckage from crash sites, a small number of DB 606 and DB 610 power systems in museum and private collections, and photographs. No reproduction has ever been built, and given that the type's defining component was a coupled engine nobody has any reason to recreate, none is likely. Roughly 1,169 aircraft were built and not one of them is left; very few types produced in four figures have vanished as completely. Production totals themselves vary between about 1,137 and 1,169 in the literature depending on whether prototypes, conversions and airframes completed but never accepted are counted; the higher figure is the one most often cited.
The He 177 versus the Allied heavy bombers
Germany fielded exactly one operational heavy bomber. The Allies fielded several, in their thousands. The comparison shows both how capable the Greif was on paper and how isolated it was as a type. Figures are representative and rounded; wartime sources vary.
| Aircraft | Origin | Engines | Max speed | Bomb load | Built |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Heinkel He 177 A-5 | Germany | 4 (coupled, 2 props) | ~565 km/h | up to ~7,000 kg | ~1,169 |
| Avro Lancaster | UK | 4 | ~450 km/h | up to ~6,350 kg | ~7,377 |
| Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress | USA | 4 | ~460 km/h | ~2,000–3,600 kg | ~12,731 |
| Consolidated B-24 Liberator | USA | 4 | ~490 km/h | ~3,600 kg | ~18,480 |
The Greif was fast and could, in theory, lift a very heavy load a long way. What it could not do was be built in the numbers, or flown with the reliability, that made the Allied heavies decisive. Where Britain and America turned out tens of thousands of dependable four-engine bombers, Germany produced barely more than a thousand troublesome ones — and could rarely fuel or maintain even those.
The Heinkel He 177 Greif: a development and service timeline
Requirement issued
The RLM issues the "Bomber A" specification for a long-range heavy bomber; Heinkel receives the contract that becomes the He 177.
Dive-bombing demanded
Ernst Udet's technical office insists the heavy bomber be capable of medium-angle dive-bombing, forcing structural strengthening and delay.
First flight
The He 177 V1 prototype flies on 19 November 1939. Overheating and engine trouble appear almost immediately and dog the test programme.
Crashes and fires
Prototype and early aircraft are lost to structural failures and engine fires; the coupled DB 606 installation earns its deadly reputation.
Into service
The Greif reaches operational units. Early A-1/A-3 aircraft remain troublesome; some are pressed into the Stalingrad airlift as heavy transports.
Maritime strike and the A-5
KG 40 uses He 177s to launch Hs 293 guided missiles against Allied convoys. The improved A-5 enters production with a safer engine installation.
The "Baby Blitz"
He 177s take part in Operation Steinbock, the night raids on Britain, and in massed Eastern Front bomber raids — but fuel shortages soon bite.
Grounded and abandoned
With aviation fuel exhausted, most He 177s are grounded, dispersed or destroyed. Many are captured intact and unused as the war ends.
No survivor
Every complete He 177 was eventually scrapped. Only fragments and wreck-site relics remain — the Greif is one of WWII's great "no survivor" types.
The He 177 Greif in the words of those who flew and fought it
Twelve short stories that capture the Greif's strange, troubled career — from its burning engines to its guided-missile strikes. Expand each card to read more.
"The Luftwaffe's cigarette lighter"
Ground crews had a black-humoured name for the Greif. So many caught fire that they called it the "Luftwaffenfeuerzeug."
Read more
The prototype that overheated on day one
When the He 177 V1 first flew in November 1939, engine temperatures climbed alarmingly and the flight was cut short.
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A heavy bomber turned reluctant freighter
During the Stalingrad airlift, some He 177s were pressed into service hauling supplies rather than bombs.
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Launching the Hs 293 at Allied convoys
In its most effective role, the He 177 stood off from convoys and fired radio-guided Hs 293 missiles.
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High-speed dives over London
In Operation Steinbock, He 177 crews often dived at speed across southern England to release their bombs and escape.
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Four engines hiding behind two propellers
To visitors, the He 177 looked like a twin. In fact each propeller was driven by two coupled V12s.
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The A-5: safer, but too late
The definitive He 177 A-5 addressed many of the fire risks — arriving as Germany was already losing the air war.
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The dive-bombing demand no one could meet
Ordering a 30-tonne bomber to dive-bomb was, engineers knew, close to impossible — but the RLM insisted.
