Dornier Do 17
The “Flying Pencil” — Germany’s slim, fast twin-engine bomber that helped open the Second World War in Spain, Poland and the Battle of Britain, then quietly disappeared so completely that only one substantially complete example survives.
The Dornier Do 17 “Flying Pencil”: the sleek bomber that started a war and then vanished
Few aircraft carry a nickname as vivid as the Dornier Do 17. German crews and their opponents alike called it the fliegender Bleistift — the “Flying Pencil” — for its extraordinarily slim, cigar-thin fuselage. Seen head-on it almost disappeared; seen from the side it looked like a drawing-office instrument given wings. That silhouette was not styling for its own sake. It was the visible signature of a design philosophy that briefly made the Do 17 one of the fastest bombers in the world, and then, just as quickly, left it behind.
The Do 17 grew out of the frantic, half-secret German rearmament of the early 1930s. It is often said that the aircraft began life as a fast mail-plane and six-passenger express transport offered to Deutsche Luft Hansa, and that the airline rejected it because the narrow fuselage was hopelessly impractical for paying passengers. There is real truth in that story — the early Dornier design genuinely was pitched as a high-speed civil “Schnellverkehrsflugzeug” — although the popular version, in which a finished airliner was forgotten in a hangar and then rediscovered as a bomber by accident, is embellished. What is not in doubt is that the slim, aerodynamically clean airframe was seized upon by the emerging Luftwaffe as the basis for a fast day bomber that could, in theory, outrun the fighters of the day.
It is worth pausing on how radical that slimness was. Most bombers of the early 1930s were slab-sided machines with deep fuselages built to swallow bombs, fuel and crew with room to spare. Dornier went the other way, wrapping the airframe as tightly as possible around its contents and betting everything on the speed that low drag would buy. It was a bold, coherent design philosophy — and, for a few short years, it worked spectacularly well, which is exactly what made the later reckoning so hard.
The first prototype, the Do 17 V1, took to the air in 1934. Early production bombers — the Do 17E — and their reconnaissance sisters, the Do 17F, entered Luftwaffe service from around 1937. That same year the type made its combat debut far from Germany, over the mountains and plains of Spain, where the Condor Legion flew it for Franco’s Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War. For a while the Do 17 looked untouchable: at the 1937 International Military Aircraft Competition held near Zürich, a specially prepared Dornier reportedly outpaced the fighters sent to intercept it, and Nazi propaganda gleefully christened it a “wonder bomber.”
Reality was more complicated. The definitive version, the Do 17Z, traded some of that raw speed for a deeper, glazed “beetle-eye” nose crew compartment that gathered all four airmen — pilot, bomb-aimer, radio operator and gunner — into one cramped, communal cockpit. Crews valued being close together under fire, but the Do 17Z’s virtues came at a cost: its bomb load was modest, around 1,000 kilograms, far less than the heavier bombers that were already on the drawing board. It was fast and pleasant to fly, but it could not carry much, and it could not carry it far.
When the Second World War opened, the Do 17 was everywhere the German war machine went — Poland in 1939, Norway, the Low Countries and France in 1940, then across the Channel for the Battle of Britain. There, flying alongside the Heinkel He 111 and the newer Junkers Ju 88, the “Flying Pencil” met the Hurricane and the Spitfire and paid a heavy price. Slow, lightly armed with hand-aimed machine guns, and carrying only a light bomb load, the Do 17Z was already obsolescent by the summer of 1940. The Luftwaffe knew it. Even as its crews pressed home some of the most famous raids of the battle, production had ended and the type was being replaced by the faster, harder-hitting Ju 88.
By the middle of the war the Do 17 had largely faded from the front line, lingering on in training, glider-towing, night-fighting conversions and second-line duties, and serving with a handful of export and allied air forces. It was so thoroughly used up and scrapped that for decades not a single complete example existed anywhere in the world — an astonishing fate for an aircraft once paraded as a symbol of German air power.
The wider tragedy of the Do 17 is the tragedy of the whole Luftwaffe bomber arm. Germany went to war in 1939 with a fleet of fast, elegant medium bombers designed for short, sharp campaigns of the kind that had worked in Spain and Poland. They were never meant for a long war of attrition against a well-organised enemy with radar, a disciplined fighter force and deep reserves. The Do 17 embodied that mismatch perfectly: it was a beautiful answer to the wrong question. Its crews — brave, highly trained and often very young — paid for the gap between doctrine and reality over Kent and Sussex in 1940.
And yet the Flying Pencil refuses to be forgotten. Its distinctive shape, its evocative nickname, its starring role in the most famous air battle in history, and the extraordinary story of the one airframe pulled dripping from the English Channel have all kept it alive in memory long after the aircraft themselves turned to scrap and salt-scoured aluminium. This page tells that whole story — the design, the myths, the campaigns, the specifications, the people, and the wreck that became the last of its kind.
How the Dornier Do 17 was built: speed, slimness and a crew packed nose-to-tail
Three design decisions defined the Do 17 — and explain both why it began the war as a star and why it ended it as an also-ran.
The Do 17 is best understood not as a bad aircraft but as a superb answer to a question the war stopped asking. Everything about it — the slim fuselage, the twin engines, the tightly grouped crew — flowed logically from one mid-1930s assumption: that a bomber fast enough and clean enough could reach its target and return before the defenders could organise. For a few years, in Spain and Poland and France, that assumption held, and the Dornier looked like the future of air warfare.
When the assumption collapsed over Britain in 1940 — smashed by radar, ground control and modern fighters — the very features that had made the Do 17 excellent became the features that doomed it. That is the tension running through its whole design story, and it is worth keeping in mind as you read the three defining choices below.
The pencil fuselage
Dornier built the Do 17 around an unusually narrow, aerodynamically clean fuselage that minimised drag and frontal area. Early on it made the bomber genuinely fast — fast enough to embarrass contemporary fighters — but it also strictly limited internal volume, capping both the bomb load and the fuel the aircraft could carry. Every advantage the shape gave in 1937 became a liability once the war demanded payload and range the airframe could never provide.
