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Just because a piggy back composite project is German and dates from the Nazi era, does not make it a part of the Mistel project.Mistel (Mistletoe) was a Junkers initiative to re-purpose old Ju 88 airframes as cruise missiles, controlled for all but the final minutes by a smaller piloted jockey aircraft mounted on the upper fuselage. Variants flown included several using the Bf 109 or FW 190 as the jockey, some operationally. I do not know what others Junkers worked on, but if it was not theirs then it was not a Mistel. Several of the images posted to date appear to depict carrier aircraft air-launching a smaller operational "sharp end", which has been a common enough proposal where the payload craft has insufficient range to reach its target, but was not to my recollection ever flown under this regime (except possibly maybe the odd V-1?) and were certainly never part of the Mistel project.A useful summary from 1977 is provided by Tony Wood & Bill Gunston's Hitler's Luftwaffe, published by Salamander. No doubt there are Junkers design studies which never made it into that book, and I would love to see more about them here.
Just because a piggy back composite project is German and dates from the Nazi era, does not make it a part of the Mistel project.
Mistel (Mistletoe) was a Junkers initiative to re-purpose old Ju 88 airframes as cruise missiles, controlled for all but the final minutes by a smaller piloted jockey aircraft mounted on the upper fuselage. Variants flown included several using the Bf 109 or FW 190 as the jockey, some operationally. I do not know what others Junkers worked on, but if it was not theirs then it was not a Mistel. Several of the images posted to date appear to depict carrier aircraft air-launching a smaller operational "sharp end", which has been a common enough proposal where the payload craft has insufficient range to reach its target, but was not to my recollection ever flown under this regime (except possibly maybe the odd V-1?) and were certainly never part of the Mistel project.
A useful summary from 1977 is provided by Tony Wood & Bill Gunston's Hitler's Luftwaffe, published by Salamander. No doubt there are Junkers design studies which never made it into that book, and I would love to see more about them here.
