War Machines Drawn: Arado TEW 16/43-23

Saturday, 16 April 2016

Arado TEW 16/43-23

Preliminary note: As it seems to be certain controversy about the lengthness of this airplane, some websites like luft46 or militaryfactory claim that this airplane was 12,2m long while the book we are using as a reference, gives an overall length of 9,40m long, significatively shorter. We believe that it's because of the resemblance this airplane has with the also never-built fighter version of the Arado Ar.234 which had a similar lengthness of 12,64m long.

During May 1943 Arado proposed to the RLM to make an extremely heavy fighter version of their Ar.234 but the expected performance didn't satisfy them because it barely had any improvement over the Messerschmitt Me.262 which was already being flight-tested. The designer Van Nes hoped that sweping the wing, reducing the overall dimensions and fitting more powerful engines, he could achieve performances that would offer a better rate of climb and enough endurance to counter the Allied bombers.

It was roughly comparable to the Me.262 in terms of dimensions and was intended to be able of reaching speeds of around the 1000km/h. However those expectations seem far fetched as a pure jet interceptor fighter, range and endurance numbers wouldn't have been particularly high and Arado didn't publish any data at all.
That's why Arado concentrated on two-seat fast general purpose or bomber airplanes. However, in the last months of the Third Reich, the company presented new proposals for jet-powered fighters, appart from their E.580 (presented for the Volksjäger specification) and the E.581 (presented as a successor of the Me.262), which consisted in the heavy fighter variants of the Ar.234 none of which went beyond the design board. Those proposals differed from the Ar.234B and C bomber and recon variants only in terms of military equipment and a new cockpit arrangement.

It was going to be powered by two Heinkel HeS 011 engines that could deliver 12,01Kn of maximum thrust each mounted below the wings. The fuselage hosted three fuel tanks located behind the cockpit and a single fin and rudder was fitted with the tailplanes having a small amount of sweep too. The landing gear would have rotated 90º before retracting inside the wing and a small spherical tire was going to be fitted in the nose. It was going to be armed with a single 15mm MG 151/15 machine gun and two 20mm MG 213/20 cannons all of them located in the nose beneath the cockpit.