Twin engines, many hearts
Over its life the Do 17 flew behind several different power plants depending on variant — early aircraft used liquid-cooled BMW VI inline engines, while the mass-produced Do 17Z switched to air-cooled Bramo 323 Fafnir radials of roughly 1,000 PS each. Export Do 17K aircraft used French Gnome-Rhône radials, and special versions even fitted Daimler-Benz DB 600 inlines. That the same airframe accepted such different installations speaks to the soundness of its basic structure.
The communal “beetle-eye” cockpit
The Do 17Z gathered its four-man crew into a single heavily glazed forward compartment. It aided morale and coordination under fire, but the hand-held 7.92 mm MG 15 machine guns that bristled from it were no match for eight-gun British fighters, and the concentrated crew meant a single well-aimed burst could disable the whole team. Comfort and communication, bought at the price of survivability — a bargain that looked very different in 1940 than it had on the drawing board.
The Dornier Do 17 in detail: origins, engines, variants and the raids that defined it
01The Dornier Do 17’s origins: was it really a rejected airliner?+
The most repeated story about the Do 17 is that it started as a fast passenger and mail aircraft for Deutsche Luft Hansa, was rejected as impractical because its slim fuselage could seat only a handful of cramped passengers, and was then dusted off and turned into a bomber. The core of this is accurate: Dornier did design a high-speed civil transport in 1933–34, and the airline did find the narrow cabin unsuitable for commercial service.
But the romantic embellishments — that completed aircraft sat forgotten until a Luft Hansa pilot stumbled on them — are not well supported. In practice the German air ministry was closely involved from the start, and the “airliner” and “bomber” strands of the programme ran in parallel during a period when Germany was still concealing military aviation work behind civilian cover. The honest summary is that the Do 17 was a fast civil design rapidly and deliberately adapted into a bomber, not an accident of history.
02The Dornier Do 17’s engines and variants: from BMW inlines to Bramo radials+
The Do 17 family spanned a bewildering set of sub-types. The Do 17E was the first bomber version and the Do 17F its reconnaissance counterpart, both using BMW VI liquid-cooled inline engines. The Do 17M and Do 17P followed with more powerful engines, the P again a reconnaissance machine. The Do 17S and Do 17U were small-run command and pathfinder variants.
The definitive Do 17Z, the version most people picture, adopted air-cooled Bramo 323 Fafnir radial engines and the deep, fully glazed nose. A night-fighter conversion, the Do 17Z-10 “Kauz”, carried nose guns and early infrared sensing. The export Do 17K, built under licence in Yugoslavia, used Gnome-Rhône radials. The design also spawned two important developments: the Do 215 export bomber and the much larger, heavier Do 217, which effectively replaced it. Total Do 17 production is usually given as somewhat over 2,100 aircraft, though sources differ on the exact figure.
03The Dornier Do 17 in the Battle of Britain: the Kenley raid and a type past its prime+
By the summer of 1940 the Do 17Z was already being phased out, yet it flew some of the Battle of Britain’s most storied missions. The most famous is the low-level attack on RAF Kenley on 18 August 1940 — “The Hardest Day” — when Do 17Z bombers of 9./KG 76 pressed home a rooftop-height raid straight into the airfield’s defences. They caused real damage but were shot to pieces by fighters and ground fire, and the raid became a byword for the courage and the vulnerability of the “Flying Pencil.”
The underlying problem was arithmetic. A Do 17Z carried perhaps 1,000 kg of bombs, defended itself with a few hand-aimed rifle-calibre machine guns, and cruised too slowly to escape modern fighters. Against RAF Fighter Command it could neither out-run nor out-shoot its opponents. The Luftwaffe’s answer was already in production: the faster, longer-ranged Junkers Ju 88, into which Do 17 units were steadily converted.
04The Dornier Do 17’s specifications and performance: what the numbers really mean+
Quoted Do 17Z figures — a top speed of around 410 km/h, a range of roughly 1,160 to 1,500 km depending on load, a service ceiling near 8,200 m and a crew of four — should be read as representative rather than absolute. Performance varied significantly between the many sub-types and with engine fit, weight and altitude. Where this page gives a single number, treat it as a commonly cited estimate for the Do 17Z; the full specification table below flags the values that are most often disputed.
The consistent theme across every version is the trade-off baked into that slim fuselage: excellent early speed and clean handling, bought at the price of a small bomb bay and limited range. It was a superb aircraft for the fast, unescorted daylight raid the Luftwaffe imagined in the mid-1930s, and a poor one for the attritional bomber war that actually came.
05The Dornier Do 17’s operating costs and value: why the figures were never really recorded+
Unlike modern aircraft, wartime German bombers were not costed in the transparent, per-flight-hour terms used today. Unit prices were set inside a planned war economy, quoted in Reichsmarks, distorted by forced and slave labour and by wildly fluctuating material supply, and were never intended as commercial figures. As a result there is no reliable, comparable “unit cost” or “cost per flight hour” for the Do 17 in the sense the rest of this museum uses those terms.
And there is no operating cost today for the simplest possible reason: there is no airworthy Do 17 anywhere in the world, and there never will be from the surviving airframe. The one substantially complete example is a fragile conservation project, not a flyable aircraft. Any figure you see presented as the Do 17’s “cost per hour to fly” is not grounded in reality.
06The Dornier Do 17 versus the He 111 and Ju 88: how the Pencil compared+
Through 1940 the Luftwaffe’s medium-bomber force rested on three types: the Dornier Do 17, the Heinkel He 111 and the Junkers Ju 88. Each embodied a different compromise. The He 111 was larger and could carry a heavier load over a longer distance, but it was slow and its tightly grouped defensive guns left blind spots. The Do 17 was the fastest of the three in its early forms and the most agile, but carried the smallest bomb load and had the shortest range.
