'Flying Wing' (Tailless) Aircraft

Amergin said:
I have his industrial design book “Horizons”, definitely worth seeking out. And a couple of his chrome soda siphons.

Airliner Number 4 here was very much more of a “sky ship” than a plane. As I understand it, the wing-profile engine platform would actually contain mechanical workshops and whole spare engines that could be swapped out mid-flight in case of mechanical failure. And don’t get me started in the sun-deck, tennis courts, shopping malls...

There are also designs for flying cars, very advanced flying wing racing planes with jet power (this is between the wars remember) and a monoplane with contra-rotating dual propellers.
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Dont forget the railway for transporting the engines
 
Nosmo King said:
There was also the K-7, which was actually built and flown.

View attachment 44956

Here is some information about the K-7 and its fatal flight aswell as some more information about the Bel Geddes #4. It was to be a thing to behold.

https://flyawaysimulation.com/news/3322/
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I've seen that picture before as click-bait. I didn't realise it was based, albeit loosely, on a real aircraft that really flew!
Although the K-7 was a flying wing, this picture from wikipedia shows it had a tail, though the twin booms connecting to the wing are hidden.
1631480413388.png
 
oxo66 said:
I've seen that picture before as click-bait. I didn't realise it was based, albeit loosely, on a real aircraft that really flew!
Although the K-7 was a flying wing, this picture from wikipedia shows it had a tail, though the twin booms connecting to the wing are hidden.
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It was one of these tail booms that caused the fatal crash
 
Given the twin booms and the twin vertical rudders, the K-7 doesn't qualify as a "flying wing." It's twin-tailed rather than tailless.

KalininK-7.jpg
 
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That is a truly wonderful flying machine but i doubt it will ever replace the aeroplane.

:omr:
 
Kondoru said:
The Bel Geddes is a neat idea but its like the Brabazon; designed for a rather different style of air travel than we do.
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I've seen a wheel that came off the Brabazon. IIRC, it was in the Montagu Collection at Beaulieu.
 
Kondoru said:
The Bel Geddes is a neat idea but its like the Brabazon; designed for a rather different style of air travel than we do.
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RaM said:
That is a truly wonderful flying machine but i doubt it will ever replace the aeroplane.

:omr:
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It was designed to replace transatlantic cruise liners, and to be a 'hotel in the sky' with all the luxury of both but with less travel time involved, it was supposed to be able to do 3 crossings a week, as opposed to one per week for a ship.
 
blessmycottonsocks said:
Bel Geddes "Airliner No.4" was a remarkably futuristic design concept for 1929!
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That's all it was - a concept.
Amergin said:
I have his industrial design book “Horizons”, definitely worth seeking out. ...
Airliner Number 4 here was very much more of a “sky ship” than a plane. ...
There are also designs for flying cars, very advanced flying wing racing planes with jet power (this is between the wars remember) and a monoplane with contra-rotating dual propellers.
Click to expand...
Bel Geddes was an architect and industrial designer. He knew nothing of practical engineering of either the marine or aeronautical variety. He was a key figure in the aesthetic movement promoting streamlined designs and design motifs (e.g., Art Deco).

He allegedly consulted with German aeronautical engineer Otto Koller, but Koller never delivered any credible specifications for the Air Liner #4. Bel Geddes produced many concepts of structures that represented encapsulated towns or cities - including entire cities that somehow floated in the air. Air Liner #4 was a levitating city in airplane form.

The point of this concept was promotion of an aesthetic principle rather than proposal of an actual workable design for a craft. The same could be said of his concept for a streamlined "whale" shaped ocean liner - an Art Deco re-imagining of the notoriously unstable and unreliable whaleback ore carriers once used on the Great Lakes.

This review of Horizons in an art magazine sums it up ...
Mr. Geddes offers us no monstrous new engines of war, but he is not unwilling to try his hand at recasting any object in present use to fit the mold of modern design. The ambition is grandiose. A perfume bottle is not too small, nor an ocean liner too large or intricate. The average layman is given to see what modern design must be like, were it consistently applied everywhere by a single hand. ...

The romance has a double appeal - the ingenuities of popular mechanics are related to those of advertising psychology, and either of the two alone would be enough ... In such a work, it would be wrong to expect any exactness, and coping with embarrassing detail, and probing of underlying principles, whether of economics or of design, and acknowledgment of the basic contributions of the real pioneers ... - the pioneers from whom derive those ideas ripe enough today to be conjoined to the perpendicular "I," one step ahead of being conjoined to the manufacturer's trademark tomorrow. It is to the manufacturer and to the mass market that this prospectus is primarily addressed, not to the discriminating individual.
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A "Stylist's" Prospectus
Douglas Haskell
Creative Art: A Magazine of Fine and Applied Art, Volume XII, No. 3: February 1933
http://www.oldmagazinearticles.com/Industrial_Designer_Norman_Bel_Geddes-pdf
 
EnolaGaia said:
That's all it was - a concept.

Bel Geddes was an architect and industrial designer. He knew nothing of practical engineering of either the marine or aeronautical variety. He was a key figure in the aesthetic movement promoting streamlined designs and design motifs (e.g., Art Deco).

He allegedly consulted with German aeronautical engineer Otto Koller, but Koller never delivered any credible specifications for the Air Liner #4. Bel Geddes produced many concepts of structures that represented encapsulated towns or cities - including entire cities that somehow floated in the air. Air Liner #4 was a levitating city in airplane form.

