June 22, 1935 - Berlin
General Udet was in his office, after returning from the Baltic coast, speaking with RLM chief Goering on the telephone before a staff meeting.
"Ja, flew Heinkel's new kite yesterday, the He-113. On the 100 km course, it held an average speed of just under 635 km/h, without clipped racing wings or a sprint engine. Not half bad, though they'll have to either fix the cooling system or go back to a normal one, when I landed I had probably 5-6 lights trying to tell me that a pump had failed. Not that I knew what they meant, hah! No one told me until I'd landed!"
"Heinkel doesn't like the -113 number? Eh, if he'd rather use -100 let him, it's not important. It's a nice plane, from the few flights I've made in it, especially now that they've put the bigger tail on it, the V1 tended to snake where the V2 doesn't."
"They're planning on putting clipped wings and a sprint engine into the V3 to try for a record later this year. The V4 is almost done, I saw it in the factory, it'll be going to Rechlin, take a spin when you can."
"Is it better than the -109? Right now it is, ja. I'm not sure about replacing the -109, not so soon, and I expect Messerschmit can fix some of the things that are giving the -113 the advantage right now, but I'm certainly inclined to give Heinkel some more room to develop his kite. It could be, if the cooling system gets fixed, that we'll end up with 2 or 3 standard single-engine fighters, just like we had in the last war. Not the end of the world."
"Ah, so Focke-Wulf is getting a couple of the BMW-139s? Are they going to put them in a fighter??? That will be different, be interesting to see what Tank comes up with."
"Right, staff meeting time. Aufwedersein!"