Seventeen years ago today, German scientist Willy Fiedler climbed into a makeshift cockpit installed in a V-1 rocket-bomb that was attached to the underbelly of a Heinkel bomber.

The World War 2, German bomber rolled down a runway and took off.

To the German pilot in the bomber the rocket became a faint black speck, hurtling through the sky at the then incredible speed of 420 m.p.h..

It happened because the German aircraft industry lacked the experience to build a long-range bomber fleet quickly, and because Hitler was insistent on the very rapid creation of a numerically large force.

* 1916 – Werner Baumbach, German bomber pilot ( d. 1953 )

* 1944 – World War II: The " Big Week " began with American bomber raids on German aircraft manufacturing centers.

* AEG G. IV, a German World War I heavy bomber

* Friedrichshafen G. IV, a 1918 German medium bomber

* Gotha G. IV, a 1916 German heavy bomber

The device was developed for use as part of the Germans ' Kehl radio control transmitter system used in certain German bomber aircraft, used to guide both the rocket-boosted anti-ship missile Henschel Hs 293, and the unpowered pioneering precision-guided munition Fritz-X, against maritime and other targets.

German industry could build two medium bombers for one heavy bomber and the RLM would not gamble on developing a heavy bomber which would also take time.

In 1936 the Junkers Ju 52 was the backbone of the German bomber fleet.

Inevitably, both the Bomber B and Amerika Bomber programs were victims of the continued emphasis of the Wehrmacht's insistence for the Luftwaffe to support the Army as its primary mission, as well as the increasingly devastating results of the RAF Bomber Command at night, and by 1943 the USAAF's Eighth and Fifteenth Air Forces ' heavy bomber raids by daylight on the German aviation industry, which catastrophically diminished the Third Reich's overall aviation production capacity later in World War II.

* 1953 – Werner Baumbach, German bomber pilot ( b. 1916 )

* Supermarine 318 – four engined heavy bomber to B. 12 / 36, abandoned after prototypes destroyed by German bombing attack

Subsequent German wartime aircraft design took account of the discovery, evident in the slim mid-fuselage of aircraft such as the Messerschmitt P. 1112, P. 1106, and the indisputably wasp-waisted Focke-Wulf Fw 1000x3 type A long range bomber, but also apparent in delta wing designs like the Henschel Hs 135.

** The " Big Week " begins with American bomber raids on German aircraft manufacturing centers.

* December 18 – Hans-Ulrich Rudel, German World War II dive bomber pilot ( b. 1916 )

During the First World War, a number of barracks and voluntary hospitals were set up around the city, and in 1917 a German bomber crash-landed near Broad Oak Road.

Other German experiments with JATO were aimed at assisting the launch of interceptor aircraft such as the Messerschmitt Me 262C, as the Heimatschützer special versions, usually fitted with either a version of the Walter HWK 109-509 liquid fuelled rocket engine from the Me 163 Komet program either in the extreme rear of the fuselage or semi -" podded " beneath it just behind the wing's trailing edge, to assist its Junkers Jumo 004 turbojets, or a pair of specially rocket-boosted BMW 003R combination jet-rocket powerplants in place of the Jumo 004s, so that the Me 262C Heimatschützer interceptors could reach enemy bomber formations sooner.

* He 177 A-0, a pre-production series of the 1942 German Heinkel He 177 heavy bomber

* Ju 87 A-0, a variant of the 1936 German Junkers Ju 87 dive bomber aircraft

On 22 January, the RAF director of bomber operations, Air Commodore Sydney Bufton, sent a memo to the Deputy Chief of the Air Staff, Air Marshal Sir Norman Bottomley, suggesting that what appeared to be a coordinated air attack by the RAF to aid the current Soviet offensive would have a detrimental effect on German morale.

The primary school ( which only has 50 pupils at most ) was formerly the village girls ' school, the boys ' school being destroyed in World War 2 after a German bomber shed its unused payload.

* 1918 – World War I: The Flight over Vienna mission, when a dozen Italian Servizio Aeronautico single-engined military aircraft drop leaflets over the main capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, demanding that both Austrian hostilities against Italy be ended, and for Austria to end its alliance with the German Empire.

* Aquila A 210, a German aircraft

The best known aircraft of this type were manufactured by the German Zeppelin company.

Although used during the Normandy landings, by that point German aircraft were contained by the Allies own air forces and they were largely unneeded.

In 2005, a small aircraft crashed close to the German parliament.

During the interwar period, aircraft and tank technologies matured and were combined with systematic application of the German tactics of infiltration and bypassing of enemy strong points.

The Luftwaffe, the German air force, was established, and development begun on ground-attack aircraft and doctrines.

The targets of the German aircraft were actually the rail lines and bridges.

However, the Western Allies ' air-to-ground aircraft were so greatly feared out of proportion to their actual tactical success, that following the lead up to Operation Overlord German vehicle crews showed reluctance to move en masse during daylight.

Indeed, the final German blitzkrieg operation in the west, Operation Wacht am Rhein, was planned to take place during poor weather which grounded Allied aircraft.

Allied forces deployed to the flanks of the German penetration, and as soon as the skies cleared, Allied aircraft were again able to attack motorized columns.

The Luftwaffe did end up with an air force consisting mainly of relatively short-range aircraft, but this does not prove that the German air force was solely interested in ’ tactical ’ bombing.

The appearance of the aircraft and tank in the First World War, often hailed as a revolution in military affairs ( RMA ), offered the German military a chance to get back to the traditional war of movement as practiced by Moltke the Elder.

Both Catalina and Sunderland aircraft were flown during the course of World War II in search of Japanese and German submarines and surface raiders.

* Fokker E. II, a 1915 German single-seat monoplane fighter aircraft

* Pfalz E. II, a German aircraft powered by the Oberursel U. I engine

The French chasseur and German Jagdflugzeuge are terms that continue to be used for fighters, and mean " hunter " and " hunting aircraft " respectively.

The use of metal aircraft structures was pioneered before World War I by Breguet but would find its biggest proponent with Anthony Fokker who used chrome-molybdenum steel tubing for the fuselage structure of all his fighter designs, while the innovative German engineer Hugo Junkers developed two all-metal, single-seat fighter monoplane designs with cantilever wings: the strictly experimental Junkers J 2 private-venture aircraft, made with steel, and some forty examples of the Junkers D. I, made with corrugated duralumin, all based on his experience in creating the pioneering Junkers J 1 all-metal airframe technology demonstration aircraft of late 1915.

In April 1917, during a brief period of German aerial supremacy, a grandstanding Member of Parliament ( upset at the lack of orders for his own aircraft manufacturing firm ) claimed that, on the Western Front, a British pilot's average life expectancy was 93 flying hours, or about three weeks of active service.

This was just the opportunity the German Luftwaffe, Italian Regia Aeronautica, and the Soviet Union's Red Air Force needed to test their latest aircraft.

Each fighter squadron ( German: Staffel ) was divided into several flights ( Schwärme ) of four aircraft.