Developed under the Emergency Fighter Program, it was designed and built quickly and made primarily of wood as metals were in very short supply and prioritised for other aircraft.

[2][3] In early 1944, the 8AF re-opened its bombing campaign with the Big Week offensive in conjunction with the RAF, to force a decisive battle with Luftwaffe by attacking German aircraft production and so achieve Allied air superiority over Europe.

The bombers returned to the skies with the long-range North American P-51 Mustang escort fighters progressively replacing Republic P-47 Thunderbolts and Lockheed P-38 Lightnings.

Unencumbered with the heavy weapons needed to down a bomber, the Mustangs (and longer-ranged versions of other aircraft) were able to fend off the Luftwaffe with relative ease.

The Luftwaffe responded by changing tactics, forming in front of the bombers and making a single pass through the formations, giving the defense little time to react.

[4] This change in tactics resulted in a sudden increase in the rate of irreplaceable losses to the Luftwaffe day fighter force, as their heavily laden aircraft were "bounced" long before reaching the bombers.

[9] Instead, they suggested that a new design be built – one so inexpensive that if a machine was damaged or worn out, it could simply be discarded and replaced with a fresh plane straight off the assembly line.

The official RLM Volksjäger design competition parameters specified a single-seat fighter, powered by a single BMW 003 turbojet,[12][13] a slightly lower-thrust engine not in demand for either the Me 262 or the Arado Ar 234 jet bomber, already in service.

[10] Some officials, such as Artur Axmann and Karl Saur, suggested even glider or student pilots should be able to fly the jet effectively in combat and, had the Volksjäger achieved widespread use, this would have been a likely occurrence.

[18] After the war, Ernst Heinkel said, "[The] unrealistic notion that this plane should be a 'people's fighter,' in which the Hitler Youth, after a short training regimen with clipped-wing two-seater gliders like the DFS Stummel-Habicht, could fly for the defense of Germany, displayed the unbalanced fanaticism of those days.

[28][29] Heinkel had carried out some design work of a new twin-engine fighter with one engine placed on top of the aircraft and another under the nose, the highest point on the bottom of the fuselage.

For this reason, the tail was constructed with two small vertical stabilizers positioned to either side of the exhaust's path, and the horizontal elevator mounted below it.

[32] The combination of the engine being directly above the pilot and the wings on either side would make a conventional bailout very risky, so the aircraft was designed from the start to feature an ejection seat akin to the one used in the Heinkel He 219 night fighter.

This was despite the fact that the factory in Wuppertal making Tego film plywood glue — used in a substantial number of late-war German aviation designs whose airframes and/or major airframe components were meant to be constructed mostly from wood — had been bombed by the Royal Air Force and a replacement had to be quickly substituted, without realizing that the replacement adhesive was highly acidic and would disintegrate the wooden parts it was intended to be fastening.

[31][44][45] An investigation into the failure revealed that the wing structure had to be strengthened and some redesign was needed, as the glue bonding required for the wood parts was in many cases defective.

Instead, a number of small changes were made, such as the addition of lead ballast in the nose to move the centre of gravity towards the front of the aircraft while the tail surfaces were also slightly increased in size.

[48][49] These versions also included – as possibly the pioneering example of their use on a production-line, military jet aircraft – small, anhedraled aluminium "drooped" wingtips, reportedly designed by Alexander Lippisch and known in German as Lippisch-Ohren ("Lippisch Ears"), in an attempt to cure the stability problems via effectively "decreasing" the main wing panels' marked three degree dihedral angle.

[51] Only a small number were built, and even fewer delivered to the sole He 162 Hitler Youth training unit to be activated (in March 1945) at an airbase at Sagan.

[53] The short flight duration of barely 30 minutes was due to only having a single 695-litre (183 US gallon) capacity flexible-bladder fuel tank in the fuselage directly under the engine's intake.

[52][58] By April 1945, it had been anticipated that output would reach 1,000 aircraft per month, which was double the rate achieved when the Mittelwerk plant commenced deliveries.

In February, deliveries of the He 162 commenced to its first operational unit, I./JG 1 (1st Group of Jagdgeschwader 1 Oesau — "1st Fighter Wing"), which had previously flown the Focke-Wulf Fw 190A.

I./JG 1 was transferred to Parchim, which, at the time, was also a base for the Me 262-equipped Jagdgeschwader 7, some 80 km south-southwest of the Heinkel factory's coastal airfield at "Marienehe" (today known as Rostock-Schmarl, northwest of the Rostock city centre), where the pilots could pick up their new jets and start intensive training beginning in March 1945.

This was all happening simultaneously with unrelenting Allied air attacks on the transportation network, aircraft production facilities and petroleum, oil, and lubrication (POL) product-making installations of the Third Reich – these had now begun to also target the Luftwaffe's jet and rocket fighter bases as well.

[citation needed] During its exceedingly brief operational service career, the He 162's cartridge-type ejector seat was employed under combat conditions by JG 1's pilots at least four times.

All JG 1's aircraft were grounded on 5 May, when General Admiral Hans-Georg von Friedeburg signed the surrender of all German armed forces in the Netherlands, Northwest Germany and Denmark.

[70][71] Erprobungskommando 162 fighters, which had been passed on to JV 44, an elite jet unit under Adolf Galland a few weeks earlier, were all destroyed by their crews to keep them from falling into Allied hands.

Test pilot Eric Brown of the Fleet Air Arm, who flew a record 486 different types of aircraft, said the He 162 had "the lightest and most effective aerodynamically balanced controls" he had experienced.

On 9 November 1945, during a demonstration flight from RAE Farnborough, one of the fin and rudder assemblies broke off at the start of a low-level roll causing the aircraft to crash into Oudenarde Barracks, Aldershot, killing Marks and a soldier on the ground.

This ungainly combination would take off on a sprung trolley fitted with tandem wheels on each side for the "main gear" equivalent, derived from that used on the first eight Arado Ar 234 prototypes, with all three jets running.