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Hitler's Stealth Fighter
DesScorp writes "Aviation Week reports on a television special from the National Geographic Channel on what may have been the world's first true stealth fighter, the Horten Ho 229, a wooden design that was to include a layer of carbon material sandwiched in the leading edge to defeat radar. Northrop Grumman, experts at stealth technology from their Tacit Blue and B-2 programs, have built a full-size replica of the airframe and tested it at their desert facilities where they determined that the design was indeed stealthy, and would have been practically invisible to Britain's Chain Home radar system of WWII."
What DIDN'T Hitler Do?
The most interesting photos:
http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/staticfiles/NGC/StaticFiles/Images/Show/39xx/394x/3942_Hitlers_Stealth_Fighter-09_10240768.jpg
http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/staticfiles/NGC/StaticFiles/Images/Show/39xx/394x/3942_Hitlers_Stealth_Fighter-08_10240768.jpg
http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/staticfiles/NGC/StaticFiles/Images/Show/39xx/394x/3942_Hitlers_Stealth_Fighter-04_10240768.jpg
http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/staticfiles/NGC/StaticFiles/Images/Show/39xx/394x/3942_Hitlers_Stealth_Fighter-11_10240768.jpg
They'd only see the plane leaving, not arriving, which is quite an interesting compromise, as every other stealth programme goes with the notion that it has to be invisible at all times.
This was designed so that, once it passed Britains coastal radar, they wouldn't be able to scramble fighters fast enough once they did detect them. Rather ingenious.
It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for being subtle.
I believe that the advances in detection technology would always have allowed the allies to hear a Horton Ho.
I remember hearing about this thinking, "Does this actually work?". Many historians seem to think that If they had this earlier it could have changed the tide of the war... Still, what fool in a wooden plane would mess with the P-51 Mustang? Nobody, thats who. Very cool that had stealth technology... even if it was in its infancy.
i doubt if this would've changed the outcome of the war. even if hitler was able to mass produce this, i don't think think it would be able to carry that much payload or have a targeting mechanism that's worth mentioning. but i took up computer science, so who am i to talk?
You know who ELSE wanted stealth planes... Thats right... HITLER No, Not Adolf, I mean Chip Hitler. You know, his brother. He was big into planes and stuff.
what with swastika flags and all. I'll be in trouble if someone has overseen my screen just then, being a german living in Britain.
It's kind of scary all the truly advanced tech Germany was working on at the end of the War. They're rocket scientists were disturbingly advanced compared to anything on the Allied side. It took Korolyov YEARS just too replicate Von Braun's V-2 in Russia, and that was working *with* Von Braun's own assistant, Helmut Gröttrup.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
How would they actually achieve stable flight though?
Current technology requires computers to keep designs like this stable in the air.
Some people are only alive because it's against the law for me to hunt them down and kill them.
Why have Germans accomplished so much in engineering and science? Here, "German" includes Germans of all religious groups, including Judaism.
Why have Africans made little contribution to engineering and science?
From the article (yeah I know, Slashdot, not supposed to, etc)
IIRC the United States developed something called Atomic Bombs that would have counteracted any advantage Germany would have gained from stealth jets.
The Horton was a bomber, not a fighter. It was part of Hitlers 1000,1000,1000 goal. 1000kg of bombs 1000km at 1000km/hr.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
Yeah, you're right. They should hang some Disney princess banners so as not to offend people.
Waahh waahhh
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_Man#The_cuckoo_clock_speech
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
It's unlikely that a plywood plane would show up on England's chain-home or chain-home-low radars.
The technology at the time forced them to use frequencies in the 10-meter range.
An object has to be at least 1/4 the wavelength in order to give a sizeable reflection.
So a plane with just two smallish metal engines would likely be invisible among the usual sea and ground clutter.
If you aren't mature enough to look at a swastika in a relevant place (we're talking about Nazi Germany here) you shouldn't be on the internet. Let me guess, you are also for the elimination of the flag of the Confederate States too? Please, show some maturity, if you can't handle seeing a swastika, perhaps you shouldn't be looking up information on Nazi Germany.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
This article is utterly bogus. Not that National Geographic has ever been known for quality writing on highly technical topics.
The Ho 229 was built as it was specifically to meet the "1000-1000-1000" bomber contract. This called for an aircraft that could fly 1000 km at 1000 km/h while carrying a 1000 kg warload. And it had to be built of wood, because all of the aluminum, and metalworkers, were accounted for in current projects.
The only way to possibly meet the speed requirement was through jet engines. However, jet engines of the era were extremely inefficient, especially German ones where poor alloys limited exhaust temperatures in the turbine. So in order to get the range while keeping the speed, you needed to cut drag to an absolute minimum.
And that's why the 229 looks like it does. It lacks the profusion of surfaces that conventional designs had, and minimized wetted surface due to the almost non-existent fuselage. This thing is all wing, which means you're losing all the parasitic drag.
ANYTHING else, including these "stealth" features, were utterly secondary.
Moreover I have a very serious problem with the claims that this plane is stealthy. Compressor disks in the engines are an extremely effective radar mirror. This is why the F-117 has "blinds" over the inlets, or why the F-22 has a S-shaped intake system. As you can see in the pictures, in the 229 the compressor face is directly exposed to the front.
Sure, the CH radars were longwave and wouldn't have been good against this aircraft, but that would be true of any small jet of the era. They were extremely good against targets a few meters in size, like a propeller, but anything smaller would be difficult to see.
Claiming this plane was developed _as a stealth plane_ is like claiming the DC-3 was a swept-wing design. Accidental features do not indicate design intent.
Maury
I was flying this in BF1942 Secret Weapons of WWII in 2003.
Todd: I hope it proves as delicious as the farmers that grew them
It's remarkable that we had in our hands a German aircraft that contained within it a very important lesson that we flat out ignored. Building a stealth plane in 1943 meant the Germans had learned something it would take us another 30 years to figure out. Stealth is essential in aircraft.
Instead, we had the likes of unstealthy aircraft flying over Vietnam and getting shot down with rather significant losses to surface to air missiles.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_losses_of_the_Vietnam_War
More than 1700 US aircraft were shot down. That's a catastrophe. It was in response to that that the US Stealth fighter program was initiated in the early 1970s. But, just imagine if we had thought, geez, the Germans had came up with a way to evade radar, we have the plane, newer technology...
You have to wonder, what if?
This is my sig.
It was a plane designed by the Nazis for their war effort. Kind of makes sense to put up a Nazi flag, no?
Trolling is a art,
Technical sophistication is one advantage on the battlefield, but manufacturing capacity is also important.
The Germans choose technical complexity over quantity believing that superior machines could beat the vast numbers of inferior machines the allies built.
The Germans were wrong.
As Stalin said "quantity has a quality all its own". A stealth aircraft or two may have been pretty trick, but if you have thousands of targets to bomb, you better have hundreds if not thousands of aircraft (and pilots) to do the job.
-ted
Hitler wasn't some demonic bad-ass bad-guy. He was a crazed political genius at the right place and right time. His downfall: he wasn't a real geek! He lost because of technical cluelessness! He didn't have the technical knowledge to realize the value of the wonder-weapons until late in the war when the 3rd Reich got desperate, and then it was too late. His right-hand man Goering didn't have a complete grasp of the importance of good intelligence and command and control. (He would have won the Battle of Britain, but he didn't know that he should've continued his campaign against the sector stations.) Even Hitler's understanding of economic warfare was that of an enthusiastic amateur.
We won not because our geeks were better, though they were darn good. We won because we *listened* to them!
The Secret History of Silicon Valley. (How geeks won WWII and the Cold War, and how that led to Silicon Valley.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFSPHfZQpIQ
Also known as: "Reichsflugscheibe"
We could be living in a utopia right now.
Yep. Rather than wasting my day in front of networking gear and *nix prompts I could be in my stealthly wooden flying car going to my job at the gas chambers.
Trolling is a art,
It's quite an amazing feat of the German scientists, if they hadn't scapegoated the jews to get into power they may have also had the atom bomb but years before the usa.
The allies only won the war because they just threw a lot more bodies than there were German bullets for the invasion of normandy.
German engineering made some of the best war technology of the conflict. But mass production is what won it for the allies. If the Nazis killed 7 allied tanks to losing 1 of theirs it seems like a good trade-off for them until you realize that American industrial production could overcome even that ratio. War is about attrition and it was that feature that caused the Nazis to ultimately lose despite their scientific and engineering prowess. (The Nazis also exiled or gassed many of their leading nuclear physicists or they'd have got the atomic bomb first too. And that would have been a real game changer.) At the risk of being modded flamebait here, look at the Iraq situation. Simple weapons (AK-47 rifles, RPGs and IEDs) are what are killing American soldiers. The insurgents' losses are also much higher than their kills (due to America's vastly superior war technology) but in the end they can "out lose" the Americans in KIA as long as they need to in order to outlast the American and make them withdraw. History doesn't repeat but it often rhymes, eh?
"If you want to know what happens to you when you die, go look at some dead stuff."
We should also like totally ban the use of eagles as a symbol of state or country, as it was used by Romans when they pillaged, murdered and enslaved all across Europe and Mediterranean.
They threw people to lions because of their religion, for Christ's sake!
Use of eagles on flags, coat of arms and seals is TOTALLY unnecessary.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
It just took quite a few years for us to make a plane that looked like a Horton. :) Actually, there were quite a few developed and some manufactured. They simply weren't as popular as "conventional" aircraft. I would suspect part would be due to the difference in manufacturing cost, and some to do with customer faith. "I know an airplane with wings and a tail can fly. Why should I believe something like that can?". Maybe the long gap in development of flying wing aircraft wasn't. It was just classified. What do you think they do at Area 51 (among other secret facilities), store alien bodies and reverse engineer wormhole technology? :)
I love aviation, and have been amazed with Horton's aircraft. There were several similar aircraft. I saw one in person at the Smithsonian Udvar-Hazy Center at Dulles. There's a Horton Ho IIIf on display (hanging from the roof), part of a Horton Ho IIIh, and I found reference to a Horton Ho 229 being restored for display there. If I remember correctly, you'd go straight in the front door, and to the left behind the SR-71, but before the room with the Space Shuttle Enterprise. They have some beautiful aircraft there. It's worth the visit if you like aviation.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
I wonder if a marketing team came up with the name... My Ho is gonna fcuk you over!
What banners where? I tried to find them but couldn't.
Then put your money where your mouth is, please, and fix the Wikipedia article, with inline citations backing up your assertions.
The Horton was an elephant, while HortEn Ho 229 was a prototype fighter/bomber.
V3 (and V4 and V5) was specifically a bomber, but V6 and V7 were designed to be fighters.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
There was a short story written by Arthur C. Clarke titled "Superiority" that discussed this. Of course, it being science fiction, the weapons were very interesting (matter annihilators, space distortion systems). Also, since it was written (in the 50s?) some of the vocabulary is quaint (I think the term "torpedoes" refer to what we would call missiles).
Still I didn't know (according to Wikipedia) that it was (once?) required reading at West Point! (For those not from the U.S., that is one of the premiere military academies).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superiority_(short_story)
...the new Godwin?
Todd: I hope it proves as delicious as the farmers that grew them
Maybe you guys get out of the NOC just long enough to get to the laundry, but there were a lot of famous first in Der Fuher's arsenal.
- V1 'Buzz Bomb': first cruise missile
- V2 Rocket: first sub-orbital bomb
- Me 163: used photocells, not gunsights to take down bombers by firing panzerfausts (bazookas) at bombers
- First jet bomber (per Hitler): Me 262
These folks tried all kinds of odd things. The Arado 234 had two engines. One front, one back, and room for two cockpits. The Bv141 had a greenhouse on one side, and an engine pod on the other: the most assymetrical aircraft you ever saw.
Now, I don't understand how we get to cool Luftwaffe goodies on Slashdot, but it's nice to see people who think the US and Germany were the only participants, to look back and see the BRIALLIANCE of the German war machines. (So cool that their tools are outlawed, when they lose a major war). :>
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
This thing would be bitch to fly without fly-by-wire.
Whether it actually reduced radar signature is an issue here, and without doing a comparison of leading edges with and without the added carbon, how do we know that the slight signature wasn't simply due to the small size and low metal content?
Yes, exactly, so a tiny detail such as swastikas in the background really shouldn't matter one way or another. What else do you propose that they put in the background? Whats wrong with a bit of aesthetic detail?
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Goodwin's Law: The longer a thread gets, the higher the chance someone will misspell 'Godwin'.
Who is John Cabal?
The Germans did decide to go the "high-tech" route, knowing full well their supply/material/manufacturing capacity limitations.
With this knowledge, the Germans did, in fact, bet the war on advanced technology. They thought a technological edge would overcome the capacity limitations of their industrial machine. It's not like they had no other options.
They could have surrendered when they realized that fuel, materials, and manpower were short, but they didn't. They bet on advanced technology over capacity and it cost them the war.
Of course, the alternative scenario above assumes a logical way of self-preservation style thinking - something Hitler was hardly capable of after advanced Syphilis (and possibly Parkinson's by the look of his shaky hands on some old war footage) started to erode his mental capacity.
-ted
The solution, in the best traditions of British espionage, was for one of the officers at the radar base to form a liaison with the chief dispatcher, as a result of which she phoned in whenever a mosquito was sent over.
After this had gone on for a month or two, friend's father phoned the air base commander and suggested that "as we seem to be picking everything up, perhaps you could try sending over some Mosquitos"
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
operation paperclip
Now look at all the still remaining big corporations that were part of the nazi war machine and how influential they are now. Looks to me more they just went "legit" and the "powers that be" just sort of ignored it and allowed/encouraged a lot of it to go "stealth" underground, hiding in plain sight. Here's some more pretty interesting stuff, and don't dismiss it out of hand, really do some research on this. fourth reich
Anyone familiar with WWII and aviation history knows about this. The U.S. also had a stealth flying wing bomber. The idea was patented in 1910, and by early 30's was being kicked around for stealth usage. Basically stealth aircraft designs where around before radar, or at least developed alongside radar.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_wing
Living in Chile
The very first reference to radar "stealth technology" that I'm aware of was in Arnold Sommerfeld's Lectures on Theoretical Physics, IIRC in the volume on Electrodynamics, which was published in Germany in 1948. Sommerfeld briefly explained how layering of certain materials could be used to reduce radar cross sections. He also discussed the technical challenges and trade-offs (weight versus efficacy).
I first became aware of this when I was using the English translation as part of my physics studies in the 1970's so I was somewhat surprised when many years later "stealth technology" was considered something new and novel. I am even more surprised that it is not now common knowledge that Germany was working on stealth technology during WW-II since that technology was described in a German textbook published at the end of WW-II.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
Just so that you know - the word Swastika is Sanskrit, it is a Hindu religious symbol, still worshipped widely in India by Hindus. And the Nazis got
it wrong - Hitler's symbol is not Swastika - at least not drawn correctly.
Just FYI and being mature also implies being informed.
For more information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swastika
That's true, the non-aggression pact.
However, would Stalin have necessarily kept to it?
Especially with the stark ideological divide between fascism and communism, probably not.
Was it an uneasy alliance to begin with? Maybe.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov-Ribbentrop_Pact
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
The name sounds like a Dr. Seuss book. Horten hears a Ho.
That's funny on a couple of levels.
"You can't really dust for vomit" --Nigel Tufnel
I can not find it now, but I remember encountering an article several years ago in a local Las Vegas newspaper that described how the stealth fighters could be detected easily. In places like Nevada where there are secret military bases all over the place, there are hobby stealth watchers and they had discovered that there are so many cell phones in use all over the world that stealth fighters get lit up like a x-mas tree from the ground based signals emanating from the cell phones. Even amateur stealth watchers could track them flying around the Western United States. It was not long after that article the military officially started dropping all plans for future production related to designs based primarily on right angles and radar.
Can anyone find the article or info on this?
Living in Chile
Don't forget that there were moral issues concerning the use of the scientific advancement gained by the Nazi's, espescially, but not limited to, Nazi medical advances. One may speculate that the means (bad Nazi's that tortured, maimed, killed innocents, and advanced technologically) justifies the ends (using advanced Nazi technology to enrich our own), but in the Kantian sense it's clearly immoral. Americans surely considerred this at the time, and periodically debated it as time progessed. Someone very well may have considerred further developing the Nazi stealth technology, but ultimately rejected the idea due to ethical considerations. sorta skew from the subject of stealth planes, but along the lines of Nazi's and morality: IBM & BMW both served the Nazi's. BMW prolly didn't have a choice, but for IBM it was greed driving their interests.
The Admin and the Engineer
Stealth or not. It looks pretty sophisticated compared to what everyone else was flying. They could have flown it and let footage leak out just to scare the hell out of everyone, as if everyone else was not already afraid as hell. First post got it right; What didn't he do ?? If they keep looking, there's probably an antigravity machine over there somewhere, a computer that looks like a Sun E10k and the entire DNA desequenced on a thing called a "CD Rom" that they invented.. just sitting there gathering dust all these years. I bet Sadam Hussein was a clone of Hitler that was hatched in a test tube after the war.
Reminds me of early attempts to cloak planes to the naked eye by putting a row of lights around the edges. It was reasonably effective on a bright overcast day.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
"RCS testing showed that an Ho-229 approaching the English Coast from France flying at 550 mph at 50 to 100 feet above the water would not have been visible to Chain Home radar."
The flying wing was a hugely unstable design. The sole Ho IX V2 crashed on 18 February 1945, after only two hours of flight time. On 5 June 1948, Northrop's YB-49 (their second attempt to build a flying wing after the B-35 was cancelled due to insurmountable technical issues) crashed, killing its pilot and co-pilot Daniel Forbes and Glen Edwards, for whom Forbes and Edwards airforce bases are named. It took until the 80s for them to figure it out and make a success of the B2.
So, so long as a pilot could buzz the waves at an altitude that would make most pilots of conventional fighters of the era nervous, at the high end of speeds for the era (a good 100mph faster than a P-51 Mustang), before flitting up over the cliffs of southern England (the famed white cliffs of Dover reaching up to 106m, a good 70m over the 100 feet the plane was flying across the channel at), then it could have been invisible to British radar of the time.
One can only imagine, if production had worked out, the teenagers Germany was strapping in to planes at the time (having lost most of its experienced pilots by that point in the war) would have been doing this on a daily basis.
Not really as powerful as the one dropped on Hiroshima, but Germany tested TWO nuclear devices well before the US tested theirs. The German tests came in 1944 and early 1945 (compare to US first test in July 1945). The German nuclear initiative was headed by this man http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Diebner
There are number of recently publicized documents and eyewitness accounts of the actual nuclear tests. Even Mussolini gave a speech praising the new German weapon. And Germany was not far away from putting nuclear warheads on the V2. Do some more research before you dismiss German technology as futile. Western historians wouldn't be happy to admit that the Nazis were the first to the bomb. Strictly speaking though, the German bomb was little more than a dirty bomb. But they came within a hair of developing a full-scale nuclear weapon and nuclear missiles. Some more information is available here http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/print/22270
Can someone explain to me what one of the evilest empires on earth was doing being so dang innovative? Next, we're going to find out that they invented Windows SS (rev Zwei of course) ...
"Let me guess, you are also for the elimination of the flag of the Confederate States too?"
as an item of history? no.
As an actual flag representing oppression, and as an excuse to say the war isn't over? yes.
Just like I would find people rallying around the swastika in need of elimination.
http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/staticfiles/NGC/StaticFiles/Images/Show/39xx/394x/3942_Hitlers_Stealth_Fighter-11_10240768.jpg
Whether it actually reduced radar signature is an issue here, and without doing a comparison of leading edges with and without the added carbon, how do we know that the slight signature wasn't simply due to the small size and low metal content?
Northorp Grumman says their tests proved the stealth value of the aircraft. I'd say that's pretty definitive.
Northop has quite a lot of experience with flying wings and stealth, as we now call it. Jack Northorp built several examples starting in 1940, and after the war, military planners began to take radar seriously. The Chain Home system was seen as invaluable in the defense of Britain, everyone was adapting radar more and more, and so aircraft manufacturers began studying how the shapes of aircraft affected radar coverage. Northrop was the first US company to really study the issue, and they found that flying wing designs were naturally less reflective of radar than standard fuselage designs. As for wood, both Northrop's N-1M and N-9M testbeds had a lot of wood in the construction, so they're well aware of the effect wood has in relation to radar signatures. And the Ho 229 itself is mostly metal in the center of the aircraft. Look at the Wikipedia article's photos of the sole-remaining original prototype, and you'll notice that its rusting away in storage. So I'd have to conclude that, yes, Northrop knows the difference between the signatures of a mostly-wood aircraft, and one with the carbon leading edges added.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
So are Northrop-Grumman in the aircraft/military businness or in the nazi propaganda business?
"And that completes 'sentences I've always wanted to say about my basement'. The next answer is..."
What is "An understatement comparable to describing the Grand Canyon as a 'ditch', Alex?"
They were totally completely superior! moreover they left their best jew and alike brains go abroad, imagine if they kept those. As someone said, compare this to what other flew at the time... I can clearly see where B2 comes from.... And not to forget what V1/V2 were if compared to other airplane dumb-bombs... V2 impacted at supersonic speed thousands of miles away. And no satellites nor computers... (well until they find the Reich satellites orbit eh). That's an example of what a really determined nation can do, and all humanity could do (in the right direction of course). If only we would stop throwing sticks at each other... by now we could have been colonizing the inner solar system....no kidding. cheers mrn
Germany could not win the battle of britain. German fighter aircraft had to little action time over britian and then only over the coast. 15 minutes over london is NOT a long time, when on all sides you are being attacked by british fighters who can land anywhere, bailout anywhere and be back in the air in hours.
Even if germany had air dominication over the chanel, that would hardly have helped with the HUGE british navy, which outgunned the german navy many times. Worse, britain could keep its warships out of air range until the crossing would attempted by which time the invasion would be attacked by everything the brits could throw at it.
People underestimate how many resources it took for the allied landings and those landings were only possible because the fast majority of axis forces were occupied in the east. Britain, or rather the british empire could spend all, would have had no choice to, its resources on defending itself. Every fighter that came of the production line went straight up. Every anti-aircraft gun, ever round of amunition had just one destination. The defence of britain.
No, the battle of britain was only really about morale and about how damaged britain would become. Its occupation was never a risk. Operation Sea Lion would have been sunk in the channel even with total air domination.
what are sore stickers??
And now you know where the technology for the B2 came from. Surprisingly, during early stages of the B2's design, engineers recalculated various design issues such as maximum lift, lowest profile, lowest radar profile, least drag, so on and so on... The result, almost no changes were required from the original designs provided by the Germans, which were later reworked in the late 40s. In other words, they had figured out on slide rulers what took modern engineers and massive computing power.
In almost every way, the Germans were technologically 50-100 years ahead of the rest of the world.
The flying wing was a hugely unstable design. The sole Ho IX V2 crashed on 18 February 1945, after only two hours of flight time. On 5 June 1948, Northrop's YB-49 (their second attempt to build a flying wing after the B-35 was cancelled due to insurmountable technical issues) crashed, killing its pilot and co-pilot Daniel Forbes and Glen Edwards, for whom Forbes and Edwards airforce bases are named.
There were indeed technical issues with Northrop's flying wing designs, but they were in no way considered insurmountable. Northrop's wings were killed by the USAF not on technical merits, but from political scheming. The Air Force wanted Northrop to merge with Convair, and Jack Northrop refused. As punishment, his wing designs were canceled and the prototypes ordered destroyed, and in a particularly petty and sadistic twist, Northrop employees were made to watch as USAF officials literally took buzzsaws to the YB-49 prototypes. The intent was to send a message to Jack Northrop... go along to get along, or else.
