Arado Ar.68G&H

On this April's fool, we finish with the Arado Ar.68 series of posts with these two prototype variants. Even if today is April's fool, we would like to remark that this post isn't a joke at all.

The strutcture of the Arado Ar.68 remained unaltered throughout the development and production and so did the pair of 7,92mm MG17 with 500 rounds each that was armed with. Complementary to those two machine guns, some rare versions were fitted with a special dispenser in order to carry six 10Kg SC 10 fragmentation bombs but it was rare because it critically increased the drag on the airplane.

When the first production Bf.109 batch arrived at the Luftwaffe squadrons in the spring of 1937, the Arado Flugzeugwerke was not convinced that such sleek monoplane had sounded the death knell for the German biplane industry and, after an abortive attempt of fitting a supercharged 670hp BMW VI into the fuselage of an Ar.68 which was to be known as the Arado Ar.68G, the Arado Ar.68H was built and flown.

The H version had many differences from it's predecessor. It was better armed since the armament was increased to four machine guns, two in the fuselage and other two in the upper wing, it was powered by an 850hp nine-cylinder radial BMW 132Da engine (which was a license built version of the American Pratt & Whitney Hornet) and, in order to cope with the apparent modernization in the aeronautical design industry, an enclosed cockpit was designed and added to make it reach higher altitudes.

It was by far the fastest of the Ar.68 variants, as it could reach the 248mph (400 km/h), but by then, the RLM wasn't interested in developing more biplanes, because it was becoming obvious that the future fighters weren't going to be biplanes, but monoplanes.

Sources:
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arado_Ar_68
2. Salamander Books - The Complete Book of Fighters
3. http://histaviation.com/ar_68.html