Message posted by Beltway_Bandit on July 09, 2009 at 19:10:29 PST:
The Horten Ho IX V3 at the Garber facility was visible during tours. It's in pieces and in pretty rough shape. The wood construction of the fuselage and less-ideal post-World War II storage conditions have badly de-laminated the area to the rear of the engine nacelles. The complete aircraft is in the hands of the Smithsonian, but it's unlikely to ever be put on public display due to its poor materiel condition and the daunting prospect of a restoration of a one-off, hand-built prototype that has almost no documentation concerning its construction techniques. The wood fuselage over a tubular steel skeleton was more a product of the severe shortage of skilled metal workers and metal to be worked in post-1942 Germany. The BMW/Junkers engines buried deep in the core fuselage were more functions of aerodynamics and weight-balance than signature reduction, and posed significant maintenance complications for the crews who would have swapped out the extremely short-lived BMW 003 (or Junkers Jumo 004B) engines and headaches for the engineers who had to devise a way to keep the extremely-hot engines from igniting the wooden fuselage skin. It's my understanding that the extremely-overstated 'stealth' qualities of the Horten Ho IX (which, supposedly, would have been enhanced in a production Ho/Go 299) are mostly due to the wooden laminate construction and the lack of vertical surfaces, and were a happy accident that the Germans weren't even aware of until flight testing began.
In Reply to: Re: 3rd Reich Stealth Plane Docu. (slight OT) posted by psiuh88 on July 09, 2009 at 17:48:13 PST:
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