The Ju 88 was the future. Faster than the Do 17, able to dive-bomb, and capable of carrying more over greater distances, it steadily displaced the Dornier from front-line units through 1940 and 1941. In effect the Do 17 was the senior member of a family it would not outlive: by the time the He 111 was soldiering on as a transport and missile carrier late in the war, the Do 17 had all but vanished. Comparing the three explains why the Luftwaffe kept the He 111 and the Ju 88 in production for years but let the Do 17 lapse.
07The Dornier Do 17K: how Yugoslavia built and then fought with its own Pencils+
The most significant export version was the Do 17K, ordered by the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Rather than German engines it used French Gnome-Rhône 14N radials, and it was built under licence in Yugoslavia in bomber and reconnaissance sub-types. Roughly seventy were produced domestically in addition to aircraft supplied from Germany, giving the Royal Yugoslav Air Force a substantial modern bomber for the late 1930s.
When Germany, Italy and their allies invaded Yugoslavia in April 1941, Do 17K crews flew combat missions against the Axis — an unusual case of a country using the enemy’s own bomber design against him. In the chaos of a rapid defeat, a handful of Yugoslav Dorniers flew out carrying gold reserves and personnel to Allied-held territory in the Middle East, where some served on with the RAF. Captured airframes and further Dorniers later equipped the air force of the German-aligned Independent State of Croatia (NDH).
08The Dornier Do 17’s second lives: reconnaissance, night-fighting, trainers and tugs+
As a day bomber the Do 17 was finished by 1941, but the airframe was too numerous simply to discard. Reconnaissance versions such as the Do 17P had served from the start, photographing targets ahead of the bombers. When the bombing role fell away, surviving aircraft were pressed into a variety of second careers.
The Do 17Z-10 “Kauz II” was rebuilt as a night-fighter, its glazed nose replaced by a solid one packed with cannon and machine guns and fitted with early Spanner-Anlage infrared detection gear. Other Do 17s became crew trainers, communications aircraft, and glider tugs — famously towing assault gliders such as those used in airborne operations. None of these roles restored the type’s prestige, but together they kept the Flying Pencil in the air for years after it had ceased to matter as a bomber.
09The Dornier Do 17’s descendants: the Do 215 and the Do 217+
The Do 17 did not end the Dornier bomber line — it began it. The Do 215 was essentially an improved, export-oriented Do 17 with more powerful engines; ironically, several ordered for foreign customers were taken over by the Luftwaffe itself and used for reconnaissance and night-fighting.
Far more important was the Do 217, a much larger and heavier aircraft that shared the Dornier design lineage but corrected the Do 17’s central weakness — its tiny payload. The Do 217 could carry several times the bomb load, flew further, and even served as a launch platform for early guided weapons such as the Fritz X and Hs 293. In effect the Do 217 was the aircraft the Do 17 could never be, and its existence is one reason the older type was allowed to fade: Dornier’s engineering effort had simply moved on to a bomber that could do the job the war actually demanded.
10The Goodwin Sands Do 17: recovering and conserving the last Flying Pencil+
The only substantially complete Do 17 in the world is a Do 17Z, Werknummer 1160, coded 5K+AR of 7. Staffel, Kampfgeschwader 3. It was shot down over the Thames Estuary on 26 August 1940 and ditched on the Goodwin Sands, a treacherous shoal off the Kent coast, coming to rest inverted on the seabed. Two of its four crew died; two were captured. Buried and protected by shifting sand, the aircraft lay undisturbed for decades.
Sonar surveys identified it in 2008, and after careful planning the RAF Museum raised it on 10 June 2013 in a delicate, closely watched salvage operation. Nearly seventy years of immersion in salt water had left the airframe extremely fragile. Rather than a conventional restoration, the museum embarked on a long conservation programme, including prolonged washing with citric-acid solutions to arrest chloride-driven corrosion. Crucially, the aircraft has not been rebuilt to display-perfect condition and is not — and will never be — airworthy. It survives as a corroded but genuine relic: the single most complete Dornier Do 17 left on Earth, and a direct physical link to the Battle of Britain.
11The Dornier Do 17’s myths: separating the legend from the record+
Several persistent stories surround the Do 17, and it is worth being clear about which hold up. The “rejected airliner rediscovered by accident” tale is embellished — the civil and military designs ran together deliberately. The “wonder bomber no fighter can catch” claim was true only of a specially tuned demonstration aircraft at Zürich in 1937, not of ordinary Do 17Z bombers, which were comfortably caught and shot down over Britain in 1940.
Even simple numbers are contested: production totals are usually given as somewhat over 2,100 aircraft, but different sources count variants and prototypes differently, and figures for top speed, range and weights vary between sub-types. Throughout this page such values are presented as commonly cited estimates and flagged where they are disputed. The one thing beyond dispute is the aircraft’s shape — and the fact that, of the thousands built, only a single substantially complete example now survives.
12The Dornier Do 17 in Spain: what the Condor Legion learned — and mislearned+
The Do 17’s combat career began over Spain, where the German Condor Legion tested men, tactics and machines on behalf of Franco’s Nationalists. Do 17E bombers and Do 17F reconnaissance aircraft operated with near impunity against a Republican air arm that was often outnumbered and flying older equipment. For the Luftwaffe’s planners, the lesson seemed obvious: a fast, modern bomber could reach its target and get home before the defenders could react.
That lesson was dangerously incomplete. Spain lacked the two things that would break the Do 17 over England — an integrated radar early-warning network and a large, well-directed force of modern eight-gun fighters. The Condor Legion’s easy successes helped entrench the belief that the fast unescorted day bomber was a war-winning weapon, a doctrine that would send Do 17Z crews into the teeth of RAF Fighter Command in 1940 with results that were anything but easy.
Spain also gave the Do 17 something less tangible: a reputation. By the time the wider war began, the Dornier arrived trailing propaganda images of an unstoppable modern bomber. Reputation, however, does not stop bullets, and the gap between the Spanish experience and the reality of 1940 is one of the recurring themes of the Flying Pencil’s story.
