"Hitler's Stealth Fighter"

Teki187

Teki187

Teki187

Permabanned
Joined
15 Sep 2006
Posts
4,642
Location
Somewhere in York
July 25, 2009--At a Northrop Grumman facility in California, top stealth-plane experts admire their handiwork in late 2008—a full-size, though flightless, replica of a Horten 2-29, aka Hitler's stealth fighter, created for a documentary airing June 28 on the National Geographic Channel. (Read the full story.)

The team tested the re-created Nazi jet against World War II-style radar. With its radar-resistant design and 600-mile-an-hour (970-kilometer-an-hour) speed, the team concluded, the Ho 2-29 would have allowed British antiaircraft forces only 9 minutes to respond, versus 18 with a conventional World War II fighter.

Had Hitler's stealth fighter made it into mass production, the plane could have changed to course of the war in Europe, experts say. (Interactive: Explore Hitler's stealth fighter.)

(National Geographic News is owned by the National Geographic Society, which part-owns the National Geographic Channel.)

Before constructing their Horten 2-29 replica in late 2008, aerospace engineers from Northrop Grumman examined this craft. The only surviving example of Hitler's stealth fighter, this Ho 2-29 has rested, largely untouched, in a U.S government facility outside Washington, D.C., for more than 50 years.

Among other things, the team, using portable radar equipment, discovered that "they put some kind of carbon-type material in between the layers of plywood on the plane's leading edges," said Tom Dobrenz, a Northrop Grumman expert in stealth, or "low observable," technology, who led the Horten replica project.

"Personally, I cannot understand that being for anything other than doing something to [defeat] radar."
Click to expand...
Source

One they found

090526-03-restoration-hitler-fighter_big.jpg


090526-04-restoration-hitler-fighter_big.jpg



Reconstructed version

090625-01-hitlers-stealth-fighter-plane_big.jpg


090526-06-reconstructed-fighter_big.jpg


For anyone interested there is also a documentary thats going live

http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/episode/hitler-s-stealth-fighter-3942/Overview

Some really interesting stuff there.
 
No i get it... it wasn't a "huh?"... it was more of an act of surprise.

Edit: Before this post, did anyone even know this existed?
 
DampCat said:
No i get it... it wasn't a "huh?"... it was more of an act of surprise.

Edit: Before this post, did anyone even know this existed?
Click to expand...

I've watched far too many WWII documentaries - yes. However, I've never seen a mock-up of it or any pictures so that's new to me. The latter stages of the war were an incredibly interesting time for aerospace engineering; we get the jet-engine and then this. I find it very hard to believe that we aren't decades more advanced than what we think we are today.
 
people dont appreciate just how amazing some of the tech the germans were working on at the end of ww2 really was, plans havebeen discovered from everything like the stealth plane above to railguns ala quake ;)


fascinating to give a wee google when you have a couple of free hours
 
Well. How thoroughly interesting! And they've just had it sitting in a hangar in the US for 50 years?

The wiki link seems pretty aged, but ive never heard of this. I know what i'll be reading about at work on monday!
 
How could have it changed the war?

It was a single seater plane, cant see any payload, whats the point in having a plane that can be undetectable and have zero bombing capabilities.

If Hitler had been more resourceful he might of won the war.
 
DampCat said:
Well. How thoroughly interesting! And they've just had it sitting in a hangar in the US for 50 years?

The wiki link seems pretty aged, but ive never heard of this. I know what i'll be reading about at work on monday!
Click to expand...

Begs the question was the USAF keeping it to create the stealth bomber we have today? Or did they use some part of the design to make it.
 
Teki187 said:
Begs the question was the USAF keeping it to create the stealth bomber we have today? Or did they use some part of the design to make it.
Click to expand...


Wiki said:
In the closing weeks of WWII the US military initiated "Operation Paperclip", an effort by the US Army to capture as much advanced German weapons research as possible, and also to deny that research to advancing Russian troops. A Horton glider and the Ho 229 number V3 were secured and sent to Northrop Aviation in the United States for evaluation,[5] who much later used a flying wing design for the B-2 stealth bomber. During WWII Northrop had been commissioned to develop a large wing-only long-range bomber (XB-35) based on photographs of the Horton's record-setting glider from the 1930s, but their initial designs suffered controllability issues that were not resolved until after the war. Northrops small one-man prototype (N9M-B) and a Horton wing-only glider are located in the Chino Air Museum in Southern California.
Click to expand...

Well there you go.
 
Theres a LOT of things the germans (and allies) were making that we dont quite realise. Had the germans another 18 months of war they would have most definitely won, the skies would have been there and not from that stealth bomber but their mass produced agile fighters that would run rings around our jets.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom