the-horten-229-v3-flying-wing

MikeKardec said:

If memory serves the Horten Bros were top glider designers before the war and tested their designs in real world conditions, tying strips of cloth in many places along the wings and then shooting motion picture film of their movement in flight from a chase plane to improve the air flow patterns. I heard something about one of their prototypes being brought to a University here for study but before the school ever flew it they felt it necessary to "fix" it ... something about a higher cockpit canopy rings a bell ... after testing they decided that it was unstable or some such and let the plane deteriorate. I suspect the Hortons knew what they were up to and the US study group ruined it then, in ignorance, said it didn't work. Being forced back to the basics of gliders by the treaty of Versailles may have advanced German aviation by a decade.

I also wonder if the US didn't hold back from copying or improving/completing the most radical German designs for fear of pushing the Soviets in the same direction. If we do flying wings then they have to start thinking about flying wings then we have to make our flying wings the best and so on. To save money we may have decided that staying just a little ahead was good enough. Especially if we really believed that, "our Germans were better than their Germans" and we could jump ahead if we needed to. The Russians often had design requirements than total performance (like can you fix it with a Swiss army knife) and so it wasn't until right about now that we have cut loose with some of those old German concepts, like the B2.

Many times I have seen that the earliest pioneers in any discipline, especially the ones who set forth the first principals of a theory, are so far ahead of the rest of the world it takes generations for everyone else to catch up. That may have been true of the early Soviet film makers, Eisenstein and that crowd. It's my feeling that Alan Blumlein of Electric and Musical Industries wrote about and designed ways of using stereo in audio in the 1920s that were genius ... and there really was no stereo besides his experiments in those days. I've been using his theories of M/S manipulation in audio dramas for 30 years and the rest of the world is just catching up to little old me ... Blumlein himself died in the 1940s! I believe that many of the earliest glider and monoplane designers were way before their time. The needs of early unschooled pilots and WWI, with lots of pilot attrition, forced everyone to design planes that were of somewhat less performance than was possible even in those early days.

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Stearmen said:

One of the Horten IV gliders was flown extensively at Mississippi State University! They found it to be a pretty good plane! As for not building flying wings because of the Soviet Union, Northrop built both the XB-35 piston engine and XB-49 jet flying wing bombers. Politics killed those!

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MikeKardec said:

A vision of another future ... not one I'd rather have, mind you, but it sure looks cool!

I'm fascinated by some of those controls ... they look quite used. Was that a shot from another film? Or did they somehow beat the crap out of them before they scrapped them?

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