13Flying and fighting the Dornier Do 17: life inside the glass nose+
To fly the Do 17Z was to share a single glazed compartment with three other men, packed into the nose ahead of the wing. The pilot sat high on the left; the bomb-aimer lay or crouched in the extreme nose over his sight; the radio operator and gunner worked the guns and equipment behind. In the cramped, cold, noisy space the crew could see and touch one another — a genuine comfort under fire, and a design feature crews often praised.
The price of that intimacy was terrible vulnerability. The Do 17’s defensive armament was a scatter of hand-aimed 7.92 mm MG 15 machine guns firing rifle-calibre rounds — weapons that were slow to traverse, limited in field of fire, and hopelessly outclassed by the eight Browning guns of a Hurricane or Spitfire. Worse, because the whole crew sat together, a single well-aimed burst into the nose could kill or disable everyone at once. Many Do 17s came home with their entire forward crew dead or wounded; many more did not come home at all.
Pilots nonetheless generally liked the aircraft. It was pleasant and responsive to fly, honest in its handling, and steady as a bombing platform. Its failings were not failings of airmanship but of concept: no amount of skill could give it the speed, firepower or payload the 1940 battlefield demanded.
14The Dornier Do 17’s minor operators: Finland, Bulgaria, Croatia and Spain+
Beyond Germany and Yugoslavia, a scattering of smaller air forces flew the Do 17. Finland bought fifteen Do 17Z-2 and Z-3 bombers in 1942 and used them against the Soviet Union during the Continuation War, flying them into the mid-1940s. Bulgaria received a mixed batch of around a dozen Do 17K, Do 17M and Do 17P aircraft from Germany. The German-aligned Independent State of Croatia (NDH) operated ex-Yugoslav Do 17K and other Dorniers after 1941.
Spain, where the type had first seen combat, retained Condor Legion Do 17E and Do 17F aircraft that passed to the Spanish Nationalist air force and served for years after the civil war ended. For all of these operators the Do 17 filled a genuine need for a modern-enough medium bomber that Germany was willing to release precisely because it was re-equipping its own units with the Ju 88. Their aircraft flew on, in ever smaller numbers, until spares and airframes simply ran out.
15The Dornier Do 17 in the Blitzkrieg: Poland, Norway and the fall of the West+
Before Britain, the Do 17 enjoyed its most successful period. In September 1939 Do 17E, M and Z units struck Polish airfields, rail junctions and troop concentrations, helping the Luftwaffe seize the air superiority on which Blitzkrieg depended. The campaigns in Denmark and Norway in April 1940 saw Dorniers flying bombing and reconnaissance sorties in support of the German landings.
Then came the great offensive in the West in May 1940. Do 17Z formations ranged over the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and France, hammering airfields and communications ahead of the advancing panzers. Against defenders who were disorganised, outnumbered in the air, and lacking a mature warning system, the fast Dornier again performed well, and its crews gained confidence.
It was precisely this run of victories that set the trap. Every campaign from Spain to France had rewarded the fast day bomber; none had tested it against a prepared, radar-guided defence. When the Do 17Z crossed the Channel that summer, it met exactly that — and the run of easy successes ended abruptly and bloodily.
The Dornier Do 17’s design in depth: aerodynamics, structure and the cost of being thin
To understand the Do 17 you have to understand the obsession that shaped it: speed through cleanliness. In the early 1930s the fastest way to make a bomber quick was not simply to fit bigger engines but to reduce drag, and the single biggest source of drag on a twin-engine aircraft of the era was the fuselage. Dornier’s answer was to make that fuselage as slim as it could possibly be while still housing a crew, a bomb bay and fuel — hence the pencil.
The wing was a clean, tapered, mid-set structure carrying the two engine nacelles, and the tail evolved into the twin-fin arrangement that became a Dornier signature and gave the rear gunner a clearer field of fire. The all-metal, stressed-skin construction was modern for its day and relatively straightforward to build in quantity, which mattered to a Luftwaffe expanding at breakneck speed.
But every design is a set of compromises, and the Do 17’s were unusually stark. A slim fuselage means a small bomb bay. A small bomb bay means a light bomb load. Light bomb load plus limited internal fuel means short range. None of this was an oversight — it was the direct, unavoidable consequence of the decision to prioritise speed and cleanliness above all else. The Do 17 was optimised, brilliantly, for a mission profile that assumed the enemy would not see it coming.
The powerplant story reflects the turbulence of the German aero-engine industry in the 1930s. Early Do 17s flew behind BMW VI liquid-cooled inline engines; the definitive Do 17Z used air-cooled Bramo 323 Fafnir radials; reconnaissance and special variants used BMW 132 radials or Daimler-Benz DB 600 inlines; and the Yugoslav Do 17K used French Gnome-Rhône radials. Switching between inline and radial engines changes an aircraft’s cooling, weight distribution and frontal area profoundly, and the fact that the airframe accepted so many different installations speaks to the soundness of the basic structure.
Defensively, the design aged badly. The hand-aimed MG 15 machine guns were adequate against the lightly armed opposition of the mid-1930s but obsolete against the armoured, multi-gun fighters of 1940. Later German bombers moved toward heavier, better-protected gun positions, but the Do 17’s layout — with its crew concentrated in a single glazed nose — offered little scope for meaningful improvement. In this sense the aircraft was a prisoner of its own elegant shape.
The twin-fin tail deserves a note of its own. Splitting the vertical stabiliser into two fins mounted on the tailplane cleared the rear gunner’s field of fire and improved directional control with an engine out — a sensible touch for a twin. It also gave the Do 17, and later Dornier bombers, an instantly recognisable rear-end profile that helped observers pick the type out even at a distance, a small design decision that became part of the aircraft’s visual identity.
The result was an aeroplane that was a delight in 1937 and a death-trap in 1940, without a single rivet having changed. Nothing illustrates more clearly how quickly aviation moved in those years, or how ruthlessly the pace of technological change punished designs that could not grow. The Do 17 was overtaken not because it was poorly made, but because the standard it was built to had simply moved on beneath it.