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Destroyed without ever fighting
By late 1944 many He 177s sat useless on their airfields, grounded for want of fuel.
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Flown and tested by the Allies
After the war, captured He 177s were evaluated by British and American teams.
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Germany's only operational heavy bomber
For all its faults, the He 177 was the only German heavy bomber to reach real operational service.
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Why the Greif has no survivor
Alone among the war's major bombers, no complete He 177 exists anywhere today.
Read more
Heinkel He 177 Greif photographs
Genuine wartime and archival images of the Greif. Click any photo to enlarge. All images via Wikimedia Commons — credits below each frame.
Watch: the He 177 Greif, the "flaming coffin"
"The Flaming Coffin – Heinkel He 177 Greif" by Dark Skies (695k subscribers) — 1.1 million views. An accessible documentary on the Greif's troubled engines and career. Verified on YouTube.
Where the Heinkel He 177 flew — origin, theatres and survivors
The Greif was a German aircraft used almost exclusively by the Luftwaffe. This map shows its country of origin, the wartime theatres where it operated, the nations that captured and evaluated it after the war — and, tellingly, an empty "Surviving airframes" category, because no complete He 177 exists anywhere today. Hover (or tap) a country for detail.
The He 177 Greif by the numbers
The Heinkel He 177 Greif: six deeper questions
09The He 177 and the Hs 293: how the Greif became a guided-missile bomber+
The most genuinely advanced thing the He 177 did was carry and launch the Henschel Hs 293, one of the first operational air-launched guided anti-ship missiles. The Hs 293 was a small rocket-boosted glide bomb with a radio-command guidance link: after release, a bombardier in the parent aircraft steered it onto a ship by watching a flare in its tail and correcting with a joystick.
For a maritime-strike bomber this was a leap forward. It let the He 177 attack from outside the range of a convoy's close-in defences, standing off while the missile did the dangerous work. KG 40, flying from occupied France, used He 177s in exactly this role against Atlantic convoys, and He 177s also carried the heavier, armour-piercing Fritz X (FX 1400) against harder targets. The concept pointed directly at the anti-ship missiles that dominate naval warfare today — but in 1943–44 it was undercut by the Greif's unreliability, by Allied electronic countermeasures against the radio link, and by Germany's inability to sustain the effort. When it did work, the effect could be dramatic — Allied sailors dreaded the sight of a distant bomber loitering just out of gun range — but the moments of success were too few and too costly to change the course of the war at sea.
10Operation Steinbock: the He 177 in Germany's last blitz on Britain+
By early 1944 the Luftwaffe mounted one final concentrated bombing campaign against Britain, code-named Operation Steinbock and nicknamed the "Baby Blitz" by Londoners who remembered the far heavier raids of 1940–41. The He 177 was one of the aircraft committed to it.
Greif crews typically approached at altitude and then made shallow, high-speed diving runs across their targets to cut the time spent in the killing zone of British night-fighters and anti-aircraft guns. The campaign achieved little of strategic value: bomb loads were often dropped inaccurately, losses to the increasingly effective RAF night defences were heavy, and the effort drained aircraft and crews Germany could not spare. For the He 177 it was a rare chance to act as the strategic bomber it had been designed to be — and a demonstration of how little difference even that could now make.
11The He 177 on the Eastern Front: bomber, tank-buster and desperate transport+
On the Eastern Front the Greif was used in a jumble of roles that reflected the Luftwaffe's shifting fortunes. Early in its service, a handful were drawn into the Stalingrad airlift of the winter of 1942–43, pressed into service as heavy freighters to supply the encircled Sixth Army — a task for which the temperamental bomber was poorly suited and in which it achieved little.
Later, He 177 units flew conventional bombing raids, including rare massed heavy-bomber attacks on Soviet rail junctions and industrial targets in 1944, and some aircraft were fitted with heavy anti-tank cannon for ground attack. As always, two forces worked against the Greif: its own mechanical fragility, and the deepening fuel crisis that from mid-1944 left much of the fleet grounded. The Eastern Front showed both the aircraft's flexibility and the futility of deploying a scarce, unreliable heavy bomber piecemeal across an enormous front.
