Anybody ever hear of the Horton brothers??? How about the HO229???
Advance warning, this is a LONG video (45 minutes) but worth it if you have time and are an airplane buff!
This is a fascinating story, and one that was ‘close hold’ for many years. Thanks to NG and NatGeo, we now know how ‘good’ their design was. And frankly, it’s scary as hell how close they came to the proverbial “game changer”…
The brother’s Wiki page is HERE.
Good thing we managed to stop them when we did.
Scary is the right word. Wow.
Hitler’s obsession’s kept several game changers out of play, or too late to matter. Same thing with Stalin’s purges in the 1930’s. The Russians had some very advanced aircraft for the time. There was some cooperation between the Russians and Germans before WWII. Some historians credit that cooperation resulted in the Romanian IAR 80. Interesting video, thank you.
Some time ago Northrup Grumman (I think) made a full size mockup, and put it up at the RCS range out in the desert somewhere.
It was about as good as a B2….
Alan- Yep, that ‘could’ have been scary…
Rev- Agree!
WSF- Good point and you’re welcome!
drjim- Yep!
Wow.
https://www.google.com/search?q=secret+weapons+of+the+luftwaffe&rlz=1G1GGLQ_ENUS249&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=jm98UefTBYjMqQHug4C4DA&ved=0CEsQsAQ&biw=1348&bih=635
Enjoyed that story. Thanks!
Thank god they squandered all that time and money and smarts and production capacity chasing dozens of technologies that weren’t yet ready for prime-time.
Every 262 or 234 or Jagdtiger or Type XXVI built or under construction represented multiple copies of perfectly adequate and thoroughly debugged weapons that could have been fielded instead.
Germany didn’t get too few jets in the air too late; they got too many on the assembly lines too soon.
Tam- excellent point and I for one am thankful they did that… Otherwise things could have been very different!
Ed- That’s an interesting link!
Oh, man, I wasted many an hour playing Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe… Flying 163s against the bomber stream or manning the turrets in a B-17 trying to fend off attackers… We even had SWOTL on the work machine in the hangar at SmithKline…