By Marcus Dunk
8 July 2009
With its smooth and elegant lines, this could be a prototype
for some future successor to the stealth bomber. But this
flying wing was actually designed by the Nazis 30 years before
the Americans successfully developed radar-invisible technology.
Now an engineering team has reconstructed the Horten Ho 2-29
from blueprints, with startling results.
It was faster and more efficient than any other plane of the
period and its stealth powers did work against radar. Experts
are now convinced that given a little bit more time, the mass
deployment of this aircraft could have changed the course
of the war. The plane could have helped
Adolf
Hitler win the war
First built and tested in the air in March 1944, it was designed
with a greater range and speed than any plane previously built
and was the first aircraft to use the stealth technology now
deployed by the U.S. in its B-2 bombers. Thankfully
Hitler’s
engineers only made three prototypes, tested by being dragged
behind a glider, and were not able to build them on an industrial
scale before the Allied forces invaded. From Panzer tanks
through to the
V-2
rocket, it has long been recognised that Germany’s technilowcal
expertise during the war was years ahead of the Allies. But
by 1943, Nazi high command feared that the war was beginning
to turn against them, and were desperate to develop new weapons
to help turn the tide. Nazi bombers were suffering badly when
faced with the speed and manoeuvrability of the Spitfire and
other Allied fighters.
Hitler
was also desperate to develop a bomber with the range and
capacity to reach the United States. In 1943 Luftwaffe chief
Hermann
Göring demanded that designers come up with a bomber
that would meet his ‘1,000, 1,000, 1,000’ requirements – one
that could carry 1,000 kg over 1,000 km flying at 1,000 km/h.
Two pilot brothers in their thirties, Reimar and Walter Horten,
suggested a ‘flying wing’ design they had been working on
for years. They were convinced that with its drag and lack
of wind resistance such a plane would meet
Göring’s
requirements. Construction on a prototype was begun in Goettingen
in Germany in 1944. The centre pod was made from a welded
steel tube, and was designed to be powered by a
BMW
003 engine. The most important innovation was Reimar Horten’s
idea to coat it in a mix of charcoal dust and wood glue
He thought the electromagnetic waves of radar would be absorbed,
and in conjunction with the aircraft’s sculpted surfaces the
craft would be rendered almost invisible to radar detectors.
This was the same method eventually used by the U.S. in its
first stealth aircraft in the early 1980s, the F-117A Nighthawk.
The plane was covered in radar absorbent paint with a high
graphite content, which has a similar chemical make-up to
charcoal. After the war the Americans captured the prototype
Ho 2-29s along with the blueprints and used some of their
technological advances to aid their own designs. But experts
always doubted claims that the Horten could actually function
as a stealth aircraft. Now using the blueprints and the only
remaining prototype craft, Northrop-Grumman (the defence firm
behind the B-2) built a fullsize replica of a Horten Ho 2-29.
It took them 2,500 man-hours and $250,000 to construct, and
although their replica cannot fly, it was radar-tested by
placing it on a 50ft articulating pole and exposing it to
electromagnetic waves. The team demonstrated that although
the aircraft is not completely invisible to the type of radar
used in the war, it would have been stealthy enough and fast
enough to ensure that it could reach London before Spitfires
could be scrambled to intercept it. ‘If the Germans had had
time to develop these aircraft, they could well have had an
impact,’ says Peter Murton, aviation expert from the Imperial
War Museum at Duxford, in Cambridgeshire. ‘In theory the flying
wing was a very efficient aircraft design which minimised
drag. ‘It is one of the reasons that it could reach very high
speeds in dive and glide and had such an incredibly long range.’
The research was filmed for a forthcoming documentary on the
National Geographic Channel.
Other: WWII News
Articles:
Copyright © Marcus Dunk.
Link to
site:
