(Horten) Ho 229 @·AIRCRAFTUBE

  • The Ho 229 V3, the sole survivor, under restoration at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center (2016) The Ho 229 V3, the sole survivor, under restoration at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center (2016)
    The Ho 229 V3, the sole survivor, under restoration at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center (2016)
  • The Ho 229 V3 at the Smithsonian's Paul E. Garber Facility (2000) The Ho 229 V3 at the Smithsonian's Paul E. Garber Facility (2000)
    The Ho 229 V3 at the Smithsonian's Paul E. Garber Facility (2000)
  • The Ho 229 V3 seen from the rear, at the Paul E. Garber Facility (2000) The Ho 229 V3 seen from the rear, at the Paul E. Garber Facility (2000)
    The Ho 229 V3 seen from the rear, at the Paul E. Garber Facility (2000)
  • The cockpit of the Ho 229 V3 The cockpit of the Ho 229 V3
    The cockpit of the Ho 229 V3
  • Three-view drawing of the Horten H.IX V1 glider Three-view drawing of the Horten H.IX V1 glider
    Three-view drawing of the Horten H.IX V1 glider
  • Full-scale replica built by Northrop Grumman for stealth tests (San Diego Air & Space Museum) Full-scale replica built by Northrop Grumman for stealth tests (San Diego Air & Space Museum)
    Full-scale replica built by Northrop Grumman for stealth tests (San Diego Air & Space Museum)
  • Tubular frame of an unfinished prototype found at Friedrichroda (April 1945) Tubular frame of an unfinished prototype found at Friedrichroda (April 1945)
    Tubular frame of an unfinished prototype found at Friedrichroda (April 1945)
  • Centre section under construction with its two Jumo 004 jet engines, Friedrichroda (1945) Centre section under construction with its two Jumo 004 jet engines, Friedrichroda (1945)
    Centre section under construction with its two Jumo 004 jet engines, Friedrichroda (1945)
  • The Ho 229 V3 captured by the US Army at Friedrichroda, April 1945 The Ho 229 V3 captured by the US Army at Friedrichroda, April 1945
    The Ho 229 V3 captured by the US Army at Friedrichroda, April 1945
  • Ho 229 V3, Friedrichroda, 1945 Ho 229 V3, Friedrichroda, 1945
    Ho 229 V3, Friedrichroda, 1945
  • The Ho 229 V3 centre section after its capture The Ho 229 V3 centre section after its capture
    The Ho 229 V3 centre section after its capture

Horten Ho 229

The Horten H.IX, given the RLM designation Ho 229 (and sometimes called Gotha Go 229 because of the substantial redesign carried out by Gothaer Waggonfabrik to prepare it for series production), was a German prototype fighter-bomber designed by the brothers Reimar and Walter Horten. Developed during the final phase of the Second World War, it was one of the very first flying wings to be powered by jet engines.

The aircraft was conceived in response to the "3×1000" requirement issued in 1943 by Hermann Göring, head of the Luftwaffe: a bomber able to carry 1,000 kg of bombs over 1,000 km at 1,000 km/h. Only jet propulsion could deliver such a speed, but the early turbojets were so thirsty that the rest of the design had to be extremely efficient to reach the required range. The Horten brothers believed that a tailless flying wing, with no fuselage and no superfluous control surfaces, offered the lowest possible drag. Their design was the only one to come close to the specification, and three prototypes were ordered. Only one powered prototype ever flew, before crashing in February 1945. The unfinished third prototype, captured by American troops, is the only surviving example and is now preserved by the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.

Background

In the early 1930s the Horten brothers became interested in the flying wing as a way to improve the performance of gliders. At that time the Treaty of Versailles forbade Germany to build military aircraft, and the government was actively supporting gliding clubs instead. In theory the flying wing offered the lightest possible structure and eliminated the drag of a fuselage and tail. The brothers demonstrated the efficiency of the formula with a series of gliders, notably the Horten H.IV.

According to the Smithsonian, the idea that would become the H.IX was born in 1940 in the mind of Walter Horten, then a fighter pilot and technical officer of Jagdgeschwader 26 in France during the Battle of Britain.

