Historical Background

Although the Heinkel HE-162A was manufactured in quantity for the Luftwaffe at the end of World War II, no HE-162A ever was credited with the destruction of an enemy aircraft due to its late arrival into the Luftwaffe inventory. The story of the He-162 has been published many times, and there are quite a few good accounts of its design and development. Designed to be a high performance jet fighter that was easy to produce, it was planned to use pilots with minimal training introduced into combat.

Although the Luftwaffe ordered thousands of these fighters into production, only 116 pre-production and early production aircraft were actually delivered when the war ended, although large numbers had reached an advanced stage of production. The idea was to use untrained members of the Hitler Youth as pilots, although more experienced Luftwaffe pilots felt that the airplane was too difficult to fly for inexperienced pilots, and the result was that many completed examples were captured after the surrender, and some were taken to the U.S., England, and the Soviet Union for testing. Only one unit, J.G.84, based at Leck, in Schleswig-Holstein, was actually equipped with the type, and these were quickly surrendered to the Allies when hostilities ended. Most, however, were scrapped, and only a few survived to become museum exhibits. If the war had lasted a little longer, Allied fighter pilots would have encountered them in increasing numbers, although the effectiveness of marginally trained pilots is open to question. There were numerous variants planned, including one Mistel version, with the HE-162A mounted above the unmanned warhead equipped flying bomb.

Kit Production

There have been a few kits produced of the HE-162 in various scales. I have built Lindberg, Frog, DML/Dragon, and Hobby Boss kits in 1/72 scale over the years, but I have yet to find one produced by Special Hobby, which I understand is an excellent model. I have built five of them over the years, and the only one remaining in my stash was an old Lindberg kit, numbered 432, , dating back to 1965, so I used that one for the review. It is a very basic kit, with only about 20 parts, and very little interior detail, and a few inaccuracies in outline. Overall, however, it is not really a bad kit, as the outline is basically recognizable, and there is room inside for enough weight so it will sit in the upright position, not on its tail as many nosewheel aircraft kits do today.

Product Description

The Photo Etch sheet is quite small, although it has about 20 parts that need to be removed and attached to various parts of the airframe. The parts are easy to remove with an Exacto knife, with the remaining attachment stubs easily removed with a pair of scissors. There is, in addition to the metal, a very small photographic film instrument panel, which is intended to be attached to the back of the instrument panel. However, this is not very easy to see if the canopy is closed. I did it anyway. The major parts are modifications to the ejector seat, and some very detailed seat belts. The instrument panel is fairly complicated, but it fits into place very nicely on this kit, and I would suspect that it is pretty much the same with the Hobby Boss kit.

With the Lindberg kit, I did not use all of the detail parts, although they were provided for the cockpit interior and landing gear. But I used the majority of them, and I think that the result was an acceptable model.

Instructions

The instruction sheet was particularly useful, consisting of a small 5” x 7” sheet of paper with illustrations showing the basic assemblies. Parts are clearly numbered, and the Special Hobby kit instructions would probably take care of any misunderstandings.

Problems

I only ran into a few problems related to what colors to use in specific situations, but with Luftwaffe aircraft, you are usually pretty safe using either 66 dark grey or 02 greenish grey.

Recommendations

I had a lot of fun building this kit, and I think that’s the idea. It is a very uncomplicated airplane, and there are plenty of reference materials to steer you in the right direction when needed. I would certainly recommend the Brengun unit for any of the HE-162 models currently on the market. It will make a work of art out of a good model. Don’t miss out on this one.

Thanks to Brengun Models, and Phil Peterson and Bill O’Malley for the review sample.