Jump to content

Horton 229 on National Geographic Channel on Sunday


Scooter

Recommended Posts

I am sure that many people will be interested to know that the National Geographic Channel will be showing a new documentary on the Horton 229 tomorrow evening at 8pm Central 6/28/09.

 

Cheers

 

AC

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Thanks for the note. Looks like I'll have to check this out & see what my local schedule says!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Thanks for the tip Adam. :smiley20: It was a pretty cool spotlight. Interesting stuff. :smiley14:

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Interesting show, wish they'd built one that could fly.

 

 

Who knows - if they had brought alot of their prototypes to fruition, we might all be speaking German now and calling it the 'War of Allied Aggression'.... It's frightening ti imagine how different things might have been had the German war machine been able to bring some of their exotic designs to fruition.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

How was the show?

My cable co doesn't carry NatGeo...

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Good show, though it seemed a bit overly dramatic to me. They built the 1-1 model to test radar reflectivity, and did that to postulize on the possibility of combating the British radar system. They placed a lot of emphasis on the advanced (for the time) tailess design (which would be a purely lucky stealth feature), and also on the wood construction. They implied that wood was chosen on purpose for the "stealth" reason, backed up with the Horton brothers experience with wooden, tailess aircraft. I found it odd that they never mentioned the shortage of aluminum and other strategic metals needed for the a/c industry, nor the influence of the British wooden Mosquito which was VERY well respected by the Luftwaffe. I believe those last two reasons were MUCH more important to Goering and the Reichs ministry, and that the Horton wouldn't have been approved if it hadn't been for those last two influences. Keep in mind that the Reichs ministry insisted on continuing production of the Bf-109 well after the FW-190 was a proven superior fighter, and that the 190 was only approved because it didn't sap DB engine production for the rest of the Luftwaffe. And don't even get me started on the mis-use of the first production run of the Me-262! In short, while the Germans were very creative on the design/production end, they were down right miopic when it came to employment strategies! Even if the Horton had been produced enough to see combat they'd probably have wasted it on attacks on England instead of trying to retake air superiority over Germany. Good show, but it could've been done in 30mins instead of an hour. Hope this helps!

 

GIL :smiley16:

Link to comment
Share on other sites

×
×
  • Create New...