The V1-Rocket looked like an airplane.  It had a fuselage 27 feet long, a wingspan of 17.7 feet and the warhead held 850 kilograms of high explosive.  Behind the fuselage were two wire-bound round pressure tanks that contained compressed air to move the vanes.  After the fuselage there was the fuel tank; it held an adequate amount of 80-octane gasoline for 20 minutes of flight.  The rocket had an automatic pilot, which held the V1 on course and at the set altitude, usually at around 4,000 feet.

    The thrust unit was mounted on top of the fuselage.  It was known as a jet engine, but is now called a pulsejet.  The pulsejet was simple and cheap to manufacture.  However, there were some problems with this type of thrust unit; firstly, it did not produce a steady exhaust blast like the turbojet did and secondly, the exhaust was irregular, causing vibrations that could throw the rocket off course.  For this reason, the rocket had to move at high speeds in order to operate properly.  To solve this problem, the Germans launched the V1-Rocket from ramps using catapults to throw the rockets into flight at high speeds. 

    The V1-Rocket had a maximum traveling range of 120 miles and traveled at approximately 400 miles/hour; thus, it travelled faster than the fighter aircrafts that was in use during the war.  The V1-Rocket had a certain mechanism that would cut off fuel to the thrust engine before reaching the target; this would cause the rocket to go into a dive, crashing into the ground and detonating.

    Periodically the mechanism would not function.  The V1-Rocket would then go motor silent and glide into the ground without detonating the warhead.  This is how the Allied countries figured out how the V1-Rocket worked.