Natters! Yippee!

I've always liked the German Ba349 Natter rocket interceptor. Well, I shouldn't say "like", because that sort of implies that I wish I'd gone to the senior prom with one, and that isn't the case at all. Let's just say I find the Natter interesting in concept and design, a vertical-launch manned rocket interceptor that works more like a surface-to-air missile than an airplane, with the rocket engine and the pilot landing by parachute and the rest of it going straight into the dumpster. No loss though, since it's made mostly of laminated wood and the WWII equivalent of melted-down tin cans.

The latest issue of FineScale Modeler contains a lengthy article by Matt Irvine, which is good for two reasons. The first is that I always enjoy his articles (I always enjoy his books too; Creating Space remains high on my list of "beach books"), and the second is that his article was about a massive display of Natters, ground vehicles, launch towers, gewgaws and whatnot, complete with a representation of Dr. Erich Bachem himself, looking more like a Pentecostal preacher than a German engineer.

I won't say that FSM has bored me lately, but I think it's fair to say it hasn't exactly thrilled me either. Oh great, another 1/32nd Trumpeter this-or-that... Oh great, another 1/35th Tiger with more aftermarket parts than Don Garlit's dragster. Ho-de-hum. It's the superdetailed German armor with $500 of added detail parts that particularly exhaust me. But all of a sudden here's Matt Irvine and Natters, and my day is brightened.

But it also betrays the subtle risk in doing too much research on the Internet. Matt in his article claims that the Natter made only one manned flight, namely, the fateful flight were Leutnant Lothar Sieber was killed. It took off, vanished into clouds, and presently reappeared coming straight down. Officials blamed the canopy for tearing away prematurely, though it is possible it came off because Sieber was attempting to bale out. Postwar investigation revealed that at least one of the four solid-fuel booster rockets had not jettisoned properly, a much more likely explanation for the accident. Not that matters; Sieber was dead and that was that. Matt says in more than one place that this is the only manned vertically launched flight until the flight of Yuri Gagarin in 1961.

But I've read in several places that after Sieber's flight, the Natter development team flew several Natters unmanned and with success (the Patin autopilot could manage that task) and then flew at least one fully successful manned flight. But since nobody ever seems to cite the name of this alleged German pilot, maybe his flight is more alleged than I like to think. I suspect without being able to prove it that Sieber's flight was the last flight sponsored by the SS, who had a habit of taking things over in Germany, but Bachem himself may have tried to carry on the program. But either way, Matt is right: Sieber's flight is the last confirmed manned flight of the Natter.

I don't think the Natter would ever have been the answer that the Germans were looking for - the whole Jaegernotprogramm was doomed to failure by the very scale of the problem that the Germans faced, even if the most promising aspects of it (such as the Wasserfall) had worked. Nor should it; the Nazis could not under any circumstances have been allowed to win the war. But as an off-the-cuff attempt to build a rocket, the Natter deserves a certain amount of respect. Just don't ask Lothar Sieber what he thinks of it.

PS: "Natter" is a tricky word to translate. Some sources render it as "viper", while others have it as "colubrid", which is a huge family of snakes that does not include vipers. So I don't know. I usually settle for "viper" because it seems like a more virile-sounding name than colubrid...