The Horten Ho 229 V3 is one of the most spectacular aircraft of the Second World War, but it was never actually used. The Horten combined two revolutionary innovations at the time: it was no longer powered by a propeller, but by two jet engines. Just like the world’s first jet fighter, the German Messerschmitt Me 262. But the Horten added a special form to the superior drive: the aircraft was a so-called flying wing. She did not have a separate hull.
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The idea of doing without the fuselage was almost as old as aviation itself. The German aerospace engineer Hugo Junkers had patented it in 1910. His reasoning was very simple: only the wings provided the necessary lift in the air, the fuselage and the rudder were, so to speak, “ballast”. If it was possible to reduce these parts and build an aircraft that consisted only of the wings, it had to have superior flight characteristics. Junker’s ideas could not be implemented in practice. Without a tail and fuselage, an aircraft was difficult to control. If there was a stall under the wings, the plane would crash.
The Horten brothers were not discouraged
It was only the brothers Walter and Reimar Horten who followed up on these plans in the 1920s. The peace treaty following defeat in World War I forbade Germany from having its own air force, but gliding clubs flourished. There the brothers began to develop their first flying wing. The enthusiasts were not deterred by the difficulties of the project; they were still children when they started. In 1932, their assembled plane took off from the ground for the first time.
The breakthrough only came in 1943. Two years earlier, the Messerschmitt Me 262 with its jet engines had completed its first flight. It was developed as a fighter aircraft, but Adolf Hitler wanted a fighter-bomber that was so fast that enemy aircraft could not catch up with it. For this reason, the Me 262 was converted into an improvised bomber plane. At the same time, the head of the Nazi air force, Hermann Göring, demanded a thoroughbred fighter bomber. It was supposed to be able to transport a bomb load of one tonne over 1000 kilometers and reach a speed of 1000 km/h. The Me 262’s top speed was 870 km/h.
Prototypes took off
These requirements could not be met with a conventional design. This is how the Horten brothers came into play. They were supposed to develop the Ho 229 long-range bomber and took up ideas from the unconventional aircraft designer Alexander Lippisch. He developed the Me 163 rocket plane and later designed ekranoplanes – ground aircraft – in the 1960s.
The Horten brothers used elongated wings and they abandoned the conventional elliptical cross-section and adopted a “bell-shaped” wing, which significantly reduced the stability problems of the flying wing. The first prototype was a glider without engines and completed a test flight on March 1, 1944. The two-engine, single-engine prototype took off on December 18, 1944. However, on February 2, 1945, this aircraft crashed after engine failure. The third prototype, the Ho 229 V3, would have been theoretically superior to any other aircraft of its time – but it didn’t take to the air.
It is unlikely that series production, which never took place, would have redeemed the advantages of the concept in practice. For example, there was a lack of suitable engines. The real achievement of the Hortens is not the superlatives with which their aircraft might have shone, but rather their ability to get the aerodynamic problems of the flying wing under control using the resources available at the time. Russ Lee, of Smithsonian Air and Space, said in a BBC documentary: “To make one of these things fly you had to let the wing do all the work, and in the end you had a plane that behaved just as well as a conventional aircraft with a tail.”
Living on in the realm of fantasy
The end of the Third Reich ended development. The prototypes fell into the hands of the Americans in Thuringia. The Hortens were taken to London for questioning. The V3 prototype came to America. Traces of soot were found there, indicating that the engines had been started, but there is no evidence that the plane ever took off.
In the last few decades, the concept of the flying wing has become cutting edge again. The lack of a fuselage and rudder not only increases the jet’s lift, it also reduces the radar shadow. Today, the USA’s long-range bombers follow the concept of the flying wing and the Russian development of its own heavy bomber is also said to be a flying wing. The hoard has long had an afterlife in computer games and Hollywood productions as a supposed superweapon of the Third Reich. After all, it had actually flown and was not a pure fantasy like the legendary Reichsflugbriefe.
The names Horten H IX and Gotha Go 229 are also used for the Horten Ho 229.
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