Young Air Force officers that were involved were ashamed of the whole affair, and as they became older (and reached General Officer ranks) became advocates of Northrop's old flying wing designs. Its been reported that when some of these now-older officers showed Jack Northrop a model of the then-secret B-2 flying wing design in 1979, Northrop wept. It took 30 years, but he'd finally been vindicated.
Here's a copy of a Los Angeles Times interview with Northrop in 1980, where he revealed what really happened. Aviation Journalists like Bill Sweetman (as well as many NASA engineers and Wright-Pat and Edwards test people) had heard rumors of what really happened to the YB-49 back in the 70's.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
I first learned about this, and many other cool end of the war vehicles, from the Sega Saturn hex-strategy game Iron Storm... which is an English port of the Japanese Dai Senryaku series.
A great game!
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
From the article (yeah I know, Slashdot, not supposed to, etc)
IIRC the United States developed something called Atomic Bombs that would have counteracted any advantage Germany would have gained from stealth jets.
Keep in mind that the Manhattan Project only had enough material for two bombs in 1945. Once they were gone, we were out of atom bombs for a period of months at the very least. So if Hitler gets his stealth aircraft, do you bomb Germany, or do you save those two bombs for Japan, where a manned invasion will cost hundreds of thousands of casualties? Choices, choices.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
I used to work for Northrop Grumman... in one word: Cocksuckers.
that is no svastika!!!! That is the Wehrmacht sign http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wehrmacht , and today used in a styled way for Bundeswehr http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundeswehr.
Uh they lost.
Even in ancient times when country "A" conquers country "B", "A" often takes people from "B" back to "A" to do stuff for them. That does not mean "B" won. Far from it.
Plus Hitler died and stayed dead. That's not normally considered winning.
When you eat bacon does that mean the pig won? I doubt it.
Germany did well after the war and so did the USA. So that's a win-win, but Hitler and the Nazis most certainly did lose.
"Building a stealth plane in 1943 meant the Germans had learned something it would take us another 30 years to figure out. Stealth is essential in aircraft."
False.
We new that, but we went with the fly higher and faster method. Which worked for quite well for a while.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The Sherman tank was never considered to be much of a match for the Tiger tank. You're talking a 36ton medium tank versus a 60-70 ton (depending on the version) heavy tank. The reason they chose the Sherman was because something like the M6 heavy tank that would have been on more even footing was too heavy for their bridging equipment. When they finally starting putting M26 units into Europe near the end of the war, the Tigers could not compete. From what I've heard, the losses in straight tank battles were somewhere closer to 4:1, while the production quantites were somewhere closer to 25:1.
This can in no way be compared to the situation in Iraq. You're comparing two armies in open battle trying to hold territory with one army fighting small guerrilla units. There are completely different tactics in play.
Ya, the Grand Canyon is a pretty cool hole in the ground. Been there, stood on the edge with my toes hanging off. Got yelled at by my girlfriend for it. :)
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
I looked at TFA and cried a bit. No seriously, I cried. It's so beautiful, but so sinister. Looking at that plane that comes from such a romantic time of aircraft, I was overtaken by an awed and creepy feeling. It's right out of history, yet right out of fiction. I just can't imagine something like that on the battlefield. I'm not a war monger, but I do have much admiration for the planes of that era and the valiant men who flew them. I am glad they dd not have to face this lovely monster in combat.
The eternal struggle of good vs. evil begins within one's self.
Pick out a particular ethnic group, and oppress the hell out of them for about 3 generations, at least. Caveats: this also results in terrorism and religious extremism.
To rebut: Technical excellence can be trumped by mass production. 15 Ford trucks vs. 3 Hummer M2s in a demolition derby. Who will win? Cheaper, simpler, weapons systems and an unlimited tolerance for casualties (Iraqi insurgents) v. the best high tech weapons ever but a very, very limited tolerance for casualties (US): Who will win? (Hint:Remember Korea and Viet Nam?)
"If you want to know what happens to you when you die, go look at some dead stuff."
oh wait those guys all had to leave germany (or italy) in the 30s because of nazi racism.
so actually.. you might want to say 'all the best scientists were german, but they were living in america / england'
All I've seen are statements that Northrop finds the plane stealthy. I've no problem with that. What I haven't seen are statements from them that the carbon inclusions are a significant part of this. The articles all imply that this is the case, but they don't directly quote anyone from Northrop saying so or mention a test that would specifically determine this.
I am sure that, as you say, those involved with the tests know what the contribution of the carbon was, but the articles are actually quite vague on the point.
Read about it and learn something new.
