With its smooth and elegant lines, this
could be a prototype for some future successor to the stealth bomber.
But this flying wing was actually
designed by the Nazis 30 years before the Americans successfully developed
radar-invisible technology.  Now an engineering team has reconstructed the
Horten Ho 2-29 from blueprints, with startling results.

Blast from the
past: The full-scale replica of the Ho 2-29 bomber was made with materials
available in the ‘40s.

Futuristic: The stealth plane design was
years ahead of its time.   It was faster and more efficient than any
other plane of the period and its stealth powers did work against radar.
Experts are now convinced that given a little bit more time, the
mass deployment of this aircraft could have changed the course of the war.

The plane could have helped Adolf
Hitler win the war

First built and tested in the air in March
1944, it was designed with a greater range and speed than any plane previously
built and was the first aircraft to use the stealth technology now deployed by the  U.S.
in its B-2 bombers.   Thankfully Hitler's engineers only made three
prototypes, tested by being dragged behind a glider, and were not able to build
them on an industrial scale before the Allied forces invaded.

From Panzer tanks through to the V-2 rocket, it has long been
recognized that Germany 's technological
expertise during the war was years ahead of the Allies.

But by 1943, Nazi high command feared that the war was beginning to turn
against them, and were desperate to develop new weapons to help turn the
tide.

Nazi bombers were suffering badly when faced with the speed and maneuverability
of the Spitfire and other Allied fighters.   Hitler was also
desperate to develop a bomber with the range and capacity to reach
the United States .

In 1943 Luftwaffe chief Hermann
Goering demanded that designers
come up with a bomber that would meet his requirements, one that could carry
1,000 kg over 1,000km flying at 1,000km/h.

A full scale replica of the Ho 229 bomber made with materials
available in the 1940s at preflight.

A wing section of the
stealth bomber. The jet intakes were years ahead of their
time. Two pilot brothers in their thirties, Reimar and Walter Horten, suggested
a flying wing design they had been working on for
years. They were convinced that with its drag and lack of wind resistance
such a plane would meet Goering's requirements.

Construction on a prototype was begun in
Goettingen in  Germany in 1944.

The centre pod was made from a welded steel tube, and was
designed to be powered by a BMW 003 engine. The most important innovation
was Reimar Horten's idea to coat it in a mix of charcoal dust and wood
glue.

Vengeful: Inventors Reimar and Walter Horten were inspired to build
the Ho 2-29 by the deaths of thousands of Luftwaffe pilots in the Battle of Britain.

The 142-foot wingspan bomber was submitted for approval in 1944, and it would
have been able to fly from Berlin to NYC and back without refueling,
thanks to the same blended wing design and six BMW 003A or eight Junker Jumo
004B turbojets.   They thought the electromagnetic
waves of radar would be absorbed,
and in conjunction with the aircraft's sculpted surfaces the craft would be
rendered almost invisible to radar detectors.  The plane was covered in
radar absorbent paint with a high graphite content, which has a similar
chemical make-up to charcoal.  This was the same method eventually used by
the U.S. in its first stealth
aircraft in the early 1980s, the
F-117A Nighthawk.

After the war the Americans captured the
prototype Ho 2-29s along with the blueprints and used some of their
technological advances to aid their own designs.  But experts always
doubted claims that the Horten could actually function as a stealth
aircraft.

Now using the blueprints and the only
remaining prototype craft, Northrop-Grumman (the defense firm behind the B-2)
built a full-size replica of a Horten Ho 2-29.

Luckily for Britain, the Horten flying wing fighter-bomber never
got much further than the blueprint stage above.

Thanks to the use of wood and carbon, jet
engines integrated into the fuselage, and its blended surfaces, the plane could
have been in London eight minutes after the radar system detected it.
It took them 2,500 man-hours and $250,000 to construct, and although
their replica cannot fly, it was radar-tested by placing it on a 50 ft
articulating pole and exposing it to electromagnetic waves.  The team
demonstrated that although the aircraft is not completely invisible to the type
of radar used in the war, it would have been stealthy enough and fast enough to
ensure that it could reach London before Spitfires could be scrambled to intercept
it.

“If the Germans had had time to
develop this aircraft, it could well have had an impact,” says Peter
Murton, aviation expert from the Imperial War Museum at Duxford, in
Cambridgeshire.

In theory the flying wing was a very
efficient aircraft design, which
minimized drag.  It is one of the reasons that it could reach very high
speeds in dive and glide modes and had such an incredibly long range.

The research was filmed for a forthcoming documentary on the
National Geographic Channel.