BMW Strahlbomber I

The BMW Strahlbomber I was a German Second World War project by BMW for a heavy jet bomber, put forward partly as a way of selling the company's BMW 003 turbojet engines. The design called for six BMW 003 engines, two mounted in the forward fuselage on either side of the cockpit and the rest in pairs at the trailing edge of the wings, each pair sharing an air intake. A pressurised nose cabin held a crew of two, the vertical tail was conventional with no horizontal tailplane, and the swept wing used its outer surfaces as ailerons and elevators and its inner surfaces as landing flaps and air brakes. The armament was two fixed rearward-firing guns and the bomb load was calculated at 4,000 kg. The aircraft was to be 18 m long with a span of 26.5 m, a maximum take-off mass of 25,000 kg and an operating speed of 820 km/h, but it never progressed beyond the design stage.