Hitler's secret fighter revealed | Hacker News Reader

Hitler's secret fighter revealed

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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.

Well, for passenger aircraft they haven't been prevalent because you'd be uncomfortable sitting at the extremities where the wings move up and down a lot. And then there's the problem of yaw control.

Also pressurizing an aircraft that isn't a tube can be tricky and evacuation/safety concerns are a messy issue. It will be a while before you'll see manned aircraft in that style.

According to Wikipedia: The expected gains in weight and drag reduction may be partially or wholly negated due to design compromises needed to provide stability and control. Alternatively, and more commonly, a flying wing type may suffer from stability and control problems. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_wing

Now that Thrust Vectoring (OWNS THE SKIES! THIS THING TURNS ON A DIME, MACROSS ZERO STYLE!) is more common we should see an upsurge in new aircraft designs that are of a flying wing style then, right?

Well, sort of. They're now called "Blended wing" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blended_wing

The original story is here with a lot more detail: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/06/090625-hitle...

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This will still keep the professional conspiracy theorists in pizza and beer for at least a year. I suspect the documentary will play up the secrecy angle at the expense of the science :-/

It wasn't awful, but they did exaggerate on the warehouse. Instead of calling it what it was (again, as far as I can tell - I haven't been there or anything) they made it out like the DC version of Groom Lake, a "heavily guarded government facility."

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

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...

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

"Nazi engineers"

Does the writer actually know the engineers were party members?

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?

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

No, that only applies if they work at GM.

No, it would be like calling them US engineers, which they are. (Except that I imagine the Nazi engineers may have been more directly employed by the Nazi government than LHM is by the US govt. That's just speculation though.)

"Nazi" refers to Nazi Germany as well as the party itself.

they were in the Luftwaffe and a part of the war machine of Nazi Germany

Duplicate of

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com