Horten Ho 229

How many of these could be produed per month in late 1944 compared to the number of allied planes being pumped out by USA, GB, and USSR?

Could the Ho 229 bomber evade a piston engine figter patrol? Could the allied fighter advantage be used to team up on the beast?

Could AAA bring it down. Would the allied responce be to bring interceptor fighters sooner and develop a SAM?
 

Cook

Banned
How many of these could be produed per month in late 1944 compared to the number of allied planes being pumped out by USA, GB, and USSR?

Sod all I expect.

Could the Ho 229 bomber evade a piston engine figter patrol?

I expect so, being a damned sight faster.

Could the allied fighter advantage be used to team up on the beast?

As said before by someone, they have to land sometime.

Could AAA bring it down. Would the allied responce be to bring interceptor fighters sooner and develop a SAM?

The Germans developed an early SAM during the war so no reason why not. But the Allies advantage in pure numbers is going to do Germany in anyway.

To me it's more a question of what happens afterwards.
 
Best as I can tell, an aircraft called Ho-229 never flew. The Ho-IX flew and flew well but for some minor shortcomings. It was reported to have moderate lateral instability, but marvellous stall characteristics. But it didn't land well, having problems during it's short development career. The engine-out crash is somewhat conjectural because the pilot did not report the problem by radio. It is possible that the drag flaps could not counter the asymetric thrustline or the pilot could have been killed or incapacitated by the blown engine. German aircraft technology was marvellous and foresighted, with numerous paper napkin designs that could have won the war with the help of a time machine, but the axial flow turbo-jets were problematical, reliant on materials and materials technology which Germany did not possess. An aircraft without a viable engine is a glider or a paperweight. And 1944 was the year of the Mustang. I hear that J-85's make the 262 a nice bird, but the Germans couldn't make J-85's.
 
Assuming for a moment that the plane would work and the Germans could produce a few there is still going to be the problem of finding qualified pilots. All the pilots with experience are trained on propeller planes and the German wartime training program was pretty pathetic. They didn't have the airplanes to use as trainers, they didn't have the fuel to get a lot of training flights, and they didn't have air superiority so their training regime was based around how long they could stay in the air before getting shot down by an allied patrol.

Little point in having a wonder weapon if nobody can use it.
 

Cook

Banned
German aircraft technology was marvellous and foresighted, with numerous paper napkin designs that could have won the war with the help of a time machine, but the axial flow turbo-jets were problematical, reliant on materials and materials technology which Germany did not possess. An aircraft without a viable engine is a glider or a paperweight.



Apparently the average life span of German production jet engines during the war was only 25 hours.
 
Someone explain to me why three test flights somehow make this a wonder weapon? There is no hard data on what it could actually do, for all we know it would breakup at three hundred miles per hour. Let's also drop the stealth nonsense, it's a pretty minimal drop from a Bf-109 and, at this era, visual signature is more important and it is much larger than a normal fighter, handicapping it against Allied fighters.
 

Cook

Banned
Someone explain to me why three test flights somehow make this a wonder weapon? There is no hard data on what it could actually do, for all we know it would breakup at three hundred miles per hour. Let's also drop the stealth nonsense, it's a pretty minimal drop from a Bf-109 and, at this era, visual signature is more important and it is much larger than a normal fighter, handicapping it against Allied fighters.

I’ll take a bigger visual signature if it comes with a 100 knot advantage but I want some damned site more reliable engines.
 

NIK PARMEN

Banned
What if the Germans build few operational of them and in 1945 the Soviets capture 3-4 of them and ship them back to Russia. They will have the knowledge that plane (in OTL the prototypes were captured by US troops). The problem for USSR in the 50's about stealth technology is they could't find a good plane design to add it. Imagine a soviet copy of Horten Ho 229 using stealth technology in the 1960's.
 

Cook

Banned
Just a reminder; the shape of the Ho 229 was to reduce drag. I don’t thing anyone had even thought about radar evasion back then had they?
Jamming yes, evasion no?
 

