Of several armed glider designs undertaken in Germany, the BV 40 progressed the farthest. Six prototypes were tested in the spring of 1944, but the project was cancelled later that summer.
The BV 40 was of fairly conventional layout for a glider. It used a jettisonable wheeled trolley for takeoffs and a semi-retractable belly skid for landings. The cockpit was heavily armored and a pair of 30mm Mk 108 cannons were mounted in the wing roots. The idea was that a single Me 109G would tow one (or possibly two) BV 40’s aloft (one BV 40 could be towed at 344 mph, two at 313 mph). After some 16 minutes, when reaching an altitude of some 27,000 feet, the BV 40’s pilot would release the tow cable and dive on an Allied bomber formation at a twenty degree angle and a speed of some 300 to 400 miles per hour. After making his one and only pass, the pilot would then look for an airfield to put down at, while keeping the glider above it’s nearly 90 mph stall speed.
The supposed advantages to such an aircraft would be the relatively small target the glider would resent from the front, the fact that pilot would not require training in a powered aircraft and that, as most of the BV 40 was made of wood, it would require only a minimum of strategic materials.
Subassemblies: Recon Plane chassis +2, Recon Plane Wings
+2, one retractable skid +0.
Powertrain: None.
Occupancy: 1 CS Cargo: 4 Body.
Armor
Body/Wings: 2/2W
Cockpit: F +0/30, RLTU +0/10, B +0/20
Weaponry
2¥30mm Short Aircraft ACs/MK 108 [Body:F] (35 rounds each)*
* Fire linked.
Equipment
Body: Medium radio receiver and transmitter, navigation instruments.
Statistics
| Size: 26'x19'x5' | Payload: 0.39 tons | Lwt: 1.05 tons |
| Volume: 96 | Maint.: 99 hours | Price: $4,100 |
HT: 8.
HPs: 30 Body, 50 each Wing, 12 Skid.
| aSpeed: * | aAccel: * | aDecel: 34 | aMR: 8.5 | aSR: 1 | Stall: 87 |
Design Notes
The historical stall speed has been used (design stall speed was 67
mph), as well as the actual wing area (94 square feet). Body HP, cost and
weight were doubled.
The top glide speed (197 mph) from the formula in VExi is not close to the historical projected top dive speed of 559 mph.
Although the front part of the glider was metal, the rest was wooden and so armor was bought as wooden for the chassis and wings.
Variants
Aside from some different armaments, all the prototypes were generally
the same. Initially, only one cannon was installed; an aerial mine, basically
a small bomb on a wire, was trailed behind the BV 40, which a bomber would
hopefully hit.