The Fieseler

Fieseler

The Gerhard Fieseler Werke was a German aircraft manufacturer of the 1930s and 40s. The company is remembered mostly for its military aircraft built for the Luftwaffe during the Second World War.-History:...

 Fi 168 was a projected German

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

 ground attack aircraft designed in 1938 by Frederik Kassel, who created the aircraft after a request from the Technisches Amt (Technical Department) of the RLM Reichsluftfahrtministerium - (German aviation ministry).

The two-engine aircraft was a strut-braced high-wing monoplane with two tail-booms and a narrow fuselage pod carried by struts under the centre-section, and was designed to operate in areas featuring rough terrain

Terrain

Terrain, or land relief, is the vertical and horizontal dimension of land surface. When relief is described underwater, the term bathymetry is used...

, and boasted two rigidly mounted forward-facing machine guns

Machine gun

A machine gun is a fully automatic mounted or portable firearm, usually designed to fire rounds in quick succession from an ammunition belt or large-capacity magazine, typically at a rate of several hundred rounds per minute....

. The former development director Erich Bachem

Erich Bachem

Erich Bachem was a German engineer.In the 1930s Erich Bachem designed the Aero-Sport camping trailer built by glider company Wolf Hirth in Kirchheim unter Teck from woodt. Until 1944 Bachem designed planes for Fieseler.In 1944, he designed for the SS the vertical take-off manned rocket plane...

described the Fi 168 as a flying "tank destroyer".

The project was discontinued at the direction of the Air Ministry in September 1939.