Max Kramer

Max Otto Kramer was a German aerodynamicist and engineer who designed some of the earliest radio-guided missiles. Born in Cologne in 1903, he studied electronic engineering in Munich, took a doctorate in aeronautics at Aachen in 1931 and worked on airflow and wing flaps at the German Institute of Aeronautics in Berlin. At the armaments firm Ruhrstahl AG he was responsible for the Fritz X radio-controlled glide bomb and the X-4 air-to-air missile, which was designed to be guided by airborne operators into Allied bomber formations and is regarded as a precursor of postwar guided missiles. After the Second World War he moved to the United States under Operation Paperclip, worked from 1947 to 1952 at the Pilotless Aircraft Laboratory at Johnsville, Pennsylvania, and then became technical director at Coleman Engineering, where he studied laminar flow and compliant coatings to reduce drag. He died in California in 1986.