The Horten Ho 229 V3 is one of the most spectacular aircraft of the Second World War, but it was never actually used. The Horten combined two innovations that were revolutionary for the time: It was no longer driven by a propeller, but by two jet engines. Just like the first jet fighter in the world, the German Messerschmitt Me 262. But the Horten added a special form to the superior engine: the aircraft was a so-called flying wing. It did not have a separate trunk.
The idea of doing without the fuselage was almost as old as aviation itself. The German aerospace engineer Hugo Junkers had already patented it in 1910. His reasoning was very simple: only the wings provided the necessary lift in the air, the fuselage and the rudder were to a certain extent “ballast”. If it is possible to reduce these parts and build an aircraft that consisted only of the wings, it would have to have superior flight characteristics. In practice, Junkers’ considerations could not be implemented. Without a tail unit and fuselage, an airplane was almost impossible to control. If the wings stalled, the plane would crash.
The Horten brothers were not discouraged
Only the brothers Walter and Reimar Horten followed up on these plans in the 1920s. The peace treaty after the defeat in World War I banned Germany from having its own air force, but glider clubs flourished. There the brothers began to develop their first flying wing. The difficulties of the project did not deter enthusiasts, when they started, they were still children. In 1932, the plane she had put together took off for the first time.
The breakthrough came in 1943. Two years earlier, the Messerschmitt Me 262 had made its first flight with its jet engines. It was developed as a fighter aircraft, but Adolf Hitler wanted a fighter-bomber that was so fast that the enemy machines could not overtake it. For this reason, the Me 262 was converted into an improvised bomb plane. At the same time, the head of the Nazi Air Force, Hermann Göring, asked for a thoroughbred fighter bomber. It should be able to transport a bomb load of one tonne 1000 kilometers and reach a speed of 1000 km / h. The top speed of the Me 262 was 870 km / h.
Prototypes took off
These requirements could not be met with a conventional design. This is how the Horten brothers came into play. They were supposed to develop the long-range bomber Ho 229 and took up ideas from the unconventional aircraft designer Alexander Lippisch. He had developed the Me 163 rocket aircraft and later designed Ekranoplane – ground aircraft – in the 1960s.
The Horten brothers used elongated wings and they said goodbye to the conventional elliptical cross-section and used a “bell-shaped” wing, which significantly reduced the stability problems of the flying wing. The first prototype was a glider without machines and completed a test flight on March 1, 1944. The two prototype with one engine took off on December 18, 1944. On February 2, 1945, however, this machine crashed after an engine failure. The third prototype, the Ho 229 V3, would theoretically have been superior to any other aircraft of its time – but it did not take off into the air.
It is rather unlikely that a series production that never took place would have redeemed the advantages of the concept in practice. For example, there was a lack of suitable engines. The actual achievement of the Hortens are not the superlatives with which their aircraft might have shone, but their ability to get the aerodynamic problems of the flying wing under control with the means available at the time. Russ Lee, of Smithsonian Air and Space, said in a BBC documentary, “To get one of these things to fly, you had to let the wing do all the work, and you ended up with an airplane that behaved as well as a conventional airplane with a tail unit. ”
Live on in the realm of fantasy
The end of the Third Reich ended the development. The prototypes fell into the hands of the Americans in Thuringia. The Hortens were brought to London for questioning. The V3 prototype made it to America. Traces of soot were found there, suggesting the engines started, but there is no evidence that the machine ever took off.
In the last few decades the concept of the flying wing has become very topical again. The fact that there is no fuselage and rudder not only increases the jet’s lift, it also reduces the radar shadow. Today the long-range bombers of the USA follow the concept of the flying wing and the Russian development of its own heavy bomber is also supposed to be a flying wing. For a long time now, hoarding, the supposed super weapon of the Third Reich, has had an afterlife in computer games and Hollywood productions. After all, it had really flown and is not a pure fantasy like the fabulous imperial flight letters.
The names Horten H IX and Gotha Go 229 are also used for the Horten Ho 229.
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