The Henschel Hs 122 was a German army cooperation/

reconnaissance In military operations, reconnaissance or scouting is the exploration of an area by military forces to obtain information about enemy forces, terrain, and other activities. Examples of reconnaissance include patrolling by troops (skirmisher ...

aircraft of the mid-1930s, radial-engined and with a

parasol wing A monoplane is a fixed-wing aircraft configuration with a single mainplane, in contrast to a biplane or other types of multiplanes, which have multiple planes. A monoplane has inherently the highest efficiency and lowest drag of any wing confi ...

. Though only pre-production variants entered service, the Hs 122 led on to the Hs 126 which was produced in large numbers.

Development

The Hs 122 was the

Henschel Henschel & Son (german: Henschel und Sohn) was a German company, located in Kassel, best known during the 20th century as a maker of transportation equipment, including locomotives, trucks, buses and trolleybuses, and armoured fighting v ...

company's second aircraft, its first, the Hs 121 not being intended for production. It was designed in response to a

Reich Air Ministry The Ministry of Aviation (german: Reichsluftfahrtministerium, abbreviated RLM) was a government department during the period of Nazi Germany (1933–45). It is also the original name of the Detlev-Rohwedder-Haus building on the Wilhelmstrasse ...

call for a multi-role army co-operation aircraft to replace the ageing

Heinkel He 46 The Heinkel He 46 was a German World War II-era monoplane designed in 1931 for the close reconnaissance and army co-operation roles. While it served with the ''Luftwaffe''s front-line units only briefly at the start of World War II, the He 46 serv ...

. The design emerged as a single-engine two-seat

machine with a fixed undercarriage. The wing centre section was carried above the fuselage on a series of short

strut A strut is a structural component commonly found in engineering, aeronautics, architecture and anatomy. Struts generally work by resisting longitudinal compression, but they may also serve in tension. Human anatomy Part of the functionality o ...

s and the swept outer sections were braced to the lower fuselage with V struts. The wings were built around two metal spars and had metal-covered leading edges and upper surfaces with fabric elsewhere. The fuselage was an elliptical metal

monocoque Monocoque ( ), also called structural skin, is a structural system in which loads are supported by an object's external skin, in a manner similar to an egg shell. The word ''monocoque'' is a French term for "single shell". First used for boats, ...

, with a metal-structured tail also metal covered apart from fabric control surfaces. The

tailplane A tailplane, also known as a horizontal stabiliser, is a small lifting surface located on the tail (empennage) behind the main lifting surfaces of a fixed-wing aircraft as well as other non-fixed-wing aircraft such as helicopters and gyropla ...

was mounted about halfway up the fin, supported by a parallel pair of struts. The spatted mainwheels were each mounted on V struts to the fuselage. The cockpits were open, with the pilot sitting below a cut-out in the wing trailing edge and the second crew member in a separate cockpit aft. The first prototype, registered ''D-UBYN'', was powered, like several other German aircraft of the time including the Messerschmitt Bf 109, by a

Rolls-Royce Kestrel The Kestrel or type F is a 21 litre (1,300 in³) 700 horsepower (520 kW) class V-12 aircraft engine from Rolls-Royce, their first cast-block engine and the pattern for most of their future piston-engine designs. Used during the interwar ...

V-12-cylinder water-cooled engine; but the next prototype (''D-UBAV'') had a 460 kW (610 hp) Siemens Sh 22B 9-cylinder supercharged radial. There were at least three prototypes, followed by a small number of pre-production Siemens-powered Hs 122B-0 aircraft which entered service in 1936. These were followed on the Henschel production lines at

Schönefeld Schönefeld (meaning ''beautiful field'') is a suburban municipality in the Dahme-Spreewald district, Brandenburg, Germany. It borders the southeastern districts of Berlin. The municipal area encompasses the old Berlin Schönefeld Airport (SXF) a ...

by the more powerful Hs 126.

Specifications (Hs 122 B-0)

Henschel_Hs_122_3-view_L'Aerophile_September_1939

References

;Citations ;Cited sources * {{Authority control Hs 122 1930s German military reconnaissance aircraft Parasol-wing aircraft Single-engined tractor aircraft Aircraft first flown in 1935