'Luft 46'

CalBear

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Don't know where you got this wisdom from ...

That a well known US american airplane pioneer and producer I respct highly wasn't able to get his designs working, doesn't mean that other couldn't. The Horten gliders were at their time the pinnacle of motorless flying.
It's motorized versions were as solid as every plane the no worse account of crashes than any other plane (ok, the first version with its too advanced for it time system of turnable wingtips was unstable, but with the "normal" Horten-type airlons arrangements on a fixed wing the were used as trainers ...).
If you refer to the crash of the Go 229 ... I would recommend you reading :
"Horten Ho 229
Spirit of thuringia" by Andrei Shepelev and Huib Ottens, 1st published 2006, ISBN (10) 1 903223 66 0, ISBN (!§) 978 1 903223 66 B
There you will find a proper account of what happend : an engine failure and due to it an hydraulic error causing an untimey deploying of the landing gear. The flying itself was regarded as FUN by the pilots.

True, "Nurflügel"-planes aren't easy to plan build - only that there are dozens of build-your-own-plane kits available worldwide without fly-by wire.


And for the He 162 (sometime called "Salamander", sometimes "Spatz") : There's a good book about it with a lot of post-war allied pilot reports flying her. In short : if you are a soft and carefull with the gas ... TOP PLANE.
However, with perhapd double the time of its development (what would have been still less than a year from first drawing to powered flight:eek:) these first illnesses would most likely been erased.

I suggest you read something that is not a veritable love letter to the aircraft.

As I noted, as other have noted, flying wings absent the presence of computer aided control surfaces that can react far more quickly, and in far more variables than any human pilot, are great places to die.

Flying wings be they from Horton or Northrop or any of the many others who looked into the design are terrific, absolute wonderful machines right up to the point where they are not. When they get hit by the unexpected gust of wind, or hit turbulence, or downdrafts or any of the almost uncountable issues that can occur in flight, or when a human pilot makes an error (and human pilots, even the very best, make them ALL THE TIME) and the plane starts to spin or skid in the air they become unrecoverable. The term of art is a falling leaf spin, when an aircraft becomes divergent on multiple axes. Spins along a single axis are generally readily recoverable, in fact part of flight testing is spin recovery. Spins in a flying wing are almost impossible to keep in only a single axis, and if the aircraft become divergent on two or more axes they are impossible to save.

Spin recovery in important in every aircraft, be it a private plane or a cutting edge fighter, but for the warplane it is critical. Combat puts aircraft into situations that the designers never imagined, that the men flying it would never attempt in anything but life and death conditions. Combat aircraft are also extremely likely to suffer damage to control surfaces, making the most stable of aircraft difficult to keep in control. Flying wings are always on the edge of instability, trying to keep one in the air with a four inch ragged hole in the aileron, or missing a trim table, or with a chunk of the leading edge blown away is literally impossible for a human being.

Beyond the basic realities of aerodynamics the best possible demonstration that flying wings, using anything before 1980s technological assistance is that no one made them. Not the U.S., which had the Horten's data, and utterly unlimited funding (the U.S. actually flight tested aircraft powered by nuclear reactors for crissake) nor the Soviets, with the same sort of test data, who would literally try anything, up to and including efforts to control aircraft with thought, tried to revive the concept beyond the wind tunnel.

It wasn't that they didn't understand the advantages that a wing represented, they are stunningly obvious, they couldn't make them work in any sort of testing.

Fans of the Luft '46 designs tend to ignore the fact that the data, not to mention the actual designers was readily available to the victors (that is how Luft '46 could even exist). Those victors then engaged in a decades long Cold War, striving every day for an advantage, spending literally obscene amounts of treasure in the effort. If any of the concepts were worthwhile they were used. Both Horten brother survived the war, one was even a post war Luftwaffe officer. If their designs could have been made usable it would have happened.
 
Without getting too long what can say about Luft46 is that while there were some truly wacky projects that would never be feasible, others were literally the shape of things to come. A large armount of whatever was flying on any side in late 1940s and into the 1950s have german roots be it american, russian and even british (i was rather shocked to discover that some german bomber projects look uncannily similar to some of the later V-bombers). It is of course a valid point that they would have encountered serious issues which could only be sorted by trial and error, but i would definitely not discount things like the Hortens (big and small) or the Ta-183. The first would have been safe enough with a few tweaks (add some tails or something) for wartime standards, while the latter is basically either an early MiG-15 or a swept wing Yak-23. It would have been truly formidable. So if things would have gotten into 1946 whatever it looked like it would work and/or it could be made to in the time available, it would imo.
 

