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The Heinkel He 118 was a prototype German monoplane dive bomber design that lost out to the Junkers Ju 87 Stuka in the 1930s, and was never ordered by the Luftwaffe.
It was a conventional cantilever monoplane with an inverted gull wing of Elliptical wing planform mounted midway up the fuselage. It was considerably more streamlined than the Junkers competitor, with retractable landing gear and an internal bomb bay.
As designed it was limited to filling a role similar to an attack bomber like the Henschel Hs 123 rather than a true dive bomber like the Junkers Ju 87. It was limited to bombing from a shallow angle, more properly known as "glide bombing", with the second crew member acting as the bomb aimer.
Heinkel complained in his biography that Udet ignored instructions and flew the aircraft beyond its limits. He suggests that the failure doomed his design, in spite of being unable to dive vertically like the Stuka.
Of the 15 He 118s built, two went to Japan where they were designated DXHe. However, the aircraft disintegrated during Japanese flight tests. The 13-Shi (1939) design specification that led to the Yokosuka D4Y naval dive bomber may have been inspired by the He 118, but otherwise the two aircraft had little in common.
Heinkel used another example as a flying testbed for the Heinkel HeS 3 turbojet, with the jet engine slung under its fuselage. Although its pilot took off and landed using the He 118's piston engine, he started the turbojet engine in flight and flew under its power in July 1939, the first time an aircraft flew under jet power. The following month the similarly powered, fixed conventional landing gear-fitted Heinkel He 178 V1 would make the first flight powered entirely by a turbojet engine.Guttman, Robert, "Heinkel's Jet Test-Bed," Aviation History, March 2012, p. 15.
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