Flying Wings

[Gary Oswald]

Discuss this article reposted from Never Was here

 

[Coiler]

Eh, there was a pretty firm barrier to flying wings being adopted before they were OTL and that's the stability issue. It took computers to get under enough control.

 

[Charles EP M.]

Nice contrast to airships - both look cool but one is Cool Past and another, Cool Future due to (as he says) rarely being used except for fancy stuff like stealth bombers. Who cares the premise is actually old?

 

[RyanF]

I did like the notion of the flying wing being a fixture of what people think the future of the industry will look like that never actually comes to pass.

I'm sure there are a few other examples from other industries. Seem to remember something like the Google Glass was long predicted to be a fixture of the future, until it was finally released and crashed like a lead zeppelin.

 

[Hendryk]

In the Soviet Union, there was the Kalinin K-7 prototype. Not a flying wing exactly, the unusual configuration of Russia’s Kalinin K-7 consisted of twin booms and large underwing pods housing fixed landing gear and machine gun turrets. It was 28 meters long and 53 meters wide, making it one of the largest aircraft built before the jet age.

A single prototype was built, which crashed. The plan was for civilian and military versions to be constructed, with the former seating around 120 passengers in the wings and the latter armed with autocannons, machine guns and bombs. But the project was terminated in 1935.

Not only was the project terminated, but so was its designer. In Stalin's USSR, failure tended to cut down one's life expectancy.

Now another large interwar airplane that sort-of looked like a flying wing and did manage to fly commercially was the Junkers G.38.

One reason I'm skeptical of the concept regardless of the technological challenges is that putting passengers inside the wings means that they get a more... stomach-churning ride than inside the fuselage.

 

[Arthur_Phuxache]

No mention of the UK's foray into flying wingery?

I haz a sad.

 

[Talwar]

Ah, the day where aircraft design included lounges and promenades and wasn't just about shoving in as many economy-class seats as physically possible.

 

[Hendryk]

Ah, the day where aircraft design included lounges and promenades and wasn't just about shoving in as many economy-class seats as physically possible.

Indeed, but that's mostly because the people who fly economy couldn't afford plane travel in the first place.

 

[Bonniecanuck]

I know this isn't the focus of the piece, but I find it an understated aspect of the Horten Ho IX story that after the war the brothers attempted to hawk the design to China before dutifully carrying out their obligations as Nazis by emigrating to Argentina. This pitch was also where the supposed stealthiness of the design and paint was first brought up as a selling point and gave rise to the myth of it being the first stealth bomber, but I find far more fascinating the idea of post-war Chinese flying wing experiments on either side of the Taiwan Straits.

 

[Hendryk]

I know this isn't the focus of the piece, but I find it an understated aspect of the Horten Ho IX story that after the war the brothers attempted to hawk the design to China before dutifully carrying out their obligations as Nazis by emigrating to Argentina. This pitch was also where the supposed stealthiness of the design and paint was first brought up as a selling point and gave rise to the myth of it being the first stealth bomber, but I find far more fascinating the idea of post-war Chinese flying wing experiments on either side of the Taiwan Straits.

Obligatory Blake & Mortimer reference:

 

[Coiler]

The postwar Horten IA.38 transport has to rank as one of the ugliest aircraft designs of all time.