Larrikin

Banned
Butterfly

There’s a massive butterfly!

What if the Ministry of Defence had vetoed the sale on national security grounds.

Labour govt, with all the "we can all be friends if we just sit down and have a chat and a cup of tea" mindset that that entails.
 
If the Russians were aware of the Horten plane?

If you're interested in the development of stealth, I'd strongly suggest reading Skunk Works by Ben Rich. He was the head of Lockheed's Skunk Works when they developed the F-117, and he outlines the story in your video from the inside.

But the Ufimtsev equations and the Horten aircraft are two completely different things. In either case, you need computer-aided controls to ensure stability in adverse conditions, as CalBear stated. In order to make a truly "invisible" stealthy aircraft, you also need the development of radar-absorbing materials, which don't become available until the 1970s. If you want something earlier than that, try a wooden aircraft. I don't think you'll have much luck getting something with the many facets required by the Ufimtsev work to fly without computers, though.

And thanks for the video!
 
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I just caught a National Geographic channel docu about some Skunk Works guys building a full-scale 229 model and measuring the RCS. They found it was quite stealthy with only a minimal RCS flare at head-on due to engine and cockpit reflections. They estimated Chain Home detection would limit the British to a very few minutes of reaction time. I forget the number, but it was far less than with a more traditional design. They estimated it could have worked as an effective first-strike fighter against specific high-value targets (like radar stations).

They didn't go into aerodynamic stability, unfortunately. I'd always heard about flying wings' inherent instability as Amerigo and CalBear point out, but the link from Cook is intriguing. Anyone know of any actual aerodynamic testing of the 229 design?
 

Cook

Banned
They lack stability in cross winds, in weather, and have a rather distressing tendency to become divergent in all three axes when adverse conditions are encountered.

The very simplest demonstration of this is, despite the apparent advantages of an all wing design, none was every sucessful prior to computer aided controls.

These are the characteristics of Lifting Bodies.

A Lifting Body can be looked on as either a slightly streamlined airframe with no wings or an extremely long but narrow wing. It suffers horribly from edge effects and they are really scary.

They are a very different animal to a flying wing.

If you want know what a bathtub would look like flying check out NASA’s M2-F1 Lifting Body. The only descriptions that would fit that pilot are “balls of steal” or “Craziest nutball in the loony bin!”

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/dryden/news/FactSheets/FS-011-DFRC.html
 

CalBear

Moderator
Donor
Monthly Donor
The issue with the flying wing designs (all of them) isn't stall. The problem is yaw, especially in turbulent air or at high speeds. The Horton Brother Gliders did not experience either of these since only a suicide case takes a glider up in a thunderstorm and gliders are very limited in max speed, especially those that had to rely on 100 mph tow planes.

Depending on the overall design the aircraft can be reasonably stable until it is presented with weather or high speed. Once so confronted the envelope of the flight characteristics is full of holes. Flying wings are also notoriously difficult to retrieve from a spin, a rather nasty characteristic since yaw troubles lead to spins. Once they go they tend toward a "falling leaf" spin (i.e. divergent in all three axes) a condition that is nearly unrecoverable even in standard, dynamically stable, designs.


The early lifting bodies were widow makers. Anyone who grew up watching The Six Million Dollar Man has seen one of them crash many times since it was the plane that our hero had supposedly been flying when he encountered the ground at high speed due to a sudden loss of thust and lift (yes, a second old TV show reference in the same sentence :D) and was part of the opening credits every week.
These are the characteristics of Lifting Bodies.

A Lifting Body can be looked on as either a slightly streamlined airframe with no wings or an extremely long but narrow wing. It suffers horribly from edge effects and they are really scary.

They are a very different animal to a flying wing.

If you want know what a bathtub would look like flying check out NASA’s M2-F1 Lifting Body. The only descriptions that would fit that pilot are “balls of steal” or “Craziest nutball in the loony bin!”

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/dryden/news/FactSheets/FS-011-DFRC.html
 
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