Heinkel Lerche

{{Infobox aircraft

| name=Heinkel Lerche

| image= Hubschraubermuseum Bückeburg 2010 0978.JPG

| caption=

| type=Tail-sitter Fighter

| national_origin=Germany

| manufacturer=Heinkel

| designer=Heinkel

| first_flight=

| introduction=

| retired=

| status=Paper project only, never built

| produced=

| primary_user=

| number_built=

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}}

{{More footnotes|date=July 2011}}

The Heinkel Lerche ({{langx|en|Lark}}) was the name of a set of project studies made by German aircraft designer Heinkel in 1944 and 1945 for a VTOL fighter and ground-attack aircraft.

The Lerche was an early coleopter design. It would take off and land sitting on its tail, flying horizontally like a conventional aircraft. The pilot would lie prone in the nose. It would be powered by two contra-rotating propellers which were contained in a doughnut-shaped, nine-sided annular wing.

The design was developed starting 1944 and concluding in March 1945. The aerodynamic principles of an annular wing were basically sound,{{clarify|date=June 2024}}{{cn|date=July 2024}} but the proposal was faced with a host of unsolved manufacture and control problems which would have made the project highly impractical, even without the material shortages of late-war Nazi Germany.