Reiman Horton said he mixed charcoal dust in with the wood glue to absorb electromagnetic waves (radar), which could have shielded the aircraft from detection by British early warning ground-based radar known as Chain Home. This application was tested by Northrop-Grumman in early 2009 and found to have been successful, making the Ho-229 the first aircraft to successfully incorporate "stealth technology" in its design.[1]
You're one of those characters that thinks the Confederate flag is ok? Funnily, there would be outrage if there were swastika flags on government buildings, pickup trucks, etc. but rednecks can display their confederate flags (which are a hateful symbol of slavery, murder, terrorism) and it's deemed ok.
The Horton 229 was one of the planes in the 1990-ish DOS game Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe, in which it was designated the Gotha 229. However, the manuals contained descriptions and pictured of the captured airframes, and it's the same plane.
It was my favourite for flying in that game - fast and manoeverable, with good weapons, but insufficient ammo. P-51s, P-47s, P-38s, and suchlike were lambs to the slaughter, until your ammo ran out. Of course, you could patch the aircraft definition file to fix the ammo supply, and tweak its performance in other ways (thrust ramp, fuel, various rate of climb/turn parameters, etc.)
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
My father landed Canadian tanks on Juno on the first day of D-Day, and stayed on as a beach controller when his ship was mined, so he knows a bit about what happened, and I've seen the official statistics while researching the background to his story. There were relatively heavy casualties for the forces deployed, but the total number killed on the Allied side in the entire invasion was almost tactical in scale compared to the German/Soviet battles.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Can you imagine the project rollout meeting? "Hey Folks, National Geographic wants us to build a 1:1 model of this secret Nazi stealth bomber." How cool is that? What a great Job!
I'm sure in 20 years we'll find German plans to make ray guns, giant mech fighers, etc. Castle Wolfenstein game plots seems less & less like fiction as the years go on. :)
Well, you know, there was a whole architectural movement in Germany based on the idea of building interiors on a regular grid, with 8-foot thick walls and no variation in elevation...
Bow-ties are cool.
You haven't noted how many nazis remained, and just dropped that affiliation title, and went on to still be successful. The allies really only executed a small percentage, most of them just went right on being very wealthy and influential bosses, throughout industry and in politics, and there are more than a few reports that this was the strategic decision they made to "carry on" with what they termed the fourth reich. That and they had their own diaspora and got scattered among some other nations, notably in the mideast and in particular in south america, where they remained mostly untouched and were able to accrue some power down there. There and the ones who got pampered in the US. And *most* of the stolen loot..vanished. Someone has been using that money.
This is similar to the breakup of the USSR, a lot of the same old bosses and powerful figures just became "new" bosses and powerful figures in the Russian federation. You can't call them soviet or kgb anymore, but that doesn't change who they are or what they did or what their goals (might) still remain.
And you also have to look at before the war, who the big "bank" rollers were, and where they and their companies are now. Some pretty big names made out well supporting them and are still in power today, they or now their direct progeny. So, who is to say what was a win or not? If corporations and some powerful men (even inside the US and other nations in Europe outside of Germany) made multi billions and remained untouched, even after banking and supplying the nazis (check out prescott bush for another example of a stealth US nazi, and there were a lot more around him, too) despite any official outcome, did they really "lose"? Looks more like they played both sides, so no matter the outcome, they won and had all the little peeps as suckers and victims. Therre was a lot more to ww2 that the headlines surface level.
Really, do some in depth research, you'll find although they technically lost some aspects of the war, they still won by not being completely destroyed. That's why your analogy doesn't fit, they weren't *destroyed*. A LOT of them, thousands and thousands, remained in various levels of corporate and governmental power, from small time and local all the way to the very top levels, they just swung right back into authority positions again, and there are enough smoking guns that researchers and whistleblowers have found that have surfaced to show this was their fall back plan B operation, this was part of an actual plan, and it looks to have been at least moderately successful.
These people were and are fantastical and fanatical planners, look at the main article again for just a tiny taste of their accomplishments. They weren't incompetent. They might have suffered a serious major setback, but that is moderated by them remaining mostly in power and influential to this very day, and who is to say that within their ranks there might not still be some feelings towards the old goals, just now they learned how to go about it better.
If some guys pitbull down the street bites a lot of people, can you say the pitbull is gone, been vanquished, just because the owner locked him up for a few days, and he just gave him a new name?
As I understand it, flying wings were difficult to fly, in part because of the lack of vertical stabilizers. I remember reading somewhere that because of this instability, the flying wing design was not practical until the advent of fly-by-wire.
Reminds me of "Narrative Fallacy" as presented in Black Swan ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Swan_(Taleb_book) ) by Taleb. For people who prefer video over text, http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1964621955986036383 .
They simply weren't as popular as "conventional" aircraft. I would suspect part would be due to the difference in manufacturing cost, and some to do with customer faith. "I know an airplane with wings and a tail can fly. Why should I believe something like that can?".
Actually the lack of popularity for flying wings has nothing to do with either of those - it's because it's a VERY hard design to stabilize and control.
