Must see for Grogs - Sunday, June 28, NatGeo TV - Hitler's Stealth Fighter

[Wilhammer]

For you, John:

http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/episode/hitler-s-stealth-fighter-3942/Overview23

"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?"

Hmmm, Our Tax Dollars at work, again?

[John Kettler]

Wilhammer,

Thanks! A friend of mine caught at least part of this when it aired a while back on his CATV network, and they just announced it would air Sunday on Time Warner Cable. In turn, I passed the word to brother Ed, who happens to be a volunteer at the Cavanaugh Museum of Flight in Dallas, Texas. Sure made his day. I note for the record that while the History Channel got there first with its Horten animated dirty bomb strike on Manhattan, NatGeo has trumped this puny effort with a real airplane and access to what sure looks to me like a classified RATSCAT (Radar Testing and Scattering) facility. Many things are doable when your firm built the B-2!

Regards,

John Kettler

[Stalins Organ]

German use of radar absorbant materials in WW2 is hardly secret!

[Michael Emrys]

I believe there was a brief article in Flight Journal on this a few months ago. Too lazy to go through my back issues just now, and I don't recall there was much more information than has been produced here, but I'll look if anyone has an urgent need to know.

Michael

[Wilhammer]

An interesting point is made in a link followed above; much technology is discovered by accident, and in all likelyhood the carbon in the glue was one such thing.

Perfect Example:

"In the 1960s Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson were working at AT&T Bell Laboratories, trying to improve microwave communications by reducing antenna noise. They found a noise in their antenna they simply couldn't remove. They considered all kinds of possibilities including bird droppings, but nothing helped. If the antenna was pointed at the sky, the noise appeared. The pointing direction and time of day didn't matter.

Finally they called an astrophysicist at Princeton, who told them what the signal probably was, hung up the phone, turned to his associates and said, "We've been scooped." The annoying noise was, in fact, the primordial radiation left over from the Big Bang. Penzias & Wilson won the Nobel Prize for their discovery."

[Other Means]

An interesting point is made in a link followed above; much technology is discovered by accident, and in all likelyhood the carbon in the glue was one such thing.

Perfect Example:

"In the 1960s Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson were working at AT&T Bell Laboratories, trying to improve microwave communications by reducing antenna noise. They found a noise in their antenna they simply couldn't remove. They considered all kinds of possibilities including bird droppings, but nothing helped. If the antenna was pointed at the sky, the noise appeared. The pointing direction and time of day didn't matter.

Finally they called an astrophysicist at Princeton, who told them what the signal probably was, hung up the phone, turned to his associates and said, "We've been scooped." The annoying noise was, in fact, the primordial radiation left over from the Big Bang. Penzias & Wilson won the Nobel Prize for their discovery."

The really amazing thing is...the radiation seen forms blotches and structures. And these structures are the echo of the first atomic structures that condensed from the pure energy of the Big Bang.

We're living within a Universe that has on it's "walls" imprinted thousand galaxy wide impressions of the first *atomic sized* matter created.

[John Kettler]

Wilhammer,

Saw it and DVRed it. Outstanding, even though it wasn't a flyable craft they built! The look at the inside of some of our black program engineering and fabrication capabilities, not to mention field measurement and operational performance assessment, to include man-in-the loop simulator and air defense system modeling was simply stunning to me. We even got introduced to the designers of the B-2! Show was groggy to the max but still very understandable to the typical viewer. Wait'll Proxmire hears about the $2500/gal paint!

Thanks a bunch for the heads up!

Regards,

John Kettler

[Affentitten]

Wait'll Proxmire hears about the $2500/gal paint!

They're using printer ink?

[REVS]

I've just finished my latest Bernie Gunther detective novel, and I have it on good authority that Juan Peron was developing an atomic weapons laboratory in Argentina post-war, using escaped SS weapons technology experts to head the research (and these guys had actually been in Los Alamos for a while after WWII until the Americans discovered how unacceptable their idea of 'hobby hour' was). Anyway, where was I? Oh, yes. Argentina. 1950. That's where it's at. I'd look there if I was you.

[Wilhammer]

" Outstanding, even though it wasn't a flyable craft they built!"

You act surpised - did you not look at my original post enough? The frakkin' picture was a BIG clue it was a static model.