
Hitler's secret fighter revealed - newacc
http://news.rediff.com/slide-show/2009/jun/30/slide-show-1-hitler-stealth-fighter-reincarnated.htm
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DannoHung
Man, that's a beautiful plane. I wonder why flying wing designs haven't been
more prevalent. I mean, there've been a few, but not a whole lot.

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russell
The original story is here with a lot more detail:
[http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/06/090625-hitle...](http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/06/090625-hitlers-
stealth-fighter-plane.html)

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_YB-49> goes into some of the
performance and stability issues of the early flying wings. I suspect that a
wooden flying wing at 600 mph would have been uncontrollable or subject to
airframe failure.

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electromagnetic
I suspect a large wooden flying wing would have been subject to warping unlike
most WW2 planes, which would produce unpredictable behaviour. When your entire
plane is a wing, you don't want it changing shape in mid-flight. We're not
birds, I doubt many human pilots would be able to intuitively control a plane
that changes shape and flight profile during turns.

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teilo
Thank goodness that Hitler was driven more by revenge than by cold common
sense. He diverted massive resources from projects such as this one, toward
building more bombers to get back at the Allies for bombing the hell out of
German cities. Consequently, a lot of really cutting edge stuff never made it
off the planning table. And that's a good thing.

~~~
lispm
reading a bit through the history I have the impression that projects like
these were taking resources but achieving little.

I doubt a plane like this with the technology of that time would have had any
impact in the war, other than losing lots of pilots in an unstable plane.

~~~
cabalamat
> reading a bit through the history I have the impression that projects like
> these were taking resources but achieving little

I also have that impression. There were loads of advanced weapons projects in
Nazi Germany, but most never saw the light of day. For example, they had 35
projects to build proximity fuzes for shells and missiles, but didn't field a
single proximity fuze during the war. America, on the other hand, had one such
project and made millions of proximity fuzes.

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TallGuyShort
They mention it's similarity to the B-2 bomber, almost to say how advanced it
is. But if it's been secretly stored at a US government military facility all
these years, I bet it was actually the inspiration for the B-2 Bomber.

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smhinsey
It's unlikely that this is the case. There were flying wing designs on the
drawing board in the US in the WW2 era, and it appears that the stealth
characteristics of the plane itself are due primarily to its construction out
of wood. The similarity seems to be skin deep, like comparing a V2 to a Saturn
V or something along those lines. (I realize that the same people were
involved in both the V2 and the Saturn V, but that's not really the point.)

[edit]

It may also be worth mentioning that NGC apparently overplayed the "stored in
a secret government facility" aspect. From what I can tell, it was stored at
one of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum warehouses around DC.

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joeyo
You picked a really strange counter-example with the V2 / Saturn V comparison.
If there were ever a set of rockets that shared a lineage would be those. Von
Braun was brought to the US specifically for his rocketry expertise and he
designed the Saturn V. It's ludicrous to claim that the similarities were only
skin deep.

Regarding the flying wing, I note that the replica was built by engineers at
Northrop, who as it happens also designed the B-2 bomber. So it seems Northrop
was at least aware of the plane, and they probably did not discover it
recently. The lag between WW2 and the introduction of the B-2 (wikipedia
claims a first flight in 1989) can be explained by the need for advances in
control for the flying wing design (thrust vectoring, fly-by-wire, etc).

Edit. Compare also the YB-49, designed by Northrop
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_YB-49>) and first flown in 1947 and
the YB-35 (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_YB-35>). Given Jack
Northrop's interest in flying wing designs, I'd be very surprised if he was
not aware and perhaps influenced by this plane.

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smhinsey
I concede it's not a great example, but the larger point was that the V2 is
related in type to the Saturn V in the same way that the Ho-299 is related to
the B-2. In other words, I don't think there was much to discover about the
299 aside from historical novelty.

For what it's worth, Jack Northrop was interested in flying wings as early the
late 30s with the N1-M.

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antidaily
"Hitler's Stealth Fighter" aired Sunday, June 28 on the National Geographic
Channel. Runs again on Sunday 7/5 at 1:00 PM.

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robin_reala
Apparently this used carbon dust in the glue of the laminate to act as a radar
stealthing material:

[http://www.newlaunches.com/archives/the_retro_horten_229_ste...](http://www.newlaunches.com/archives/the_retro_horten_229_stealth_fighter_recreated.php)

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AndrewO
Reminds me of all the time I spent playing Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe.
Good game.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_Weapons_of_the_Luftwaffe>

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kingkongrevenge
"Nazi engineers"

Does the writer actually know the engineers were party members?

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rend
If you read the actual source article in National Geographic, you'll find that
the Horten brothers _were_ in fact Nazis.

Still, even if they were not Nazi's, English is sufficiently malleable that
Nazi engineer could mean simply _an engineer employed by the Nazi's_.

Is every "Google engineer" an actual Google?

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kingkongrevenge
It's a bit more akin to now calling all Lockheed Martin engineers "Obama's
Engineers".

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donw
No, that only applies if they work at GM.

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tokenadult
Duplicate of

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=680721>