12The He 277 and He 274: the four-engine Greifs that came too late+
Heinkel's engineers understood the real cure for the He 177's troubles from early on: replace the coupled engines with four separate, conventional ones. This logic led to the He 277 (essentially a four-propeller Greif) and the high-altitude He 274, along with a series of related proposals designated He 177 B and beyond.
On paper these promised the reliability the Greif lacked. In practice they were repeatedly delayed by official indecision — the air ministry blew hot and cold on whether it even wanted a strategic bomber — and then overtaken by events. By the time a four-engine derivative could have entered production, Germany had neither the fuel, the raw materials, the factory capacity nor the time to build one in numbers. Only a handful of prototypes flew. The coupled-engine A-5 remained the only He 177 to see real service, and the "obvious fix" never reached the front.
13Flying the Greif: what it was like for the six-man crew+
A healthy He 177 was, by the accounts of those who flew it, a surprisingly pleasant aircraft — fast, reasonably manoeuvrable for its size, and well equipped. The catch was the word "healthy." Crews had to nurse the coupled engines carefully, avoiding the prolonged high-power settings that invited fires, and they kept a constant watch on the nacelles for the first wisp of smoke.
The six-man crew — pilot, co-pilot, and gunners/operators manning the nose, dorsal, ventral and tail positions, some of them remotely sighted — worked a complex machine that demanded far more training than a simple medium bomber. That training burden, combined with poor serviceability, meant that even when aircraft were available, fully worked-up crews often were not. The Greif asked a great deal of the men who flew it, and gave back a nagging awareness that the aircraft might betray them before the enemy did.
14Why no He 177 survives: the story of a bomber with no museum+
Almost every major bomber of the Second World War has at least one preserved survivor — a Lancaster, a B-17, a B-24, even the Greif's smaller stablemate the He 111 (in the form of Spanish-built airframes). The He 177 is the great exception. Not one complete example exists anywhere in the world.
The reasons are a mix of history and reputation. Many He 177s were destroyed in the war or scrapped in its immediate aftermath; the examples captured and evaluated by the Allies were tested and then broken up rather than kept, at a time when a defeated enemy's troublesome bomber had little appeal as a museum piece. By the time historic preservation became a priority, the airframes were long gone. Today only fragments and crash-site relics remain, which is why the Greif is so often called a "ghost" aircraft — one you can study in photographs, drawings and wreckage, but never walk around intact. Occasionally, recovered components — a propeller boss, a section of engine, a data plate — surface in private collections or specialist museums, and enthusiasts have long dreamed of one day assembling enough relics to reconstruct a representative airframe. For now, though, the Greif remains the great absentee of Second World War bomber preservation.
Heinkel He 177 Greif: your questions answered
Can I fly in a Heinkel He 177?
No. Not a single complete Heinkel He 177 survives anywhere in the world — the type is one of WWII's notable "no complete survivor" aircraft, so there is no airworthy, static or bookable He 177 of any kind. MiGFlug does not offer He 177 flights, and no one else can either.
You can, however, fly in several genuine historic military jets today. MiGFlug arranges real flights in aircraft such as the L-39 Albatros, Hawker Hunter, MiG-15, de Havilland Vampire and others. See what is currently bookable at migflug.com/flights-prices.
Why did the He 177 keep catching fire?
To cut drag, Heinkel coupled two engines together to drive each propeller (the DB 606, later DB 610). This crammed two hot V12s into one tight nacelle where oil and fuel lines ran through a poorly ventilated space, oil could pool and be sprayed onto hot exhausts, and bearings were overstressed. In-flight fires were common enough to earn the aircraft nicknames such as the "Luftwaffe's cigarette lighter" and "flaming coffin." The later A-5 was much safer, but the reputation stuck.
Why did a four-engine bomber have only two propellers?
Because the four engines were paired. Each of the He 177's two propellers was driven by a "power system" formed from two Daimler-Benz V12 engines coupled side by side. The goal was four-engine power with the low drag of a twin — an elegant idea that turned into a persistent reliability and fire problem.
Did the RLM really order a heavy bomber to dive-bomb?
Yes. In the late 1930s the technical office under Ernst Udet insisted the He 177 be able to perform medium-angle dive-bombing — a tactic suited to the small Ju 87 Stuka, not a 30-tonne bomber. Meeting the demand forced heavy structural strengthening that added weight and delay. It was eventually dropped as impractical, but only after it had compromised the design.
