Most of the remarkable planes built during the WWII era equally remarkable singularity, the Horten Ho 229 doesn’t approach. But by no means improbable either, this brilliant flying wing with jet engines, thought to be mysteriously masked, absolutely sensible semi-fluid of Germany was being gobbled up by the war. It’s daring to meld aerodynamics and to let very little that it was the predecessor of stealth-inculcated one, it was the concept of aircraft that lovers of the future would only guess whole decades get by.
They are the brains of Walter and Reimar Horten. The siblings, in kindergarten, were very much fascinated by flying features, and yet they were not bound by the conventional. By the 1930s, their undertaking was to create an experimental glider without the main body and tail, with only one part being the wing. Their logic was quite simple yet revolutionary: cut drag, raise the output, and get better performance of the plane. The impact of their thinking was already visible there and then, but it was not until the early 1940s that the aerospace ministry was prepared to give the Luftwaffe the Horten’s most unusual and sceptical ideas some support.
The project was more dynamic after Hermann Göring declared his “3×1000” challenge: an aircraft with the ability to carry a bomb load of 1,000 kilos, fly 1,000 kilometers, and at 1,000 kilometers per hour. Conventional designs were not able to even come close to such requirements, especially when it comes to the fuel consumption of the jet engines at that time.
The answer of the team was courageous—a tail flying wing with two Junkers Jumo 004B turbojet engines. The first name was the H IX, but it was later called the Ho 229 or Gotha Go 229 instead.
How it was made was nothing like the other aircraft. The large, swept wings were made from a mixture of steel, plywood, and even a composite of charcoal powder that was thought to be capable of absorbing radar signals.
The feature, though far from complete invisibility, did present a narrower ‘footprint’, so it was not easy to track. The other technological achievement was the landing gear that could be pulled in, an escape chair, and a speed that reached 800 km/h—amazing for that period.
The prototype was a glider and flew in March 1944. By the end of the year, the jet-powered version was performing its first test flight and demonstrating its ability to reach considerable speeds. Nonetheless, the radical tailless configuration still had problems to deal with, and a fatal accident involving a test pilot occurred. Yet, Göring asked for its product to be kept on going, seeing it as both a bomber and a fighter equipped with 30mm cannons to fire.
Before the Ho 229 was fully developed, the war ended. In April 1945, a prototype, which was almost complete, was seized by the Allies and taken for research. At present, out of all the Horten brothers’ designs, only one unit that was spared from history and is in the Smithsonian collection is a daring innovation that symbolizes the period of time.
One of the most common tags associated with the Ho 229 is the ‘first stealth aircraft in the world’. Although it incorporated aspects for lessening the radar visibility of the aircraft, later calculations revealed that it would have been more difficult to spot than most fighters of its generation, thus not being altogether invisible, but more stealthy than anything else at that time.
Though the Ho 229 never saw any engagement, its sound still haunted future flight projects. The concept of a flying wing was reused in projects like Northrop’s YB-35 and YB-49 and then furthered after several decades by the B-2 Spirit stealth bomber program. Similarities with the B-2 are quite evident, although modern composites and computers managed to fix the stability problems that occurred in the original design.
Reimar Horten emigrated to Argentina, where he continued building experimental aircraft of a unique kind, while Walter stayed in Germany and became a member of the postwar air force. To the Hortens, the Ho 229 remains their zenith art piece, a breathtaking jump into the aeronautics of the future.