Programmer: an ingenious device that converts caffeine into code.
That's all I have at the moment and the phone is already ringing off the hook...
Seastead this.
The Wright brothers' wooden plane was never seen doesn't show up on radar. Canvas hot air balloons don't show up on radar. Most birds don't show up on radar. Are these "stealth" inventions? No.
There are also swastikas.
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
The only thing I would add to the above formula of russian manpower + US industry is the will to fight on the part of the allies. We're very lucky the the leaders of the allied countries didn't look at 1939-1940 and see an inevitable german win, but instead saw an enemy that had to be defeated.
What's wrong with the aircraft hangar door?
How about we remake models of Fat Man and Little Boy and put up two pictures of US flags, and the insignia of the airborne squadrons which flew them over to Japan? I'm sure the Japanese would just love that.
We know what the plane is, we know what it's for. No need to fly the fucking flag and wave it in my face.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Also, it did not affect the program much - problems with the engines and lack of fuel did that.
One V2 rocket had a ~1 ton warhead. Over 5200 were built.
One B17 carried 900kg of ordnance, hardly "more than the entire V-2 production."
'Once scientists, even the dim-witted social scientists, get muzzled, the Western Civilization is finished.' - oldhack
> "What DIDN'T Hitler Do?"
He didn't actually give the go-ahead to a serious Nazi Atom Bomb project. He hated Jews, and after having the rudiments of the operation of an Atom Bomb explained, responded by calling it: "Jewish science! Foolishness!"
(David Bowman, EVA near HUGE Monolithic Win-PC in orbit around Jupiter) "My God - its full of Malware!"
Agree to a point.... The British quick and dirty flying machine the spit fire clearly inferior to the German planes ...but easy quick and cheap to manufacture and they got the job done, good enough.
I have never read so many incorrect points in one sentence regarding RAF and Luftwaffe equipment. You may have been half correct if you had used the name Hurrican instead of "spit fire".
(David Bowman, EVA near HUGE Monolithic Win-PC in orbit around Jupiter) "My God - its full of Malware!"
The plain looks cool, just bear in mind that they made them 65 years ago...
Eh? What plain . . . in Germany . . . in Spain!
Even Clint Eastwaood Drifting -- High -- painting the town red!?!
(David Bowman, EVA near HUGE Monolithic Win-PC in orbit around Jupiter) "My God - its full of Malware!"
OP was talking about bombing raids, not single planes. And even the B17 (which had a small bomb load for a heavy bomber) could carry between 2 and 4 tons of bombs. Lancasters could carry a ten-ton Grand Slam (or about 6 tons of regular bombs). And bombing raids with about 1000 planes weren't unheard of in WW2.
I can't help thinking about the plane itself. OK it was wood and wooden planes worked so well during WWII. There was the Mosquito made by the aluminum poor British. It just kept falling apart in midair.
The US was working on the Northrup flying wing. The Air Force decided that it was just too unstable to try to fly it. It wasn't until computer controls that the B2 was made that such an unstable aircraft was flyable.
AG
Non bene pro toto libertas venditur auro
I suppose I should have described the article since it's rather lengthy.
Basically, stealth technology works very well against a single or even several radar points. The problem is if you have hundreds, even thousands of radars. Building that many radars would be prohibitively expensive, but cell phone towers are already in place every few miles, and so we have our "thousands of radars" network.
It's not an easy task, by any means, but it is an accomplishable task to detect stealth fighters using the cell phone networks. The principle is that stealth aircraft bounce radar in a different direction than it comes. Presumably, one of these randomly bounced signals will hit another radar somewhere (a cell phone tower). The required computing power is immense, but doable with modern technology, as there are very, very, very few points in which a stealth aircraft would bounce a signal perfectly back to a different radar, so you'd have to be scanning a multitude of cell phone towers very carefully. This can be done, however, and if you do it, by more carefully analyzing the data, the velocity, size, shape, and even characteristics such as engine rotation or structural vibration can be calculated.
Fortunately, US defense contractors are ahead of the game, and this idea has been thought of already. It is apparently important in naval radar detection because underwater vessels naturally don't reflect very well, so radar arrays are necessary to do meaningful detection; thusly, this principle has been extended to the air, as well. Also, Lockheed has already been working on just such a detection system, using TV broadcasts instead of cell phone towers. The idea is that there are fewer but still many TV broadcasting towers, reducing the computing requirements, and TV towers emit radio waves much more powerfully than cell phone towers.
Experts also said that even if you could detect a stealth aircraft, things such as cell phone towers are very susceptible to jamming, and even if you could detect a stealth aircraft well, you need to get a missile extremely close to it to shoot it down, anyways.
Anyways, the technology is relatively sound and research is actively being done on it. Any such systems based on the concept are also either in the very, very early prototype stage or not developed, at all. And it's good to know that the stealth and radar experts are on top of things, already.