Heinkel He 46
type of aircraft
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 served as late as 1943 as a nighttime nuisance bomber and with the Hungarian Air Force.
Background
During the early 1930s, the German military was beginning to build up in strength. The RLM (German Air Ministry) wanted aircraft that could be rapidly built and would be able to swell the Luftwaffe's inventory with large numbers of aircraft for training. Ernst Heinkel designed many of these early aircraft. The He 46, for instance was, created to fill the short-range reconnaissance and army co-operation role for the Luftwaffe.
Development
As designed in 1931, the He 46 was a two-seat sesquiplane of mixed construction. The upper wing was swept back 10°. This is a common trick when a change in an aircraft's design moves the center of gravity to the rear; rather than moving the whole wing back to counter for the shift, it is easier to simply angle the wings back slightly, which requires very little change to the basic design, or even the overall structure of the wing. (The similarly angled wings on the Fairey Swordfish are due to just such a mid-program change to the weight distribution of the aircraft.)
The tailplane was mounted high and braced by struts.
“Heinkel He 46” enters the record as type of aircraft. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Heinkel, type and aircraft can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q707893. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1931 and 1943.
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This entry incorporates text from “Heinkel He 46” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.