One burst a tire on take off. The other 8 returned due to over heating and burning engines. Those are strange operational troubles indeed. One was shot down by NFs.
Major General Pelz on the Feb 13 mission.
Then there is the question, why did the bomb load decrease so much?
It seems that mission has been discussed over at the Axis History Forum.
"In I./KG100 reports these aircrafts appear as A-3 not A-5. Also they were in the process of moving in France for the Steinbock raids, 3./KG100 began to move from Lechfeld to Chateaudun 3 weeks prior this raid, 2./KG100 started to move the week before the raid. The maintenance facilities required to operate He-177 were still to come, prior this move only one He-177 squad operated from Chateaudun. In plus all the He-177 that 2. and 3./KG100 had were new builds, not yet flown in combat, so the manufacturing defects were yet to be discovered. I'm not surprised that they didn't flew well on the first mission and most aborted it.
In general bombers had much stricter safety requirements than fighters, which translated in many aborted missions. For example in average USAAF fighters had 1 inefective sortie in 15-20 sorties flown, USAAF bombers on the other hand had 1 aborted sortie in 5 flown, and some even 1 in 3! When one bomber had problems all its squad mates had to check for the same problems, because they could be affected by the same maitenance deficiencies common to the squad. There are many such instances. I can give you an example from B-29 missions against Japan:
92 plane leave India
79 reach China
75 dispatched for mission
68 leave China
47 reach the target
1 single bomb managed to fall somewhere near the target"
Same guy on He 177A-5's "serious problems":
"I completely disagree with this affirmation. Although it is often mentioned in the old literature, it never comes with a satisfactory prove (all they bring in their support are some single instances when He-177 performed badly). They say that He-177 was marred by mechanical failures, although their never succeed in explaining why the crews loved the aircraft. Where they suicidal? Of course not. If you look at the service stats, you'll see that the expected losses in accidents was lower than on most other types serving with LW, and even those caused by the enemy action were low although most of the time they performed extremely dangerous antishipping missions. I already gave those stats in another thread, they are eye opening."
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?p=532279
