Bill Sweetman has the scoop:
This Sunday, June 28, National Geographic TV airs Hitler’s Stealth Fighter. Set your TiVos or just kick the rest of the family off the TV, because this one should be good. Back when stealth was very, very secret, a few people quietly advised me to take a look at the Horten Ho229, one of WW2 Germany’s most advanced designs – a jet-powered flying wing made of wood. In a German book, a British documentary producer had found something even more interesting: the Horten brothers, Walter and Reimar, had planned to use a primitive radar absorbent structure (RAS) in the leading edges. They were to be made from a sandwich of plywood around a carbon-loaded filler. The only question: how well would it actually have worked?
The documentary was directed by Mike Jorgensen, who also directed the excellent Battle of the X-Planes that chronicled the competition between Boeing and Lockheed to design what would become the Joint Strike Fighter. Should be pretty awesome. And worth clicking through if only to see the mock-up of the Ho229 that’s been constructed in the middle of the desert.