Dornier Do 17Z specifications: dimensions, performance and cost data
Representative figures for the mass-produced Do 17Z-2. Values marked “est.” or “disputed” vary between sources and sub-variants — they are given here as commonly cited estimates and flagged for the fact-check pass.
| Тип | Twin-engine light/medium bomber |
|---|---|
| Экипаж | 4 (pilot, bomb-aimer/navigator, radio operator, gunner) |
| Длина | ~15.8 m (Do 17Z) |
| Размах крыльев | ~18.0 m |
| Высота | ~4.6 m |
| Зона крыла | ~55 m² (est.) |
| Пустой вес | ~5,200 kg (est.) |
| Максимальная взлетная масса | ~8,600 kg (est., disputed) |
| First flight | 1934 (Do 17 V1 prototype) |
| In service | ~1937–1945 (front-line bomber use largely ended mid-war) |
| Number built | ~2,100+ all variants (disputed; often ~2,139) |
| Engines (Do 17Z) | 2 × Bramo 323 Fafnir radial, ~1,000 PS each |
|---|---|
| Engines (early variants) | BMW VI inline (Do 17E/F); Gnome-Rhône radials (export Do 17K) |
| Max speed | ~410 km/h (~255 mph) at altitude (est.) |
| Крейсерская скорость | ~300–340 km/h (est.) |
| Диапазон | ~1,160–1,500 km depending on bomb load (disputed) |
| Служебный потолок | ~8,200 m (est.) |
| Bomb load | Up to ~1,000 kg internal |
| Defensive armament | Up to 6 × 7.92 mm MG 15 machine guns (hand-held) |
| Unit cost | Not reliably recorded (wartime planned economy; Reichsmark pricing not comparable) |
| Cost per flight hour | Not applicable — no airworthy example exists |
Cost note: the Do 17 was produced within Germany’s wartime command economy using forced labour and controlled prices, so no meaningful unit cost or cost-per-flight-hour figure survives in the commercial sense used elsewhere in this museum. There is likewise no operating cost today because no Do 17 is airworthy.
Dornier Do 17 variants: from the Do 17E to the Kauz night-fighter
The Do 17 spawned an unusually large family of sub-types across bomber, reconnaissance, command, night-fighter and export roles. The main variants are summarised below; sources differ on some production details.
| Do 17 V1–V15 | Prototypes and pre-series aircraft, from the first 1934 flight through engine and configuration trials |
|---|---|
| Do 17E | First production bomber; BMW VI inline engines; short, stepped nose |
| Do 17F | Long-range photo-reconnaissance counterpart to the E |
| Do 17M | Bomber with more powerful Bramo 323 radial engines |
| Do 17P | Reconnaissance version with BMW 132 radials; widely used early-war |
| Do 17Z | Definitive mass-production bomber; Bramo 323 Fafnir radials; deep glazed “beetle-eye” nose; four-man crew |
| Do 17S / Do 17U | Small-run high-altitude reconnaissance and pathfinder / command aircraft with DB 600 engines |
|---|---|
| Do 17Z-10 “Kauz II” | Night-fighter conversion; solid gun nose; early infrared detection gear |
| Do 17K | Yugoslav licence-built bomber/recon version with Gnome-Rhône radial engines |
| Do 215 | Export-oriented development with more powerful engines; many taken up by the Luftwaffe for recon and night-fighting |
| Do 217 | Much larger, heavier successor sharing the Dornier lineage; far greater bomb load; guided-weapon carrier |
| Total built | ~2,100+ Do 17 of all variants (disputed; often quoted as ~2,139), plus separate Do 215/Do 217 production |
The Dornier Do 17 timeline: from fast civil design to the last Flying Pencil
Dornier Do 17 stories: the raids, the crews and the wreck that came home
Twelve short, expandable stories from the life of the Flying Pencil — tap any card to read the full account.
The nickname
Why crews called it the Flying Pencil
The slim fuselage was so thin it barely looked like an aeroplane from the front.
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German and Allied airmen alike nicknamed the Do 17 the fliegender Bleistift — the Flying Pencil — because its narrow, tubular fuselage looked, head-on, almost impossibly slender.
That slimness was the whole point of the design: minimal frontal area meant minimal drag, and in the mid-1930s that translated into a bomber fast enough to embarrass fighters. The same slimness later doomed it, leaving too little room for a worthwhile bomb load or the fuel to reach distant targets.
The nickname stuck so firmly that it crossed the front line. British newspapers and recognition posters used it too, and to this day ‘Flying Pencil’ is the name most people reach for before they remember the words ‘Dornier Do 17’. Few military aircraft have ever been so completely defined by a single visual quirk.
Spain, 1937
Combat debut with the Condor Legion
The Do 17 first dropped bombs in anger over the mountains of Spain.
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The Do 17E and Do 17F entered combat with the German Condor Legion supporting Franco’s Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War from 1937.
In Spanish skies, thinly defended by obsolete opposition, the fast Dornier seemed almost untouchable — an impression that would encourage the Luftwaffe to overrate the fast unescorted bomber concept, with painful consequences over Britain three years later.
Spain was a laboratory in every sense. The Legion refined formation flying, bombing techniques and reconnaissance methods that would shape Luftwaffe doctrine for years. But because the opposition never resembled a modern, radar-equipped air force, the lessons learned were dangerously optimistic — and the Do 17 carried that false confidence into a far deadlier war.
Zürich, 1937
The ‘wonder bomber’ that outran fighters
A tuned Dornier reportedly left interceptors trailing at an international meet.
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At the 1937 International Military Aircraft Competition held near Zürich, a specially prepared high-powered Dornier reportedly outpaced the fighters sent up against it.
Nazi propaganda seized on the result, presenting the Do 17 as a ‘wonder bomber’ that no fighter could catch. Ordinary service Do 17Z bombers, heavier and less powerful, never matched that showpiece performance.
