Every quality that made the Komet astonishing also made it useless as a weapon. The rocket that gave it an unmatched climb also drained in minutes, tying it to the airfield it defended. The light, tailless airframe that let it reach 1,000 km/h left no room for the fuel a longer mission needed. And the hypergolic propellants that made the rocket so powerful made the whole aircraft a bomb on the ground.

The future of high-speed flight belonged not to the rocket but to the jet — the Me 262 could stay up for half an hour and fight on something like equal terms. Rocket research continued after the war, but no rocket-powered fighter ever entered service again. The Komet was a magnificent, terrifying blind alley.

The Walter motor burned two hypergolic propellants — chemicals that ignite the instant they meet, needing no spark. T-Stoff was concentrated hydrogen peroxide, a violent oxidiser; C-Stoff was a mix of hydrazine hydrate and methanol. Fed together into the combustion chamber they produced a controllable, throttleable thrust of up to about 1,700 kg — extraordinary for 1944.

They were also nightmarish. T-Stoff was corrosive enough to attack skin, cloth and organic tissue; the two fluids had to be trucked and stored entirely separately, because any accidental mixing could explode. Ground crews wore protective suits, aircraft blew up on the tarmac, and pilots died from leaks and fires. The test pilot Josef Pöhs was killed in 1943 in a takeoff accident compounded by T-Stoff exposure. The rocket gave the Komet its magic — and much of its menace.

With no undercarriage to save weight, the Komet used a two-wheeled dolly for takeoff, accelerating to around 320 km/h before lifting off and dropping the dolly. That was the easy part. Landing meant gliding back, unpowered, and setting down on a sprung belly skid — often with unburned, volatile propellant still sloshing in the tanks, so that a hard arrival could ignite or explode.

Once stopped, the Komet was immobile, lying on its belly in the open, and had to be hauled clear by a purpose-built tractor, the Scheuch-Schlepper. Many pilots were injured in landing accidents; the recovery process left the aircraft — and the pilot — dangerously exposed on the airfield.

Around 370 Komets were built, but only one unit — Jagdgeschwader 400 — ever flew them in anger, and only a fraction were airborne at any time thanks to chronic shortages of the exotic propellants. Its confirmed tally is usually given as between nine and sixteen Allied aircraft, mostly heavy bombers, across roughly a year of operations.

Set against that are the Komets lost to accidents — takeoff and landing crashes, fuel fires and explosions — which outnumbered those lost to the enemy. One historian’s verdict was blunt: for all its speed, the Komet “did not warrant the effort put into the project.”

The Komet spawned a short-lived family. The Me 263 (originally the Junkers Ju 248) was a larger, longer-ranged redesign with retractable landing gear; it was completed but never flew under power, and its lineage was continued after the war by the Soviet Mikoyan-Gurevich I-270. Germany also shipped plans and an example to its ally Japan, which developed the Mitsubishi J8M Shūsui — whose prototype crashed on its first powered flight.

None entered service. The rocket fighter, for all its thrilling performance, had reached a dead end — outlived within months by the turbojet.