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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.