"Hitler's Stealth Fighter" Re-created

[Screaming Skull]

"Hitler's Stealth Fighter" Re-created​

June 25, 2009

Top stealth-plane experts have re-created a radical, nearly forgotten Nazi aircraft: the Horten 2-29, a retro-futuristic fighter that arrived too late in World War II to make it into mass production.

The engineers' goal was to determine whether the so-called stealth fighter was truly radar resistant. In the process, they've uncovered new clues to just how close Nazi engineers were to unleashing a jet that some say could have changed the course of the war.

To replicate the Ho 2-29 late last year for a documentary premiering Sunday, a team from the Northrop Grumman defense-contracting corporation used original Nazi blueprints and the only surviving Ho 2-29, which has been stored in a U.S. government facility for more than 50 years.

The all-wing Ho 2-29 looked more like today's U.S. B-2 bomber —or something from a Star Wars preQUEUEl—than like any other World War II aircraft. Made primarily of wood and powered by jet engines, the plane was designed for speeds of up to 600 miles an hour (970 kilometers an hour).

Armed with four 30mm cannons and two 500-kilogram (1,100-pound) bombs, the planned production model was also meant to pack a punch.

A Ho 2-29 prototype made a successful test flight just before Christmas 1944. But by then time was running out for the Nazis, and they were never able to perfect the design or produce more than a handful of prototype planes.

Determining the Horten's stealth capabilities could help reveal what might have happened if the Ho 2-29 had been unleashed in force.

Last Minute "Miracle Weapon"?

As Hitler's Thousand-Year Reich crumbled, the führer clung to dreams of secret Wunderwaffen—miracle weapons (more Nazi secret weapons).

Enter the unconventional Horten brothers, who were at work on one such weapon.

Lead designer Reimar Horten was a glider designer "obsessed with the all-wing [design] because of the possibilities it created for low drag and exceptional performance," said Florida-based aviation historian David Myhra, who interviewed the Horten pair numerous times from the early 1980s until their deaths in the late 1990s.

Walter Horten was a military man who had lost hundreds of Luftwaffe colleagues during the Battle of Britain in 1940.

"That loss never left him to the day he died," said Myhra, author of The Horten Brothers and Their All-Wing Aircraft.

"He was burning with revenge and felt the need for a plane that would be pretty much invisible to Britain's Chain Home radar system. That's what he wanted his brother to design."

The result of their collaboration was uniQUEUE among Luftwaffe designs.

"It has no vertical surfaces for stability or control. Every exterior surface of that aircraft contributes lift," said Russell Lee, curator for the only remaining Horten 2-29 aircraft, at the National Air and Space Museum's Paul E. Garber Preservation, Restoration and Storage Facility outside Washington, D.C.

"That had been tried before and failed time and time again," Lee said. "Reimar Horten took the idea further and made it more practical than any other designer really up until the B-2."

Re-creating Hitler's Stealth Fighter

To determine once and for all whether the Ho 2-29 had stealth capabilities, experts first examined the surviving 2-29 and probed it with a portable radar unit based on World War II radar tech.

Then, in the fall and winter of 2008, they set about building the full-scale re-creation at a restricted-access Northrop Grumman testing facility in California's Mojave Desert.

The construction team embraced historic materials and techniQUEUEs, and the Horten 2-29 replica, like the original, is made largely of wood and bonded with glue and nails.

Unlike the original, however, the replica wasn't built to fly, though it did soar, after a fashion.

The new craft's body was constructed around a rotor, which allowed the replica to be manipulated atop a five-story-tall column. There, in January 2009, the craft was subjected to World War II-style radar.

Initiated by Michael Jorgensen, writer and producer of the National Geographic Channel documentary Hitler's Stealth Fighter, the construction and testing of the replica was funded by Northrop Grumman. (The National Geographic Channel is part-owned by the National Geographic Society, which owns National Geographic News.)

Stealth by Accident?

Stealth aircraft rely on shapes that prevent radar waves from bouncing back to their sources and on materials that absorb radar energy (stealth-plane time line).

Some experts, like the Garber facility's Lee, QUEUEstion the Hortens' postwar claims that their plane had been intended as a stealth plane.

"My take on it is that their goal at the time was to meet requirements for speed and range," Lee said. "The all-wing concept was [Reimar Horten's] baby, and he designed the shape for aerodynamic reasons—he never started talking about radar until after the war.

