Ju388.de is what happens when one obscure aircraft gets the full personal-Web treatment instead of a paragraph in a general aviation database.
The Junkers Ju 388 was a high-altitude development of the Ju 188, itself descended from the Ju 88. The site breaks the aircraft into variants, technical systems, production history, drawings, photographs and the story of a surviving Ju 388 L-1 airframe.
That survivor is Werknummer 560049.
According to the site, American forces found it at the end of World War II in Merseburg. It was transported to the United States aboard HMS Reaper with other captured German aircraft, tested at Wright Field under the designation FE-4010 and later transferred to what became the National Air and Space Museum collection.
The aircraft survived largely because nobody had room to display it.
It remained disassembled in storage.
The site goes deeper than a spec sheet
Christoph Vernaleken’s archive includes exterior and interior photographs, cockpit views, technical drawings, historical images, version comparisons, a U.S. Air Materiel Command report and a map of production sites.
The technical section records a 22-meter wingspan, BMW 801 TJ-0 engines, a pressurized three-man cabin and a service ceiling around 12,800 meters for the Ju 388 L-1.
The page also preserves the weird engineering details that generic summaries tend to erase. Wing de-icing used hot air from the engines, while the tailplane used a separate fuel-fired Kärcher heater. The aircraft carried a remote-controlled rear gun installation rather than a conventional manned rear position.
The source list is equally valuable. Vernaleken cites 1944 and 1945 Junkers documents, technical drawings and German military material rather than presenting the page as unsourced enthusiast lore.
That matters because rare-aircraft history is full of repeated errors. A surviving primary-document trail gives researchers something to work backward from.
The site was last visibly edited in 2011, and its HTML still carries the flavor of the period: fixed backgrounds, image rollovers, hand-built navigation and separate English and German pages.
But the underlying research has aged much better than the markup.
That is the recurring Ancient Web pattern: old presentation, durable subject matter.