Design and development

German bombers could reach targets across Great Britain, but they were suffering crippling losses to Allied fighters. When Göring launched the "3×1000" project in 1943, no conventional design seemed able to meet it: the new Junkers Jumo 004B turbojet provided the speed, but its fuel consumption ruined the range. The Hortens reasoned that by reducing drag, a flying wing would need less power in cruise, and could therefore meet the range target. They put forward their private project, the H.IX, as the basis for the bomber.

Removing the vertical fin reduced drag but created yaw control problems. On a conventional aircraft the fin passively limits sideslip; without it, an aircraft flown without active yaw control could slide into an uncontrolled sideslip, or even a flat spin. The Hortens solved the problem with split drag surfaces that increased drag on one side only.

The Reichsluftfahrtministerium (RLM) quickly approved the proposal, but required the addition of two 30 mm cannon, as officials believed that an aircraft so much faster than any Allied type would also make a useful fighter. The official designation Ho 229 was allocated. Göring, reportedly impressed, personally made sure that three prototypes were ordered, for a sum of 500,000 Reichsmarks. An order for 100 production aircraft followed, later reduced to 20. As the Horten brothers had no suitable production facilities, manufacturing was entrusted in September 1944 to an established company, Gothaer Waggonfabrik. The arrangement was not a happy one: Gotha is said to have lobbied the authorities in favour of its own projects, including its own flying wing designs.

Russell Lee, chair of the Aeronautics Department at the National Air and Space Museum, has suggested that one of the brothers' motivations in pursuing such a difficult programme was to keep themselves and their workers from being sent to more dangerous assignments. The Hortens went on to propose many other flying wings, such as the Horten H.VII fighter-trainer and the Horten H.XVIII "Amerikabomber", and according to the historian Jean-Denis G.G. Lepage, their work inspired several other German wartime projects.

Construction

The H.IX was of mixed construction. The centre section was a welded framework of steel tubes up to 160 mm in diameter, housing the cockpit, the two engines and the landing gear. The outer wings had box spars made of pine and were skinned with thin plywood panels, bonded with a glue mixed with sawdust and coated with fireproof paint. The wing had a single main spar, pierced by the engine air intakes, and a secondary spar carrying the elevons. It was designed for a load factor of 7 g with a safety factor of 1.8, giving an ultimate load of 12.6 g. The thickness/chord ratio ranged from 15% at the root to 8% at the tips. Internal space was very limited, making it difficult or impossible to add equipment or a second crew member.

The aircraft had a retractable tricycle undercarriage. The nose gear of the first two prototypes used the tail wheel unit of a Heinkel He 177, while the third prototype received a newly designed nose leg fitted with a main wheel and tyre from the He 177A. A drogue parachute slowed the aircraft on landing. The pilot sat on a rudimentary ejection seat, and Dräger developed a special pressure suit for him. The design was originally intended for the BMW 003 turbojet, but as this engine was not ready, the Junkers Jumo 004 was substituted.

Flight control relied on elevons combined with spoilers. The yaw control system used long-span inboard spoilers and short-span outboard spoilers, the smaller outboard ones being deployed first; this arrangement reportedly gave smoother yaw control than a single spoiler would have done.

Flight testing

The first prototype, the H.IX V1, was an unpowered glider with a fixed tricycle undercarriage. It made its first flight on 1 March 1944 at Göttingen (the Smithsonian gives 28 February 1944, with test pilot Heinz Scheidhauer at the controls). The results were favourable, although the glider was damaged when the pilot landed without first retracting a test instrument boom. Once design responsibility had passed from the Hortens to Gothaer Waggonfabrik, the company's engineers introduced several changes: a simple ejection seat, a substantially redesigned undercarriage to allow a higher gross weight, modified engine intakes, and cooling ducts around the engine casings to protect the surrounding wooden structure.

