The Henschel Hs 298 was a 1940s German rocket-powered air-to-air missile designed by Professor Herbert Wagner of Henschel.
The Hs 298 was designed specifically to attack allied bomber aircraft and was the first missile designed specifically for air-to-air use. It was to be carried on special launch rails by Dornier Do 217s (five missiles) or Focke-Wulf Fw 190s (two missiles) and carried 48 kg (106 lb) of explosive.
The Hs 298 was a mid-wing monoplane with tapered swept back wings and it had a single horizontal stabiliser with twin vertical fins. It was powered by a Henschel-designed rocket motor built by Schmidding as the 109–543; it had two stages, the first high velocity stage was designed to leave the launch aircraft at 938km/h (585 mph), in the second stage the speed was brought back to 682 km/h (425 mph) to give a maximum range of about one mile (1.6 km). It used a Strassburg-Kehl FuG 203 radio guidance system powered by a propeller-driven (mounted on the nose) electric generator. The missile needed two crew on the launch aircraft to control it, one operator used a reflector-type sight to aim at the target and the other flew the missile using a joystick and another sight paired to the first with a servo system.
The only known test firings were carried out on 22 December 1944 with three missiles carried by a Junkers Ju-88G. Only two missiles left the launch rails with one failing to release, of the two released one exploded prematurely and nose-dived into the ground. It was planned to enter mass production in January 1945 but the project was abandoned in favour of the X-4.