The gap between the demonstrator and the workhorse is one of the Do 17’s defining ironies. The aircraft that dazzled the crowds at Zürich carried no bombs, no full defensive kit and specially uprated engines. The bombers that actually went to war were slower, heavier and far more vulnerable than the propaganda image suggested.
The cockpit
Four men in one glass nose
The Do 17Z packed its whole crew into a single cramped compartment.
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The definitive Do 17Z gathered pilot, bomb-aimer, radio operator and gunner into one heavily glazed forward cabin — the so-called beetle-eye nose.
Crews often said they preferred being together, able to help one another and share the terror of a raid. But the concentration was a liability: a single accurate burst of fire into the nose could kill or wound the entire crew at once.
The glazing that gave the crew their superb view also gave enemy fighters a clear aiming point, and offered almost no protection. Combined with the feeble hand-aimed guns, it made the Do 17Z’s cockpit one of the most dangerous places to sit in the summer skies of 1940.
Kenley, 18 Aug 1940
The rooftop raid on ‘The Hardest Day’
Do 17Zs of 9./KG 76 attacked a fighter airfield from just above the ground.
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On 18 August 1940 — remembered as ‘The Hardest Day’ — Do 17Z bombers of 9./KG 76 made a daring low-level attack on RAF Kenley, roaring in at rooftop height to bomb the fighter station.
They inflicted serious damage but flew straight into a storm of anti-aircraft fire and fighters. Several were destroyed and others limped home shattered. The raid became one of the enduring images of the Do 17 in the Battle of Britain: brave, skilful — and terribly exposed.
The low-level tactic was meant to slip beneath the radar and strike before the defenders could climb to meet them. It worked, briefly — but the price was fearsome. Flying at rooftop height meant every light gun on the airfield could fire on them, and there was no altitude in hand to trade for escape when the fighters arrived. The Kenley raid is remembered precisely because it shows both the daring of the Do 17 crews and the impossible position the type had been placed in.
Outclassed
Why the Pencil was already obsolete in 1940
Slow, lightly armed and short on bombs, it could not survive over Britain.
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By 1940 the Do 17Z was outmatched. Its top speed of around 410 km/h left it unable to escape Hurricanes and Spitfires, its hand-aimed rifle-calibre machine guns were feeble against eight-gun fighters, and its ~1,000 kg bomb load was small.
The Luftwaffe already knew this: production had ended and units were converting to the Junkers Ju 88. The Do 17 fought the Battle of Britain as a type living on borrowed time.
There is something poignant in that. The men who flew the Do 17 in the most famous air battle in history were, in effect, taking an obsolete aircraft into a fight their own high command had already conceded it could not win in the long run. Their courage was real; the tool they were handed was not equal to it.
Yugoslavia
The licence-built Do 17K
Yugoslavia built its own radial-engined Dorniers — then fought the Luftwaffe with them.
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Yugoslavia bought and then licence-built its own version, the Do 17K, powered by French Gnome-Rhône radial engines instead of German units.
When Germany invaded Yugoslavia in April 1941, Royal Yugoslav Air Force Do 17K crews flew combat missions against the Axis — Dorniers fighting Dorniers. A few Yugoslav aircraft even escaped to Allied territory, and captured airframes later served the German-aligned Croatian air force.
One famous episode saw a handful of Yugoslav Dorniers flown out to British-held territory in the Middle East carrying part of the national gold reserve, only for some to be destroyed on the ground soon afterwards. It is a fittingly tangled ending for an aircraft that spent its export career fighting on almost every side of a fracturing conflict.
Финляндия
The Pencil in the far north
Finland flew a small batch of Do 17Z-2/Z-3 bombers against the Soviet Union.
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Finland purchased 15 Do 17Z-2 and Z-3 bombers in 1942 and operated them during the Continuation War against the Soviet Union.
The Finnish Dorniers served into the mid-1940s, one of several minor operators — alongside Croatia, Bulgaria and post-civil-war Spain — that kept the type flying after it had faded from German front-line service.
For these smaller air forces the Do 17 was a useful, modern-enough bomber that Germany was willing to part with as it re-equipped its own units with newer types. It is a reminder that an aircraft judged obsolete on the main front could still be a valuable front-line asset elsewhere.
The Kauz
When the bomber became a night-fighter
The Do 17Z-10 Kauz hunted RAF bombers in the dark.
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As it lost its place as a day bomber, the Do 17 found second careers. The Do 17Z-10 ‘Kauz II’ was converted into a night-fighter, its glazed nose replaced by a solid one bristling with cannon and machine guns, and fitted with early infrared sensing gear.
It was a stop-gap, soon overtaken by purpose-built night-fighters, but it shows how thoroughly the Luftwaffe tried to wring value from an airframe it had otherwise outgrown.
One Kauz is even credited with an early radar-free night interception, groping toward the tactics that would later make the German night-fighter arm so formidable. The Do 17 thus had a modest hand in the birth of organised night air defence, a role utterly removed from the fast day bomber it had been designed to be.
Vanishing act
How every Do 17 disappeared
For decades not one complete example survived anywhere on Earth.
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The Do 17 was so completely used up — crashed, shot down, scrapped or simply worn out — that by the post-war years not a single complete example remained in any museum in the world.
For an aircraft once paraded as a symbol of German air power, this near-total erasure was remarkable. It made the eventual discovery of an intact wreck all the more extraordinary.
There is a simple reason so few German bombers survive: the defeated Luftwaffe left its aircraft scattered and abandoned, and post-war Europe had neither the resources nor, for a time, the appetite to preserve the machines of the Third Reich. Thousands were simply melted down. The Do 17 suffered this fate more completely than almost any other major type.
Goodwin Sands
A wreck found beneath the sea
A Do 17Z lost in 1940 lay hidden in a sandbank off the English coast.
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In 2008 sonar surveys off the Kent coast revealed an aircraft lying on the Goodwin Sands, a notorious shoal in the English Channel. It proved to be a Do 17Z, Werknummer 1160, of 7./KG 3, shot down on 26 August 1940 and ditched, coming to rest inverted on the seabed.
