Heinkel HD 38

The Heinkel HD 38 was a fighter aircraft developed in Germany in the late 1920s. It was a compact, single-bay biplane with staggered wings of unequal span braced by N-type interplane struts, and was a refined version of the HD 37 that the Reichswehr had evaluated and rejected for its secret training facility at Lipetsk. Heinkel designed it in the hope of capturing a different niche, that of a seaplane fighter, with a twin-pontoon undercarriage that could be quickly removed and replaced with wheels. It was accepted in that role but did not serve in it for long before being relegated to general training duties, and soon afterwards Germany abandoned the Lipetsk base to the Soviet Union. The version with wheels had a BMW VI engine of 560 kilowatts, a wingspan of 10 metres and a top speed of 290 kilometres per hour.