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Originally Posted by nevidimka  I've seen the remnants of the plane b4 but is this real? They really built it and made it to fly? and that to test it with the radar of that time? How did they fly it reliably? AFAIK, the 1st jet engines of that time were problematic. Did they recreate the engines too? and that fly it few feet from the sea?
How did they manage to control it without FBW? |
Watching the national Geographic documentary "HItler's Stealth Fighter", which triggered all the recent news coverage, will answer some of your questions. It is easily available via BitTorrent or Rapidshare. It has some factual glitches but is very entertaining. And there is lots of other stuff about the Ho 229 to be found on the internet.
So, yes, a prototype flew and flew well several times. It crashed during a test flight due to engine failure, killing the pilot. The second prototype wasn't finished when it fell into the hands of the allies.
No, they didn't recreate it at all. They just built a wooden 1:1 mock up with some parts painted with a special, radar reflecting paint to simulate metal parts such as the engines and fuel tanks. They then mounted it on a pole and did some rcs measurements.
And no, I don't think it was built with stealth in mind. Certainly German engineers thought about and developed solutions in order to avoid radar detection of e.g. submarine sails and fighters. This is well known. The flying wing shape of the Ho 229 and its predecessors was chosen due to aerodynamic reasons however, and the rcs reduction compared to contemporary fighters was "only" about 20%, according to the documentary.