The second prototype, the H.IX V2, powered by two Junkers Jumo 004 engines, was completed in December 1944. Göring believed in the design to the point of ordering a series of 40 aircraft from Gotha before it had even flown under jet power. The V2 made its first flight on 2 February 1945 at Oranienburg, flown by Leutnant Erwin Ziller. The Horten brothers were not present, being busy with the design of a jet-powered strategic bomber for the Amerikabomber competition, and all subsequent testing and development work was handled by Gotha.

On 18 February 1945, during its third flight, disaster struck. After about 45 minutes in the air at an altitude of around 800 m, one of the engines caught fire and stopped. Ziller was seen to dive and pull up several times, apparently trying to restart it, then flew four complete turns at a bank angle of about 20°. He neither used his radio nor ejected, and may already have been overcome by fumes from the burning engine. The aircraft crashed just outside the airfield boundary and was destroyed; Ziller died of his injuries.

The programme nevertheless continued. On 12 March 1945 the Ho 229 was included in the Jäger-Notprogramm (Emergency Fighter Programme) for the accelerated production of cheap "wonder weapons". The prototype workshop was moved to Gotha's facility at Friedrichroda, in western Thuringia, where work began on the third prototype, the Ho 229 V3. Larger than its predecessors and modified in several areas, it was to serve as the pattern for the pre-production Ho 229 A-0 day fighters, 20 of which had been ordered. It was to be powered by two Jumo 004C engines, each offering about 10% more thrust than the 004B used in the Me 262A and Ar 234B, and armed with two 30 mm MK 108 cannon in the wing roots. Work had also started on the two-seat V4 and the V5 night fighter, the V6 armament test aircraft and the V7 two-seat trainer.

Capture and evaluation

In April 1945, troops of the VIII Corps of George Patton's Third Army reached the Friedrichroda workshop and found the prototypes V3 to V6. The V3, roughly half finished, was the nearest to completion. It was removed within days and shipped to the United States under Operation Paperclip, with the foreign equipment number T2-490. An American intelligence officer nicknamed it the "Bat-Wing Ship".

The aircraft spent a short time at the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough, where the installation of British jet engines was considered, but the engine mountings proved incompatible with the larger diameter British turbojets. It is not known whether its original Junkers engines were ever run, although the American evaluation team at one point intended to fly it. The V3 arrived around 1950 at what is now the Paul E. Garber Preservation, Restoration, and Storage Facility in Suitland, Maryland, where it remained in storage for decades.

Surviving aircraft

The Ho 229 V3 is the only surviving Ho 229, and the only German jet prototype of the Second World War still in existence. In December 2011 the National Air and Space Museum moved it into the active restoration area of the Garber facility to assess it for restoration and display. The centre section was transferred to the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia, in late 2012 for a detailed examination, and was cleared to enter the restoration shops in the summer of 2014. After conservation work carried out between 2015 and 2017 in the Mary Baker Engen Restoration Hangar, the wings and centre section were moved into the Boeing Aviation Hangar in September 2017. The aircraft is displayed partially restored, the wings being exhibited separately from the centre section, alongside other German aircraft of the period.

The full-size replica built by Northrop Grumman for the radar tests described below is displayed at the San Diego Air & Space Museum in California.

The stealth question

In 1983, after hearing about American stealth programmes, Reimar Horten claimed that he had intended to mix charcoal dust into the wood glue in order to absorb radar waves and hide the aircraft from the British Chain Home early warning radar. This treatment was supposedly planned for the production aircraft only: the V3 did not use it, and no wartime documentation supporting the claim has ever been found.

In 2008, Northrop Grumman engineers carried out electromagnetic tests on the V3's multilayer wooden nose cone, 19 mm thick. They found that it behaved much like a control sample of plywood and concluded that, if carbon black had been used, it made a poor absorber. A later study of the materials carried out by the Smithsonian found no evidence of carbon black or charcoal at all, refuting the hypothesis.

A jet-powered flying wing such as the Ho 229 might nonetheless have had a smaller radar cross-section than a contemporary twin-engine aircraft, since its wing blends into the centre section and it has no propeller discs and no tail surfaces. The exposed front and rear faces of its jet engines, however, would have reflected radar energy about as much as propellers.

