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Hitler's Stealth Fighter
Posted by
Soulskill
on Wed Jun 24, 2009 09:36 AM
from the time-for-a-whole-new-round-of-ww2-games dept.
from the time-for-a-whole-new-round-of-ww2-games dept.
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."
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Man (Score:5, Funny)
What DIDN'T Hitler Do?
Re:Man (Score:5, Funny)
What DIDN'T Hitler Do?
make friends as a child?
Parent
Re:Man (Score:5, Funny)
Succeed as an artist?
Parent
Re:Man (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Man (Score:5, Funny)
I'm glad that Indiana Jones was able to destroy this thing in Egypt, before it got off the ground. Otherwise, who knows how the war would have gone?
Parent
Best Photos (Score:5, Informative)
The most interesting photos:
http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/staticfiles/NGC/StaticFiles/Images/Show/39xx/394x/3942_Hitlers_Stealth_Fighter-09_10240768.jpg [nationalgeographic.com]
http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/staticfiles/NGC/StaticFiles/Images/Show/39xx/394x/3942_Hitlers_Stealth_Fighter-08_10240768.jpg [nationalgeographic.com]
http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/staticfiles/NGC/StaticFiles/Images/Show/39xx/394x/3942_Hitlers_Stealth_Fighter-04_10240768.jpg [nationalgeographic.com]
http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/staticfiles/NGC/StaticFiles/Images/Show/39xx/394x/3942_Hitlers_Stealth_Fighter-11_10240768.jpg [nationalgeographic.com]
NSFW (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:NSFW (Score:5, Funny)
Tell them you were reminding yourself about just how bad a person Hitler was. And then chomp down on a big banger while saluting a picture of the queen to let them know how much you love England.
Parent
Re:NSFW (Score:5, Funny)
In America, we call it a sausage in the mouth.
Parent
Re:NSFW (Score:5, Funny)
I've got mod points, but I can't find anything that matches +1 Frightful Police State.
Parent
Re:Best Photos (Score:5, Interesting)
The development of stealth technology is one of those secretive fields that has an instant fascination. I quite enjoyed reading Ben Rich's autobiography [amazon.com]. Also Hitler's plan to atom bomb New York [youtube.com] and The Real Heroes of Telemark [amazon.co.uk] were both quite interesting, casting two sides of the same global battle from very different perspectives. German scientists were some of the best in the world (not that they are so bad today..). Sometimes I think that the world got lucky - a few small changes in history, and things could easily have gone the other way.
Parent
Re:Best Photos (Score:5, Insightful)
Not hardly, as Jacob McCandles would have said. The Germans biggest problem in the war wasn't their technology, it was their production. The USA built enough tanks that they could afford to give away more than the total German tank production. The Soviets built more tanks than the USA.
Airplanes, the USA built enough to give away more than the Germans made. The Soviets didn't build more than the USA, but they built nearly as many.
The USA built more ships than everyone else combined, much less the Germans.
And on and on like that. Nothing the Germans could have done would have mattered a hill of beans, really - the only way they could have won that war was if they'd started building up their industry to USA/USSR levels in the 20's.
And even then, their chances would have been slim at best - they didn't have the manpower to operate industry at our level and put 20 million men in the field at the same time.
Parent
Re:Another Example of German Technical Achievement (Score:5, Informative)
Read Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond, it's the best explanation I read so far.
Parent
If it were only in the leading edge (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:If it were only in the leading edge (Score:5, Insightful)
every other stealth programme goes with the notion that it has to be invisible at all times.
Not exactly. You will never be invisible, and stealth technology/employment is a lot more complicated than "we'll just be invisible". Even today, remaining undetected until past the threat is a fairly well-used technique. Just look at the F-22. And even if your airframe isn't fully-LO, you see a lot of emphasis on reducing frontal RCS. The B-1, Typhoon, Rafale, and Super Hornet all use some degree of RCS reduction, which buys them that much more time to get in close. Modern cruise missiles use the same principle.
Interestingly enough, raw speed can buy you some of the same advantages. Go fast enough and high enough, and the defenses just won't have enough time to react, even if you're lit up like a billboard.
Parent
not so fast (Score:5, Funny)
I believe that the advances in detection technology would always have allowed the allies to hear a Horton Ho.
So no one hears a Horton Ho? (Score:5, Interesting)
Bah, another crappy science article in NG (Score:5, Interesting)
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
The Germans build nice stuff... (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Re:The German's are doing it. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Parent
Re:The German's are doing it. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:Control surfaces? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Re:I like the decoration (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Hehe (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe, maybe not.
Obviously this is all speculation, and doesn't matter much when you're comparing it to a real timeline... Yes, the United States developed an atomic bomb... But the Germans were also working on one. So if you extend the timeline to allow the Germans to develop this stealth jet, would they have had time to develop their own atomic bomb as well?
Albert Speer (who as minister of armaments after '43 was in a position to know) wrote that the Nazi atomic program was in its infancy in 1943. When Hitler was informed that an atomic bomb would probably not be produced until the 1950s, he downgraded the priority of the research.
The Nazis' were hampered by Hitler's view of technology. The Me-262 (first jet fighter) was outfitted as a light bomber, for instance, because Hitler saw more value in bombing than in defending airspace (in 1945!). The V-2 rocket was pushed hard, even though a single B-17 raid carried more explosives than the entire V-2 production. Anti-aircraft missiles were ignored and naval armaments were always given a low priority.
Parent
Re:Wow (Score:5, Informative)
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 [wikipedia.org]. 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.
Parent