• There seems to be an uptick in Political comments in recent months. Those of us who are long time members of the site know that Political and Religious content has been banned for years. Nothing has changed. Please leave all political and religious comments out of the forums.

    If you recently joined the forums you were not presented with this restriction in the terms of service. This was due to a conversion error when we went from vBulletin to Xenforo. We have updated our terms of service to reflect these corrections.

    Please note any post refering to a politician will be considered political even if it is intended to be humor. Our experience is these topics have a way of dividing the forums and causing deep resentment among members. It is a poison to the community. We appreciate compliance with the rules.

    The Staff of SOH

  • Server side Maintenance is done. We still have an update to the forum software to run but that one will have to wait for a better time.

Horton 229 on Channel 4 TV

Pat Pattle

Pat Pattle

SOH-CM-2025
"In the summer of 1945, American troops made a startling discovery in northern Germany: a secret hangar housing a dozen unfinished boomerang-shaped aircraft: the HO 229, Hitler's 'stealth fighters'.
The 'flying wings' were sent to the US, and today a team of hand-picked experts is working to reproduce a complete HO 229, in an attempt to discover whether this Nazi-designed fighter predates modern stealth aircraft by nearly four decades. Could it really have eluded Allied radar and changed the course of the war?"

http://www.channel4.com/programmes/world-war-ii-the-untold-stories/episode-guide/series-1/episode-4

Did anyone else see this? I watched it last night, very interesting supposition on what effect these aircraft may have had on the war. The CG was a bit iffy though, they should have used CFS3!
 
Just watched it on C4D,that was a great insite to what it would have been like .... just good job it never had the chance to become full scale production.

That horton 18 would have been a pretty terrifying thing to be flying if you was the allies.

Dave
 
Dave(Dangerous)Boynton said:
Just watched it on C4D,that was a great insite to what it would have been like .... just good job it never had the chance to become full scale production.

That horton 18 would have been a pretty terrifying thing to be flying if you was the allies.

Dave
Click to expand...

If David Ince's claims are to be believed, the Horton pilots might have been equally terrified...

...I badly wanted to talk to (Heinz) Scheidhauer. Even if he had almost no English and I as little German, we managed surprisingly well with lots of sketches and some fairly extreme body language. It was he who had carried out almost all flight testing on the Horten IX V1 - the glider version - and when the powered version was ready bureaucratic officialdom stepped in with disastrous results.

Heinz said that he had been replaced by Irwin Ziller who had zero experience on flying wings or jet aircraft. There were some hard words. But worse was to follow. On the fourth flight, in February 1945, an engine failed. The combination of poor directional stability, negligible yaw damping and drag rudders proved too much for this unfortunate man. He failed to follow Heinz's advice about flying wing down towards the good engine, lost control on the approach and crashed heavily. A fatal accident and a sad end to the Horten IX.

Apart from the cockpit transparency, the engine bulges, air intakes and exhaust nozzles, the Horten IX was an unblemished flying wing. There were no vertical surfaces of any sort. Apparently there had been talk of a fin and rudder. But it never happened. After learning more about the handling of tailless aircraft from Heinz, I wondered whether this feature might have saved Ziller's life. At the same time Horten's revolutionary design appeared to have all the makings of a lousy weapons aiming platform. Were the Germans just clutching at straws, at a crucial stage in the war, mesmerised by the high performance which it promised? (my emphasis)

Brotherhood of the Skies, by David Ince DFC, p184-5
Click to expand...

Ince is no ordinary pilot: after distinguished wartime service he was trained as a test pilot at the Empire Test Pilot School. His 'conversation' with Heinz Scheidhauer was in 1952, as Reimer Horten continued developing his tailless gliders in Argentina.

There are a number of flight models for Hortens available for CFS3 and all but one are smooth, wickedly fast and wonderfully responsive.

Except one - Gregory Pierson's AvHistory flight model. Yeeeikes! :redf:
 
Damn....the service is unavailable in my area! I really wanted to watch this. Oh Well, I guess California is just too far away.
 