The same year, Northrop Grumman joined documentary producer Michael Jorgensen and the National Geographic Channel to find out whether the Ho 229 could be considered the first "stealth" aircraft (the resulting film, "Hitler's Stealth Fighter", was broadcast in 2009). The company built a full-size, non-flying reproduction of the V3, made mostly of wood, unlike the original with its steel space frame. Costing about US$250,000 and 2,500 man-hours, it was mounted on a 15 m pole at Northrop Grumman's radar cross-section test range at Tejon, California, and illuminated from various angles from 100 m away at frequencies between 20 and 50 MHz. Simulations showed that a hypothetical Ho 229 with the characteristics of the mock-up, which had neither a metal frame nor highly reflective engines, approaching the English coast at 885 km/h and 15 to 30 m above the sea, would still have been detected by an early Chain Home radar at about 80% of the range at which a Bf 109 would have been seen.

Variants

  • H.IX V1 : First prototype, an unpowered glider; one built and flown.
  • H.IX V2 : First powered prototype, with two Junkers Jumo 004B turbojets; one built and flown, destroyed in a crash on 18 February 1945.

Gotha developments

  • Ho 229 V3 : Revised air intakes, engines moved forward to correct the longitudinal balance. Captured nearly complete on the production line with two Jumo 004B engines installed; preserved by the Smithsonian.
  • Ho 229 V4 : Planned two-seat all-weather fighter, under construction at Friedrichroda; little more than the tubular framework of the centre section was completed.
  • Ho 229 V5 : Planned two-seat all-weather fighter, under construction at Friedrichroda; little more than the tubular framework of the centre section was completed.
  • Ho 229 V6 : Projected definitive single-seat fighter with a different cannon; one captured on the production line at Ilmenau by US troops.

Horten developments

  • H.IXb (also designated V6 and V7 by the Hortens) : Projected two-seat trainer or night fighter; not built.
  • Ho 229 A-0 : Projected accelerated production version based on the Ho 229 V6; not built.

Operators

  • Germany : Luftwaffe (test flights only).

— — — = = — — —

This text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License
Source : Article Horten Ho 229 of Wikipedia ( authors )

Horten Ho 229

  • Role : Fighter-bomber (prototype).
  • Designer : Reimar and Walter Horten.
  • Manufacturer : Gothaer Waggonfabrik.
  • First flight : 1 March 1944 (H.IX V1 glider) ; 2 February 1945 (H.IX V2, powered).
  • Status : Prototype, abandoned in 1945.
  • Primary user : Luftwaffe (tests only).
  • Number built : 3 (V1, V2, and the unfinished V3).
  • Variants :
    • Horten H.IX V1 (glider).
    • Horten H.IX V2.
    • Horten Ho 229 V3.
  • Developed into :
    • Horten H.XVIII (project).

    Specifications (Ho 229 A, manufacturer's estimates)

  • Crew: one.
  • Length: 24 ft 6 in (7.47 m).
  • Wingspan: 55 ft (16.76 m).
  • Height: 9 ft 3 in (2.81 m).
  • Wing area: 540 sq ft (50.2 m²).
  • Empty weight: 10,100 lb (4,600 kg).
  • Max takeoff weight: 17,900 lb (8,100 kg).
  • Fuel capacity: 3,700 lb (1,700 kg).
  • Maximum speed: 607 mph (977 km/h, 528 kts) at 39,000 ft (12,000 m) ; 590 mph (950 km/h) at sea level.
  • Cruise speed: 560 mph (900 km/h, 490 kts).
  • Range: 1,200 mi (1,900 km, 1,000 nmi).
  • Service ceiling: 49,000 ft (15,000 m).
  • Rate of climb: 4,300 ft/min (22 m/s).
  • Powerplant: Two Junkers Jumo 004B turbojets.
  • Thrust: 1,990 lbf (8.83 kN) each.
  • Armament: Two 30 mm MK 108 cannon (planned for the Ho 229 A).

— — — = = — — —

This text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License
Source : Article Horten Ho 229 of Wikipedia ( authors )
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