"Reimar talked about a sawdust and carbon coating to absorb radar energy, but we found no evidence of that on the Horton that we have here," Lee added.

But Myhra argues that the plane was indeed intentionally designed for stealth.

"When I talked with Walter Horten in the 1980s and '90s he always referred to his aircraft as low-observable," said Myhra, a former aerospace scientist.

Horten also told Myhra about his time in a Berlin think tank, when he had learned about radar evasion from Nazi navy officers hoping to camouflage their submarines.

Walter claimed to have brought this information to his brother so that it could be part of the plane's design.

"These guys knew about this stuff," Myhra said. "They were probably the only people in the entire German aviation community that were pursuing this line of thought."

Proof of Stealth?

Radar tests on the replica show that the plane's radical, smooth design would indeed have given it a significant advantage against radar, according to Tom Dobrenz, a Northrop Grumman expert in stealth, or "low observable," technology, who led the Horten replica project.

In short: The Horten 2-29 looks to have been the world's first stealth fighter.

But was it meant to be?

"I believe they were [mainly] driven by the aerodynamic side of it," Dobrenz said.

Still, radar tests on the surviving Ho 2-29 revealed "that they put some kind of carbon-type material in between the layers of plywood on the plane's leading edges," he said.

"Personally, I cannot understand that being for anything other than doing something to [defeat] radar." Even so, Dobrez added, "I'm not so sure that they had any clue what it was going to do or whether it was going to work or not."

"Could Have Been a Game Changer"

At least one major mystery remains: How would Hitler's stealth fighter have affected the outcome of World War II, had the plane made it to mass production?

"This design gave them just about a 20 percent reduction in radar range detection over a conventional fighter of the day," Dobrenz said.

According to tests on the replica, World War II British radar would have picked up the Horten over the English Channel at about 80 miles (129 kilometers) out, versus 100 miles (160 kilometers) for a conventional World War II fighter.

But because of the Ho 2-29's tremendous speed, the time from detection to target—the British mainland—would have been lowered from the usual 19 minutes to just 8 minutes, making it difficult for Allied defenders to respond.

"Probably, for at least a short amount of time, it could have been a game changer, until a counter was developed for it," Dobrenz said.

But the Ho 2-29 design was far from perfect.

World War II-era jet engines were unreliable, for one thing. For another, the lack of stabilizing vertical surfaces—a bane of all-wing designs, past and present—resulted in freQUEUEnt lurches, making sharp shooting and accurate bomb delivery that much harder.

In a different place and time, with further development, the promising Horten 2-29 might have made a difference.

But by early 1945, aviation historian George Cully said, "The Germans had run out of pilots, petroleum, and time."

"Hitler's Stealth Fighter" Re-created

 

[Screaming Skull]

Blueprints​

 

[raymerriam]

Interesting article. Had not previously heard of the building of a copy of this. However, the correct designation is the Horten Ho 229, not 2-29.

 

[Comet]

I wonder where did the Germans get such briliance more than 60 years ago

 

[EyelessInGaza]

Nazi Germany's designs in aviation and rocketry are amazing. Beyond genius even.

But the reason I am commenting on this thread is to speak up against the hoary old cliches that Hitler's wonder weapon could have won the war if he only had a year more.

Would they heck. Even if we assume that he had managed to get them going full swing by '45, the allies would have nuked the bejesus out of Germany in a pinch. And in '45 Hitler's nuclear program was nowhere even close to a halfway decent start.

Then again, we are assuming, that he would have got his wonder weapons in full delivery mode by '45. This is an impossibility. Looking at it coldly and logically, a new weapons platform takes anything between 3- 10 years to complete - i.e. from conceptualization to mass production - and this is a generous estimate. Given these numbers, Nazi Germany would have taken at least a couple years more before they could have faced the allies with these new weapons.

In other words, he was dead out of time.

This is even without assuming the infrastructure challenges. A lot of people do not know that Germany had almost run out of aviation fuel by mid 1945; so what would have powered these wonder weapons?

No, we can respect the designs and the prototypes, but must recognize them for what they are - the last brilliant intellectual spark of an evil, moribund, regime.

 

[duhastmish]

Nazi Germany's designs in aviation and rocketry are amazing. Beyond genius even.

