Posted on 06/26/2009 4:37:21 AM PDT by Dallas59
ON TV Hitler's Stealth Fighter airs Sunday, June 28, at 9 p.m. ET/PT on the National Geographic Channel. About the show >>
Top stealth-plane experts have re-created a radical, nearly forgotten Nazi aircraft: the Horten 2-29, a retro-futuristic fighter that arrived too late in World War II to make it into mass production. (See Hitler's stealth fighter in pictures.)
The engineers' goal was to determine whether the so-called stealth fighter was truly radar resistant. In the process, they've uncovered new clues to just how close Nazi engineers were to unleashing a jet that some say could have changed the course of the war.
To replicate the Ho 2-29 late last year for a documentary premiering Sunday, a team from the Northrop Grumman defense-contracting corporation used original Nazi blueprints (re-created blueprints of Hitler's stealth fighter) and the only surviving Ho 2-29, which has been stored in a U.S. government facility for more than 50 years.
The all-wing Ho 2-29 looked more like today's U.S. B-2 bomber (B-2 bomber picture)—or something from a Star Wars prequel—than like any other World War II aircraft. Made primarily of wood and powered by jet engines, the plane was designed for speeds of up to 600 miles an hour (970 kilometers an hour).
(Excerpt) Read more at news.nationalgeographic.com ...
Germany was way ahead of it’s time...Genius mixed with tyranny and horror.
Yes and I hear DaVinci invented the helicopter as well...
It looks to me like it had no chance of flying without a tail in the design and lake of computers to control wing surfaces in flight.
I suspect they would never achieved great success for the same reasons our early flying wings failed. They would have needed modern computers to make the second by second tiny adjustments that are required to keep them in the air.
Kromagg science from across the dimensions.
I'm still shaking my head after reading that sentence.
I thought “lake” was used as a synonym for “a whole bunch of”. ;-)
The problem is that a successful test flight does not mean a successful plane and weapons platform. We also flew flying wings on successful test flights but lots of times they weren’t.
If I’m not mistaken Edwards Air Force Base is named for a pilot killed during a test flight of a flying wing design.
You, Sir or Madam, are a Trufan. And if they hadn't oiled the damn gate, the series would have ended three years earlier and a whole lot better. harumph!
Not likely. There are those little pesky details of not having any fuel, or of being able to get time to train pilots in how to fly the things, or of not having airbases not under constant attack.
It takes more to control the skies than a superior aircraft.
“That had been tried before and failed time and time again,” Lee said. “Reimar Horten took the idea further and made it more practical than any other designer really up until the B-2.”
Jack Northrop (if he was still alive) might dispute that comment. The B36 and YB49 must have been at least as successful as the German plane. Somewhere I have a large poster of the YB49 in flight over the California desert...
hh
Fast forward to 2009. American policy makers worry about rogue nations like Iran and North Korea, and radical Muslim terrorists, and rightly so. However, there is general myopia about the fact that the rogue nations and the terrorists are sponsored by China and Russia. With the shrinkage of our own industrial base for a number of reasons, I must wonder if we could sustain a massive ground and naval war like the two World Wars. Additionally, given the general dumbing down of the American populace, our long term ability to keep ahead of the Russians and the Chinese in nuclear weapons and electronic and computer technology must be questioned.
Unless these questions can be addressed successfully, America's future as a superpower is in doubt. Britain and Spain lost their superpower status due to the myopia of their leadership and misguided foreign policy. Is it our turn in this century to suffer the same fate?
Bump for later when I’m at home so I can swipe that picture.
The Me 262 proved that. At its given role of bomber interception, it was fast enough and heavily-armed enough that it would be largely invulnerable to fighter escort—it could just sweep past the Mustangs and Thunderbolts, blast bombers with those four big 30mm cannon, and fly away. But there weren’t enough of them, there weren’t enough skilled pilots to fly them, and those that did see service were vulnerable during takeoff and landing from the long paved strips that they needed (and were easily spotted by Allied fighters). Plus the 262’s engines had an average life of 10 flying hours before they fell apart.
When a good pilot got a hold of an Me 262, it was a fearsome combination (witness the record of Jagdverband 44, the “air unit of the aces”). But the odds were way too stacked against Germany by that point.
I remember being able to fly the Go 229 in the old Lucasarts PC game “Secrets of the Luftwaffe,” a long time ago. They modeled it with the alleged performance figures that Horten and Gotha (the manufacturer) gave, so it really basically was a superfighter.
}:-)4
This radio-controlled model seems to fly well enough.
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