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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.
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.
The British de Havilland Mosquito was also very hard to detect with radar due to its wooden construction. It served in fighter (day and night) and fighter-bomber roles amongst others so they did see action against the P-51's contemporaries.
Not exactly. It is possible to build a flying wing type aircraft that is stable. They're generally not as easy to fly as more traditional designs, but it's possible. Also keep in mind that aircraft of that era flew much slower. Part of the difficulty with modern designs is with the insane speeds they can reach. The aerodynamics of very fast (ie. supersonic) craft are much different from slower craft.
The confidence of ignorance will always overcome the indecision of knowledge.
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.
Doesn't matter what the plane is made out of as long as it's faster, accelerates faster, and climbs faster than than what the other side has.
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.
Read Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond, it's the best explanation I read so far.
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
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.
Hand in your geek card, youngster. I was flying this in "Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe" from LucasArts.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_Weapons_of_the_Luftwaffe
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
The production version of the Ho-229 was designed to have four 30mm-MK-108 cannons and could carry two 500-kilogram bombs.
Some people are only alive because it's against the law for me to hunt them down and kill them.
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
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.
Someone in a plane that could out-run it.
The P-51 Mustang had a top speed of between 400 and 440mph. That's close to the upper limit for a propeller-driven aircraft. This thing was intended to be capable of 600mph. Granted, that's an estimate made by the plane's designers, so they may not have been able to achieve it, but the Me 262 (German jet figher) was capable of 580mph already. No Allied figher could keep up with an Me 262 anyway.
Presumably, the plan was to hide from radar detection until over the coast. At this point, the aircraft would travel the 80 miles or so to London in around 8 minutes. It would have to do this unescorted - German fighers would be detected on approach, and wouldn't be able to keep up anyway. By the time the RAF got some fighters in the air, it'd be too late for them to intercept, assuming they could even catch up. Drop bombs over London, turn around, and run like hell. Hope to evade the fighters, which are now directly ahead of you, and return home.
Getting back home would be the tricky part.
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.
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)
i am sorry what? 500 years?
until the end of the 15th century the eidgenossenschaft was fighting the habsburg, throughout the 16th and 17th century there was religous civil war all over switzerland. at the end of the 17th century france essentially conquered switzerland and started the helvetic republic. the last fights on swiss territory were in 1847 and there is only democracy since the 19th century.
Very darwinistic view of the world that man has. If he's right, the tactics in life are the same as in quake. Anything that moves and isn't obviously on your side, shoot it. Anything that doesn't move, shoot it anyway because it's probably thinking about moving and killing you as soon as you turn your back.
Why are you making this out to be his worldview? That these were the tactics of the majority of humans for the majority of history is just a matter, of, well, history. Wars between nations, strong tribes subjugating weak ones, nation-states subjugating non-centrally-organized peoples, this actually happened and none of the people doing it read Diamond's book.
In fact, I can't recall him ever discussing it in terms of tactics or intent. The question he asked and attempted to answer was not "why did the Spanish come to the Americas to crush the Inca, Aztec, and Mayan empires." The question he asked was "when they came to the Americas with this intent, why were they able to succeed so handily?"
I mean he does discuss the success of European countries in terms of them being sizable enough to take advantage of specialization, but small enough and with enough similarly-sized and hostile neighbors that they couldn't afford to eschew some technology or tactic for cultural reasons -- the kind of every-wary shoot-first-ask-later strategy you are talking about. I don't think he ever hypothesized that a nation-state's neighbors must be hostile, or that the nation-state must subjugate those weaker than itself. That's just the reality of the situation in Europe.
But I could be wrong. It's been a few years since I read it.
The enemies of Democracy are
You're saying Quake doesn't teach Ammo Conservation?
Who is John Cabal?
Goodwin's Law: The longer a thread gets, the higher the chance someone will misspell 'Godwin'.
Who is John Cabal?
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
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
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.
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
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.