Horton Flying Wing

nuuumannn said:

Hm, yes, they aren't strictly 'POWs', but since espionage is a crime under British law, in wartime they are subject to harsh penalties, which includes execution. The treatment these guys got was pretty rough. There was a detention centre on the outskirts of London where the German agents captured were sent, run by a particularly ruthless Scot who was, to all intents and purposes good at his job.

Click to expand...

Tony Blair's government removed the death penalty for high treason and espionage. Tony Blair it is said cooperated with a foreign power to create a dossier, latter proven to be a fake which was used to shop the Iraq wars on the basis of non existent WMD and perhaps thought they had a remote possibility of being hoisted by their own petard. To this day Tony Blair is regarded as somewhat of a war criminal. It's worth nothing that Germans were sentence to death and executed at Nuremburg for the crime of 'waging aggressive war' which is essentially starting a war on false pretences. This technique of creating a fake causes belli based on the evidence of another countries agencies, circular references in media is nothing new.

The failure in German intelligence is a topic in itself. I suspect it does lie in the treaty of Versailles which probably prohibited it. The treaty certainly prohibited code braking by the German military which lead to this weakness.

FLYBOYJ said:

At the narrowest point?

Click to expand...

Well yes, but I dont think Chain Home Low could detect anything much further out either.

tyrodtom said:

I've always been extremely skeptical about the tale of anyone having a mock combat with with a brand new concept of a aircraft on it's second flight.
And how many flights did it make ? 3 !

I guess that's why we call it the Wunderwaffe .

Click to expand...

This: "Given the fact that it outperformed the ME 262 in mock combat..." is utter fantasy shamelessly presented as fact, with accompanying computer graphics, in the National Geographic documentary "Hitler's Stealth Fighter" no less!!!! My God the horror! I strongly suspect that was input by Horton fan-boy David Myhra. It is a lie!

So, here's something that might add to this discussion from a prominent researcher engaged in another forum, Dan Sharp has written and researched the Horten subject extensively and has had his results published before, which I've referred to in the past in my assertions that Horten didn't apply LO technology in the construction of their flying wing. This is what Sharp recently stated about the subject based on recent research he's done:

"In September 1944, Professor Dr Kurt Krüger, director of the Institut für Luftfahrtgeräte der Technischen Akademie der Luftwaffe at Berlin-Gatow and the Messtechnisches Institut, Königshofen im Grabfeld, produced a report entitled Reflexion elektromagnetischer Wellen an Flugzeugbaustoffen - Reflection of electromagnetic waves on aircraft building materials.
The report summary says: "The task is to camouflage planes and other flying objects against exposure to radio measuring devices, i.e. to make the reflection amplitude of the aircraft as small as possible. In the present report, it is proposed to solve this problem by preferably building the aircraft out of electrically permeable substances and by covering those components that must be metallic in nature (such as the engine, landing gear, etc.) with electrical absorbing substances."
The report notes that "through the mediation of the OKL and their own efforts, materials such as Tronal, Atex, plywood and a combination of several building materials were procured and measured by various companies". One of those companies was Gothaer Waggonfabrik, which at the time was engaged in building the Horten 8-229 prototypes. There is a diagram of a generic twin-engine flying wing aircraft included in the report with the caption "Nurfluegler mit schluckstoffverkleideten (schraffiert gezeichnetan) metallischen Bauteilen." - "Flying-wing aircraft with metallic components clad with absorption material (shown hatched)." The hatched area covers where the engines would be, the cockpit and the undercarriage.
Evidently Gothaer was trying different sets of layered material to various thicknesses which included plywood, Moltopren (a sort of plastic foam, I think), cellular rubber (Hartzellkautsch) and what is described as Holzgitter - wooden lattice.
This report doesn't overtly say 'there was a plan to make the 8-229 out of radar absorbing materials', but it does clearly show that radar absorbing materials were being considered for flying wing types and that Gotha was involved in testing those materials during the same time period when it was building 8-229 type flying wings. The Hortens were working closely with Gotha and would almost certainly have been aware of Krüger's work. Of course, Krüger, his colleague Dr H. G. Grimm (who was managing the materials testing) and the institutes were left out when Reimar Horten mentioned the radar absorbing material to David Myhra during his interview.
Krüger himself was evidently killed before the end of the war, according to a CIOS evaluation report I have. This says that development of his absorbent materials was at an early stage, which may well mean that they hadn't yet been applied to an actual aircraft.
So although Horten wasn't necessarily telling the whole truth, I don't think he was really lying either."

This comes from the excellent Secret Projects forum, of which he's a regular contributor because of the research he's done:

The Planes of Fame has a Horten Ho. IV sailplane in pretty good shape, missing the elevons. Otherwise complete.

It's well documented that the Germans studied anechoic materials to defeat active sonars and radars, for submarine warfare.

For sonar, they developed a rubber texture called 'Alberich' which reduced the signature by 15-20%. Not very effective. Another problem was the lack of a suitable adhesive to glue the panels to the hull. The result was that panels tended to detach especially around the bow.

For radars they developed two solutions:
Tarnmatte was a flexible rubberish coating designed to be more effective with frequencies around 3GHz, used by British magnetron based radars. By covering the snorkel and periscope masts with this material an uboot could travel at perioscope depth using its combustion engines undetected... at least in theory. In reality sometimes submarines at periscope depth can be easily spotted from a plane due to the wake left by the snorkel or, if the sea is calm, the entire silhouette can be seen through water.
The second solution was a solid, 8 cm thick material made by Ig-Jaumann that had to be shaped beforehand to conform to the structures designed to cover. It could reduce radio returns in a wide range of frequencies (from 600Mhz to 15GHz) and it was composed of several layers of synthetic materials. Being rigid and thick, it was better suited to cover flat or slightly curved surfaces but not a mast.

U-480's Anachoic tiles worked well enough, that it was never detected by active sonar.

Of course, no matter how good your "cloaking" is, sailing into a minefield tends to ruin all that...

msxyz said:

It's well documented that the Germans studied anechoic materials to defeat active sonars and radars, for submarine warfare.

Click to expand...

The one thing that almost everyone who knows about this subject tends to do is link, by sheer circumstance only I might add, the German navy experiments with radar absorbent material and the Hortens.

Let's be clear. There is no co-relation between them. The most glaring evidence of this is that the Horten aircraft were built out of wood. To my knowledge the navy did not use wooden periscopes or snorkels.

What still is clear is that the Horten flying wings were not designed for the purpose of being 'stealthy'; this was an afterthought and was being discussed, which is new information, but it had not actually been applied by the war's end. Surviving documentation in Britain confirms this, the British have a lot of paperwork, the airfield was extensively combed of documentation post war and there is no record of Reimar mentioning it during interrogation. Bear in mind he remained (after interrogation, of course) in Britain with the intent of working in the aviation industry.

This is why this subject does warrant so much twisting of the story to suit particular narratives, there is simply not enough conclusive evidence to deny erroneous information or red herrings, which means that by the end of the war, only discussions and a few practical experiments had been considered, and had not even been directly applied.