What was the He 177 used for in combat?
Three main roles. It flew night raids on Britain during the early-1944 "Baby Blitz" (Operation Steinbock); it operated as a bomber and improvised transport on the Eastern Front, including the Stalingrad airlift; and — most effectively — it launched Hs 293 radio-guided anti-ship missiles at Allied convoys from bases in occupied France and against shipping in the Mediterranean. Unreliability and fuel shortages limited its overall impact.
How many He 177s were built and how fast was it?
Roughly 1,169 were built across all variants, though sources vary (about 1,137–1,169). The definitive A-5 had a top speed commonly cited at around 565 km/h (351 mph) at altitude — some references give lower figures nearer 488 km/h with a full load — a range of roughly 5,500 km, a crew of six, and a maximum weapon load of up to about 7,000 kg.
Are there any surviving He 177s in museums?
No complete example survives. Unlike the Lancaster, B-17 or He 111, every He 177 was eventually scrapped — including the aircraft captured and evaluated by the Allies after the war. Only fragments and crash-site relics remain, which makes the Greif a "ghost" type studied from photographs, drawings and wreckage rather than a preserved airframe.
What does "Greif" mean, and why was it nicknamed a lighter?
"Greif" is German for "Griffin," the mythical eagle-lion — a suitably fierce name for a heavy bomber. In service, though, crews coined far less flattering names because of the aircraft's frequent engine fires: "Luftwaffenfeuerzeug" (the Luftwaffe's cigarette lighter), "Reichsfeuerzeug" (the Reich's lighter) and the "flaming coffin." The gap between the official name and the crews' nicknames says almost everything about the Greif's reputation.
Was the He 177 Germany's only heavy bomber?
It was the only German heavy bomber to reach real operational service in the Second World War. Earlier four-engine designs such as the Dornier Do 19 and Junkers Ju 89 "Ural bombers" were cancelled in the 1930s, and later four-engine derivatives like the He 277 never entered meaningful production. So while Germany studied and prototyped several heavy bombers, the He 177 was the one it actually fielded — which is a large part of why its shortcomings mattered so much.
How does the He 177 compare to the Fw 200 Condor?
Both were long-range German aircraft used against Atlantic shipping, but they were very different machines. The Focke-Wulf Fw 200 Condor was a converted airliner — elegant but structurally weak — that shadowed and bombed convoys. The He 177 was a purpose-built heavy bomber, much faster and better armed, and could launch Hs 293 guided missiles. On paper the Greif was the far more formidable maritime striker; in practice its unreliability meant the older Condor often did more actual damage.
Was the Heinkel He 177 a failure — or a good aircraft ruined by bad decisions?
It is tempting to file the He 177 under "German wonder-weapon that didn't work," but that misses the more interesting truth. The Greif was not a bad design. Aerodynamically it was ahead of its Allied contemporaries; it was faster than a Lancaster or a B-17, carried a heavier maximum load, and pioneered stand-off guided-missile attack years before anyone else made it work. In the hands of a well-trained crew, a healthy A-5 was a genuinely capable and even pleasant aircraft to fly.
What ruined it was a chain of decisions taken before a single bolt was cut. The insistence on burying four engines behind two propellers, to shave drag, created a fire-prone powerplant that no amount of later engineering could fully tame. The demand that a 30-tonne bomber also dive-bomb loaded the airframe with weight and delay for a capability it never needed. And the air ministry’s chronic indecision about whether Germany even wanted a strategic bomber meant the obvious cure — four separate engines, as in the He 277 — was never pursued in time. Layered on top came the strategic realities that doomed the whole Luftwaffe: too few aircraft, too little fuel, too many fronts.
The result is one of aviation history’s great "what ifs." Give the He 177 four conventional engines from the start, drop the dive-bombing nonsense, build it in quantity a year earlier, and Germany might have had a heavy bomber worth the name. Instead it got a brilliant airframe strapped to a self-inflicted flaw, built in the hundreds, and largely wasted. That is why the Greif fascinates: not because it was hopeless, but because it was so nearly great.
No Greif survives. But you can strap into a real fighter jet.
The He 177 exists only in photographs today. If you want the genuine experience of flying in a historic military aircraft — the g-forces, the noise, the view from a fighter cockpit — MiGFlug makes it real. Here are some of the aircraft you can actually book.