Until the Do 17Z variant, all Do 17 aircraft had used the narrow and small stepped cockpit of the original civil version. Combined with the narrow fuselage, this meant that all early Do 17 designs suffered from the problem of weak defensive armament because there was no room for additional defensive machine guns.
This led to a completely new design and redesign of the nose and cockpit area, which was enlarged over the sides of the narrow hull and largely glazed. This new design became characteristic for all subsequent Dornier bombers. This enabled more crew members with better ergonomics, a strengthened defensive armament, which could now also be accommodated in fire positions to cover the sensitive ventral and dorsal sides of the aircraft.
The Do 17S was the first version with these characteristics and flew for the first time in 1938 with Daimler-Benz DB600 engines. Fifteen Do 17U scout bombers followed shortly before the ultimate Do 17Z was released, which became the main production version.
The pre-series version Do 17Z-0 and the first production machines Do 17Z-1 appeared at the end of 1938, but proved to be underpowered. The following Do 17Z-2 was powered by 1,000 hp Bramo-Fafnir 323P engines, had a crew of five, a bomb payload of 2,205 lb (1,000 kg) and a defensive armament of six 7.92 mm machine guns. The Do 17Z-2 now had at least a respectable performance and was faster than the contemporary He 111 types, but still significantly slower than the newer Ju 88 bomber, while normally carrying only half the bomb load of the other two types.
At the outbreak of the Second World War, the German Air Force had 370 Do 17 in front operations, of which 212 were Do 17Z. On 2 December 1939 the Luftwaffe had 493 Do 17, 352 of which were Do 17Z and most of them of the Z-2 version. A few of the Z-3 version was converted in 1940 to temporary Z-10 night fighters.
These medium-sized bombers took part extensively in the operations of the Luftwaffe in the Polish campaign 1939, at the Operation Weser Crossing in Norway, at the Western campaign, in the Battle of Britain and in the Balkans Campaign. In Britain as well as in Germany the bomber was popularly baptized as ‘The flying pencil’ or in German as ‘Der Fliegende Bleistift’.
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