CalBear

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Without getting too long what can say about Luft46 is that while there were some truly wacky projects that would never be feasible, others were literally the shape of things to come. A large armount of whatever was flying on any side in late 1940s and into the 1950s have german roots be it american, russian and even british (i was rather shocked to discover that some german bomber projects look uncannily similar to some of the later V-bombers). It is of course a valid point that they would have encountered serious issues which could only be sorted by trial and error, but i would definitely not discount things like the Hortens (big and small) or the Ta-183. The first would have been safe enough with a few tweaks (add some tails or something) for wartime standards, while the latter is basically either an early MiG-15 or a swept wing Yak-23. It would have been truly formidable. So if things would have gotten into 1946 whatever it looked like it would work and/or it could be made to in the time available, it would imo.

If you add a tail to the Ho-229 it rather spoils the whole "flying wing" bit :D, although it might benefit slightly in terms of stealth thanks to the buried engines and wood used in the design.


The Ta-183 is interesting. The design had some serious stability issues. MiG didn't do a straight lift of the design, but, as you note, the MiG-15 has serious echoes of it. The Soviet wound up adding a set of vertical wing fences to the original design to make the aircraft flyable, even then Soviet pilots were taught to eject if the aircraft would up in a spin and they couldn't recover within three revolutions (Yeager discusses it in his biography).

A lot of the other aircraft from the 1950s & 60s have similar looks to the "Luft 46" designs, but that is in large part due to the fact that there are only so many airframe designs possible and the Reich designers were throwing pen to paper for something, anything, that would stem the tide (not to mention keep them out of the Heer lugging a rifle).
 

What always gets me is the Allies didn't play fair argument they like to throw about. Of course they didn't play fair it was a goddamn war! You take every advantage you get and you squeeze it until it turns into dust and then if its still an advantage you squeeze it even more.
 
What always gets me is the Allies didn't play fair argument they like to throw about. Of course they didn't play fair it was a goddamn war! You take every advantage you get and you squeeze it until it turns into dust and then if its still an advantage you squeeze it even more.

More importantly, what does play fair even mean? If the Allies were cheating by using their superior industry, then weren't the Germans cheating by using their totally-not-overcompensating-barely-working-at-the-best-of-times-super-awesome tech?
 
Well, if you add a bit of fuselage and a tail or two to the Hortens big and small, why wouldn't they become like the Me-163, reportedly almost unspinnable? If they would have had the time to test the thing properly, they may or may not have done that, we don't know (and the same goes for the Ta-183 f.e.). I seem to remember reading a little tidbit about the Horten Amerika bomber project, apparently the powers that be decided that they want it with fuselage and tail (but the brothers were not too happy about it), and again i can't stop thinking at something akin to the early Vulcans. In fact something even closer to that are the Arado cranked flying wings, they have fuselage, tail etc. Don't tell me they will not work either. :D

As to the stealth part, i actually took the pain to watch the respective episode from an american TV on youtube. They really spent all that money to build the replica and test it in their top secret RCS facility, which i found bewildering. I seriously doubt that the Horten was designed specifically for stealth, that surely was the last concern (if at all), the main one being to get something in the air that surpasses the oposition, is cheap to build and hard hitting and the brothers believed a flying wing will provide all that. Stealth, if any, was just a welcomed side effect, but as you probably know, the radar signature reduction was not significant.

Probably all this stealth legend has to do with the present day craze about it, and this coming from someone who, again, believes that the german aircraft design thought was ahead of it's time (that the political and other circumstances prevented the aforementioned design thought to fully realize it's true potential is of course another matter).
 
the cheap, practical advances on Luft 46 site get no notice

little Flettner helicopter http://www.aviastar.org/helicopters_eng/flettner_kolibri.php

R4M rockets

even the 109Z Zwilling ungainly twin fuselage used 90% existing parts and more useful than ... well ... 90% of the other projects?

a couple of mixed propulsion aircraft which (IMO) was proper strategy, attach small jets or rockets to existing piston aircraft.
 
More importantly, what does play fair even mean? If the Allies were cheating by using their superior industry, then weren't the Germans cheating by using their totally-not-overcompensating-barely-working-at-the-best-of-times-super-awesome tech?

not to mention working slaves to death definitely counts as cheating by Germany
 
What always gets me is the Allies didn't play fair argument they like to throw about. Of course they didn't play fair it was a goddamn war! You take every advantage you get and you squeeze it until it turns into dust and then if its still an advantage you squeeze it even more.
To borrow a quote "If it's a fair fight then somebody fucked up".
 
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