Horten Flying Wings

I like Horten designs a lot. A big part of my site is about them.

Use link at bottom to get to the large Horten section. That is the quickest way.

Many think that Jack Northrop is the inventor of the flying wing. Not true! To say that the Horten brothers were the inventors of the flying wing is also not true. But ...they were the ones that made flying wings better known. They were the ones that made that nearly every German airplane constructor in WW2 proposed flying wings near the end of the war.

The most known airplane of the Horten brothers is surely the HIX, a jet.

This airplane was mentioned many many times as the forerunner of the B2 bomber. And ...it is not very hard to understand as this airplane had some stealth-techniques. It was not invisible, but ...lesser viewable by radar.

But what many people didn't know ...not even me ... was that this jet flying wing outperformed the Me 262 (which uses the same engines)! I heard that info on the National Geographic documentary about this airplane. "It outperformed in dogfight ability, maneuverability and speed". At that moment this flying wing got even more respect from me than it already had. And ...it had already a lot!

Lesser known are the gliders of the Horten brothers. But they need to same amount of respect as they are the forerunners of this jet. They were the tools that the brothers used to fine-tune their design.