So what is the CFS3 version of this aircraft? Is the Flight model near reality or just stable to give us some confidence to get into the thing?

As for the Horton X. I would have been surprised it might have passed Allied airbourne radar stations over England unnoticed and had a successful bombing of New York mission before returning home. What would the outcome really have been?
 
Autothrottle said:
So what is the CFS3 version of this aircraft? Is the Flight model near reality or just stable to give us some confidence to get into the thing?

As for the Horton X. I would have been surprised it might have passed Allied airbourne radar stations over England unnoticed and had a successful bombing of New York mission before returning home. What would the outcome really have been?
Click to expand...
Funny thing is, even with radar contact, I don't know how the allies would intercept it anyway.
 
Autothrottle said:
So what is the CFS3 version of this aircraft? Is the Flight model near reality or just stable to give us some confidence to get into the thing?
Click to expand...

To be frank, nobody still living knows! However, a lot of research into flying wings was done after WW2 and the results varied from a bit tricky to downright lethal. A de Havilland test pilot was killed when his aircraft developed a severe pitch oscillation. Another was described by Eric Brown as "a killer".

I'd put a bit more weight on the AvH flight model as Gregory uses aerodynamics to calculate the flight behaviour, rather than guesswork. We could argue about the results (and many have) but one thing still comes back to me - whatever simulator models might do, there have been no supersonic flying wings built for real. All supersonic aircraft have short and/or swept-back wings and very effective rudders and elevators. So there has to be an upper speed limit to the controllability of flying wings.

The programme is great, BTW. You could see how much fun the Northrop modellers were having putting that beautiful airframe together! Where some of the claims in the programme came from is another matter, like dogfighting one with a Me262???
 
Quote "there have been no supersonic flying wings built for real."
Hyper x is essentially a supersonic flying wing.(Mach 5+) Not that there is a strong comparison between the horten and it.My point is simply, it was ahead of it's time and the technology/ knowledge- base, just wasnt there, to be built on. It's definately a case of what could of been.
 
Thanks for the heads up, have just finished watching it. It was rather good but I agree the computer graphics were a little poor
 
Autothrottle said:
So what is the CFS3 version of this aircraft? Is the Flight model near reality or just stable to give us some confidence to get into the thing?
Click to expand...

Using AirWrench to look at the .air files for the stock FM and the AvH FM, the immediate difference between the two is the stock flight model has horizontal stabilisers, the AvH flight model has none. So yes, the stock model is stable to give us confidence to get into the thing.

lthump said:
Quote "there have been no supersonic flying wings built for real."
Hyper x is essentially a supersonic flying wing.(Mach 5+) Not that there is a strong comparison between the horten and it...
Click to expand...

Perhaps I should have been less ambiguous? Not much comparison at all! We don't know what the ultimate potential of the Ho229 would be, I only suggest that post-war research aircraft indicate the flying wing to be a tricky beast with continuing stability problems, rather than a devastatingly capable warbird.

aurora_x-43_grand.jpg



Horton_05.jpg



But I expect this debate has many more years to run...
 
See it for real

Anyone who is in the San Diego, CA area can see the plane made for the show. It's hanging from the ceiling of the San Diego Aerospace Museum in Balboa Park.
 
one thing the show was right had they let it go and release a bunch at the time liekly spits and hurricanes where helpess in the catch up and kill air mode based on its speed for that time and stealth points ,,tested in a mock on the cdn version of this show


my question is if so why they didnt ...


was it hilter over sight or gorring ....
 
loverboy1 said:
one thing the show was right had they let it go and release a bunch at the time liekly spits and hurricanes where helpess in the catch up and kill air mode based on its speed for that time and stealth points ,,tested in a mock on the cdn version of this show


my question is if so why they didnt ...


was it hilter over sight or gorring ....
Click to expand...
I've always thought that it was still not ready yet...still in development when the Allied war machine was at their doorstep.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top