Protected and buried by shifting sand for nearly seventy years, it was the most complete Do 17 known to exist anywhere — a time capsule from the Battle of Britain.
The aircraft had been attacked during a raid and ditched with its wheels up; remarkably, the airframe stayed largely intact as it settled. Of the four crew, two lost their lives and two were captured. The sand that claimed them also, in a sense, preserved their aircraft for a future that none of them could have imagined.
The raising
Lifting the last Flying Pencil
In 2013 the RAF Museum raised the Dornier — and began a delicate rescue.
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On 10 June 2013 the RAF Museum lifted the Goodwin Sands Do 17Z from the seabed in a difficult, widely watched salvage operation. The corroded airframe was immediately placed under continuous conservation, including washing to arrest salt-driven corrosion.
The aircraft was never restored to display-perfect condition and is not — and will never be — airworthy. It survives as a fragile conservation project, the single substantially complete Do 17 on Earth.
Conservation of a seventy-year-old saltwater wreck is painstaking work measured in years, not months: chloride salts drawn deep into the aluminium have to be flushed out slowly with citric-acid solutions to stop the metal quietly destroying itself. The goal is not to make the Dornier look new, but to stabilise it as an authentic, if battered, survivor — the closest thing to a real Do 17 that anyone will ever see again.
Dornier Do 17 photos: the Flying Pencil in service, 1937–1942
Genuine wartime photographs, each credited to its Wikimedia Commons source and licence. Scroll for more.
Dornier Do 17 documentary: the full story of the Flying Pencil
A feature-length history of the Do 17 from Rex’s Hangar, a respected aviation-history channel.
“Why Everyone Feared The ‘Flying Pencil’ | Dornier Do 17” — Rex’s Hangar (approx. 1.57 million views). A detailed, well-sourced documentary on the type’s design, service and decline.
Where the Dornier Do 17 flew and fought: an operations overview
The Luftwaffe (blue) was the overwhelming operator; camouflage marks the combat theatres where Do 17s fought; grey shows export and other operators; light grey marks the single country with a surviving airframe. Hover or tap a country for detail. Note: “Russia” stands in for the wartime USSR, and Serbia/Croatia represent former Yugoslavia.
The Dornier Do 17’s war record at a glance
Approximate, widely cited figures — the Do 17’s story is one of early dominance giving way to obsolescence.
The Dornier Do 17’s legacy: the human cost and the memory of the Flying Pencil
Behind every statistic about the Do 17 are the men who flew it. Luftwaffe bomber crews in 1940 were, on the whole, superbly trained and highly motivated, and they pressed home attacks in an aircraft they must have known was outmatched. Their losses over Britain were heavy, and because the crew sat together in the nose, those losses were often total — an entire four-man team gone in a single pass. The Do 17’s story is, at heart, a story about the gap between the courage of aircrew and the limitations of their equipment.
The bald casualty arithmetic of the Battle of Britain tells the story. Bomber crews flew into a defence that was, for the first time in the war, ready and waiting: warned by radar, marshalled by ground controllers, and met by fighters with the height and speed advantage. For a slow, lightly armed Do 17Z, being intercepted in daylight often meant the difference between a damaged aircraft and a destroyed one, and the loss rates the type suffered in the late summer of 1940 were simply unsustainable for any air force.
It is also a story about the people on the ground beneath them. The Do 17 bombed cities, airfields and civilians across Europe, from Warsaw to Rotterdam to London. Any honest account of the aircraft has to hold both truths at once: admiration for the engineering and the airmanship, and clear sight of what those bombers were sent to do and the suffering they caused. Museums that display the type, including the RAF Museum with its Goodwin Sands airframe, are careful to present it as history, not glorification.
The Do 17’s direct military legacy was short. Its descendants — the Do 215 and especially the much larger Do 217 — carried the Dornier bomber line forward, while the Junkers Ju 88 inherited the medium-bomber role the Do 17 had once filled. As a fighting machine, the Flying Pencil was effectively finished by 1942, and its influence on later designs was more cautionary than formative: it stood as a lesson in the dangers of optimising an aircraft too narrowly for one idea of war.
Its cultural legacy, though, has proved remarkably durable. The Do 17 is one of the most instantly recognisable aircraft of the Second World War, fixed in the public imagination by newsreels of the Battle of Britain, by its evocative nickname, and by that unmistakable slender shape. Model kits, paintings, films and books have kept it visible long after the last airworthy example was scrapped.
And then there is the wreck. When the RAF Museum raised the Goodwin Sands Do 17 in 2013, it did something no amount of restoration could achieve: it returned an actual Battle of Britain bomber, corroded and unrepeatable, to the public eye. Fragile, unrestored and permanently grounded, that single airframe now carries the entire memory of a type that once numbered in the thousands. It is, quite literally, the last of the Flying Pencils — and the reason the Do 17’s story does not simply end in a scrapyard.
The Goodwin Sands airframe also changed how the type is studied. For the first time, historians and engineers could examine a real Do 17 in three dimensions rather than from photographs and drawings alone — the layout of the cockpit, the construction of the wing, the details of equipment and finish. In that sense the wreck is not only a memorial but a document, and its slow conservation continues to add to what we actually know about the aircraft rather than merely what we remember about it.
That is why the Do 17 earns its place in this museum. Not because it was a great bomber — it was not — but because its rise and fall capture, more sharply than almost any other aircraft, the moment when the fast, elegant ideas of the 1930s collided with the brutal arithmetic of a real, prolonged air war. The Flying Pencil began the Second World War as a symbol of what modern air power might be, and ended it as a lesson in the limits of a single good idea — a lesson written, finally, in the corroded aluminium of one aircraft raised from the sea.
Dornier Do 17: frequently asked questions
Can I fly in a Dornier Do 17?+
No. There is no airworthy Dornier Do 17 anywhere in the world, and there never will be. The only substantially complete survivor — the RAF Museum’s Do 17Z raised from the Goodwin Sands in 2013 — is a fragile, unrestored conservation project. It is not restored to display-perfect condition and is emphatically not flyable.