But the reason I am commenting on this thread is to speak up against the hoary old cliches that Hitler's wonder weapon could have won the war if he only had a year more.

Would they heck. Even if we assume that he had managed to get them going full swing by '45, the allies would have nuked the bejesus out of Germany in a pinch. And in '45 Hitler's nuclear program was nowhere even close to a halfway decent start.

Then again, we are assuming, that he would have got his wonder weapons in full delivery mode by '45. This is an impossibility. Looking at it coldly and logically, a new weapons platform takes anything between 3- 10 years to complete - i.e. from conceptualization to mass production - and this is a generous estimate. Given these numbers, Nazi Germany would have taken at least a couple years more before they could have faced the allies with these new weapons.

In other words, he was dead out of time.

This is even without assuming the infrastructure challenges. A lot of people do not know that Germany had almost run out of aviation fuel by mid 1945; so what would have powered these wonder weapons?

No, we can respect the designs and the prototypes, but must recognize them for what they are - the last brilliant intellectual spark of an evil, moribund, regime.

not right !! hitlers nuclear programme was almost complete it wasnt a proper nuclear bomb but a dirty bomb designed by Uranverein which used hybrid-nuclear fusion . It was said in hitler's bombe - that Kurt Diebner.almost fnished the project but it took a month too much. germans could not spend too much time and energy like united states did on nuclear bomb past 1942 . or else they would have done it way before 1945.

Meaning war result would have been different.

 

[Mig-29]

May be they had a little help from the aliens , there is a hilarious article in pravda.ru about the same .

Adolf Hitler and other Nazi bonzes heeded predictions of pagan priests and astrologists. But little is known about the interest of the Third Reich in aliens. Ufologists in the West think that the issue was purposefully kept secret because a great share of the classified army and technology heritage of Nazis had been seized by countries of the anti-Hitler coalition.


Much of what is said by western historians and ufologists may sound too fantastic and even absurd.

Nazi researchers succeeded in development of nuclear bombs, other up-to-date armament and achieved a very high technological level in general. It is supposed that the success was thanks to contacts with aliens that were quite regular.

Before Hitler came to power national socialists had been developing projects meant to find the origins of the legendary Aryans and the location of legendary Shambala. They expected to obtain some secret super knowledge to seize the domination over the world. Secret expeditions were sent to Tibet and the Himalayas. The number of such expeditions considerably increased when Nazis came to power in 1933.

The secret projects were especially active within 1935-1939, and probably expeditions were even sent after the war campaign in Europe started. But all the documents pertaining to the projects were destroyed before Nazi Germany capitulated or probably are still being kept in undisclosed hiding-places.

Ufologists several times supposed that some Nazi expedition probably came across a wrecked UFO and contacted its crew. That highly likely occurred in the Himalayas. Or maybe the Germans took an extraterrestrial crew prisoners or came across an alien base.

However, majority of researchers think that contacts between Germans and crews of crashed UFOs were mutually beneficial. Aliens got materials to repair their space vehicles, and Nazis gained new and knowledge and technologies from aliens. So, much of Germany’s scientific researches are considered to be achieved thanks to the information obtained from extraterrestrial civilizations.

 

[EyelessInGaza]

not right !! hitlers nuclear programme was almost complete it wasnt a proper nuclear bomb but a dirty bomb designed by Uranverein which used hybrid-nuclear fusion . It was said in hitler's bombe - that Kurt Diebner.almost fnished the project but it took a month too much. germans could not spend too much time and energy like united states did on nuclear bomb past 1942 . or else they would have done it way before 1945.

Meaning war result would have been different.

I think a lot of this is myth, i.e. the bomb was a month late.

From wiki (not always a reliable source):

When it was apparent that the nuclear energy project would not make a decisive contribution to ending the war effort in the near term, control of the KWIP was returned in January 1942 to its umbrella organization, the Kaiser-Wilhelm Gesellschaft (KWG, Kaiser Wilhelm Society, after WW II the Max-Planck Gesellschaft), and HWA control of the project was relinquished to the RFR in July 1942.


Pretty much in line with my other reading on the subject. After 42, Goering funded some nuclear research, but it wasn't near close enough for Germany to create an effective prorgam.

 

[xebex]

enjoy...