However, you can fly in several genuine military jets today. MiGFlug offers flights in aircraft such as the L-39 Albatros, the Hawker Hunter and others, and has flown fighter jets including the MiG-29. Explore what is bookable right now at migflug.com/flights-prices.
Why was the Dornier Do 17 called the ‘Flying Pencil’?+
The nickname — fliegender Bleistift in German — comes from the aircraft’s extremely slim, cigar-thin fuselage. Seen from the front it was so narrow it barely looked like an aeroplane. That slenderness reduced drag and made the early Do 17 fast, but it also limited how many bombs and how much fuel the aircraft could carry.
Was the Dornier Do 17 really a rejected airliner?+
Partly. Dornier did design a fast civil transport and mail aircraft in 1933–34, and Deutsche Luft Hansa did find the narrow fuselage impractical for passengers. But the popular tale of a finished airliner being forgotten and then rediscovered as a bomber is embellished — the military and civil strands of the programme ran together from early on, at a time when Germany was concealing military aviation behind civilian projects.
How fast was the Dornier Do 17 and how many bombs could it carry?+
A Do 17Z could reach roughly 410 km/h (about 255 mph) at altitude — fast for the mid-1930s but not enough to escape 1940-era fighters. Its bomb load was modest, up to about 1,000 kg. These figures vary between sub-variants and sources and should be treated as commonly cited estimates.
Why did the Dornier Do 17 fail in the Battle of Britain?+
By 1940 the Do 17Z was already obsolescent. It was too slow to outrun Hurricanes and Spitfires, defended itself only with hand-aimed rifle-calibre machine guns, and carried a small bomb load. It flew some famous raids — notably the low-level attack on RAF Kenley on 18 August 1940 — but suffered heavily. Production had already ended, and Do 17 units were converting to the faster Junkers Ju 88.
How many Dornier Do 17s survive today?+
Only one substantially complete example survives: the RAF Museum’s Do 17Z (Werknummer 1160), recovered from the Goodwin Sands in June 2013. It is a conservation project — corroded, unrestored to flying or display-perfect standard, and not airworthy. Beyond that aircraft, only fragments and relics exist. For decades before 2013 there was no complete Do 17 anywhere in the world.
Which countries operated the Dornier Do 17?+
The German Luftwaffe was by far the main operator. Export and other users included Yugoslavia, which licence-built the Do 17K; Finland, which bought 15 Do 17Z-2/Z-3; wartime Croatia (the NDH); and Bulgaria. Do 17E/F aircraft that fought in Spain with the Condor Legion later passed to the Spanish Nationalist air force. The related Do 215 was also exported.
What engines did the Dornier Do 17 use?+
It depended on the variant. Early aircraft such as the Do 17E and Do 17F used liquid-cooled BMW VI inline engines. The mass-produced Do 17Z switched to air-cooled Bramo 323 Fafnir radial engines of roughly 1,000 PS each. Some reconnaissance versions used BMW 132 radials, a few special variants used Daimler-Benz DB 600 inlines, and the Yugoslav Do 17K used French Gnome-Rhône radials. This variety reflected the fast-changing German aero-engine industry of the late 1930s.
What replaced the Dornier Do 17?+
In front-line Luftwaffe service the Do 17 was replaced chiefly by the Junkers Ju 88, which was faster, longer-ranged and carried a heavier load. Within the Dornier family itself, the design lineage continued through the Do 215 and, most importantly, the much larger Do 217, which corrected the Do 17’s greatest weakness — its small bomb load — and served well into the later war years.
Is the Dornier Do 17 the same as the Do 217?+
No, though they are closely related. The Do 17 is the slim ‘Flying Pencil’ light/medium bomber of the late 1930s. The Do 217 is a substantially larger, heavier and later development that shares the Dornier design heritage but can carry several times the bomb load and even launch guided weapons. Think of the Do 217 as the grown-up successor to the Do 17 rather than a version of it.
Where can I see a Dornier Do 17 today?+
The only substantially complete Do 17 is held by the Royal Air Force Museum in the United Kingdom, where the Goodwin Sands airframe is conserved and, at times, displayed as part of an ongoing conservation project. Because it is a fragile, salt-damaged relic rather than a polished restoration, how and where it is shown can change. Elsewhere, museums hold only fragments, relics and recovered components — there is no second complete aircraft to see.
How many crew did the Dornier Do 17 carry, and what did they do?+
The Do 17Z carried a crew of four, all seated together in the glazed forward compartment: a pilot, a bomb-aimer/navigator who also manned a forward gun, a radio operator, and a gunner. In combat the non-pilot crew doubled up on the hand-aimed machine guns. Grouping everyone in the nose aided communication and morale but meant a single burst of enemy fire could disable the whole crew.
Was the Dornier Do 17 a good aircraft?+
It depends on when you ask. In 1937 the Do 17 was one of the fastest and cleanest bombers in the world, a genuinely advanced design that flew beautifully. By 1940 it was outclassed — too slow, too lightly armed and too short on bomb load for a modern air war. So it was neither simply ‘good’ nor ‘bad’: it was an excellent early design that the pace of wartime aviation left behind with unusual speed.
No Dornier Do 17 will ever fly again. But you can strap into a genuine military jet, pull real G and take the controls yourself. Here is a selection of what MiGFlug makes bookable.The Flying Pencil is gone. Real jet flights are not.
Explore the Do 17’s Luftwaffe contemporaries
Heinkel He 111The other backbone medium bomber of the Battle of Britain, flown alongside the Do 17.View in the museumJunkers Ju 88The faster, harder-hitting bomber that replaced the Do 17 in Luftwaffe service.View in the museumJunkers Ju 87 StukaThe infamous dive-bomber that fought beside the Do 17 through the Blitzkrieg years.View in the museumDornier Do 17: sources and further reading