The point of this concept was promotion of an aesthetic principle rather than proposal of an actual workable design for a craft. The same could be said of his concept for a streamlined "whale" shaped ocean liner - an Art Deco re-imagining of the notoriously unstable and unreliable whaleback ore carriers once used on the Great Lakes.

This review of Horizons in an art magazine sums it up ...

A "Stylist's" Prospectus
Douglas Haskell
Creative Art: A Magazine of Fine and Applied Art, Volume XII, No. 3: February 1933
http://www.oldmagazinearticles.com/Industrial_Designer_Norman_Bel_Geddes-pdf
Click to expand...

A lot of his transport designs were actually intended as models for his General Motors Futurama exhibit at the 1939 New York World’s Fair.
Centrepiece was a sort of fairground ride, which was intended to place you inside the airliner, flying over a forced perspective model of a utopian art-deco city of the future. The diorama was enormous, complete with freeways and highways, buildings, skyscrapers, moving cars, buses, boats and so on.
 
The Airbus Zero-e hydrogen-powered range of aircraft are expected to be in service within 14 years.
The flying (or blended-) wing concept is quite a beauty!

zero.JPG


The more conventional airliner should have a range in excess of 2,000 nautical miles:

zero2.JPG


https://www.aero-mag.com/airbus-hydrogen-zeroe-22042021
 

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The Vought V-173 aka "Flying Pancake" deserves a mention here.
Developed at the start of WW2, with the aim of producing a highly manouevrable short take-off and landing aircraft, it flew manned flights between 1942 and 1947, although several large-scale remote-controlled models predated this.

main-qimg-35882fff596fb29319750f0bcd22f4bf-lq.jpeg


After a long restoration one model is on display at the Frontiers of Flight Museum in Dallas, Texas.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vought_V-173
 
The Nazi Flying Wing, interesting article but what really caught my attention was:

In 1937, Reimar Horten decided that the ultimate flying-wing shape would be a parabola—a wing with a near-circular leading edge planform, which would provide the minimum induced drag and maximum lift. The Hortens built just one parabola-wing glider but never flew it; the airplane was torched after warping and becoming unglued during winter storage. But wait, there’s more: Supposedly the AAF found out about the Horten parabola wing and decided to build a powered version to secretly test Reimar’s theory. It was this airplane, looking uncannily like two-thirds of a flying saucer, that crashed in New Mexico in 1947.

Nobody has yet explained the aliens, however.

WHAT IF THE NAZIS HAD ACTUALLY BUILT THE HORTEN HO-229 JET FLYING WING?​


Reimar Horten and his older brother Walter were German aircraft homebuilders. Their relatively short aircraft-building careers extended from 1933 until the end of World War II, though they did some minor work in Argentina after the war as expatriate Nazis. Had they lived 40 years later, chances are they would have been busy members of an EAA chapter in Germany, making a living selling kits for their high-performance flying-wing sailplanes.

The Hortens weren’t Burt Rutans. Talented, yes, but not the aeronautical geniuses they’ve been called by some. They built a series of increasingly sophisticated iterations of the same basic design—graceful sweptwing, tailless gliders, though several of their wings were powered. The Hortens produced a grand total of 44 airframes of their dozen basic designs. History has portrayed them as aeronautical visionaries, for in 1940 Messerschmitt Me-109 pilot Walter Horten, who scored seven Battle of Britain victories as Adolf Galland’s wingman, proposed putting a pair of Germany’s new axial-flow jet engines into a Horten glider. The result was the Ho IX. (Brother Reimar was the aerodynamicist and designer; Walter was the facilitator, eventually holding an important Luftwaffe position that allowed him to divert government supplies, staff and facilities for his brother.)

The jets were first going to be two BMW 003s, but when they underperformed the Hortens switched to Junkers Jumo 004Bs. The Ho IX V2 (Versuch 2, or Test 2—the V1 was an unpowered research glider) officially flew three times, crashing fatally at the end of the third flight when one of its two Jumos failed.

No Horten IX ever flew again, but the brothers had undeniably built and tested the world’s first turbojet flying wing. The Ho IX V2 first flew in March 1945, more than three and a half years before Northrop’s eight-jet YB-49 flying-wing bomber took off. In a number of ways, the Hortens were well ahead of Jack Northrop and his engineers, though Northrop never admitted that. After the war, it was suggested to Northrop that he hire the brothers. “Forget it, they’re just glider designers,” he said condescendingly. The success of the Ho IX was pointed out to him, but Northrop dismissed it as a Gotha design, not a Horten. ...

https://www.historynet.com/horten-brothers-jet-flying-wing/
 
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As described on the Planespotting! thread, Techy saw what seems to have been a B2 flying over mid-Cheshire when he was out on a bike ride in January last year.

@RaM kindly shared a video -


I was green with envy. :mad:
 
ramonmercado said:
The Nazi Flying Wing, interesting article but what really caught my attention was:

In 1937, Reimar Horten decided that the ultimate flying-wing shape would be a parabola—a wing with a near-circular leading edge planform, which would provide the minimum induced drag and maximum lift. The Hortens built just one parabola-wing glider but never flew it; the airplane was torched after warping and becoming unglued during winter storage. But wait, there’s more: Supposedly the AAF found out about the Horten parabola wing and decided to build a powered version to secretly test Reimar’s theory. It was this airplane, looking uncannily like two-thirds of a flying saucer, that crashed in New Mexico in 1947.

Nobody has yet explained the aliens, however.

WHAT IF THE NAZIS HAD ACTUALLY BUILT THE HORTEN HO-229 JET FLYING WING?​


Reimar Horten and his older brother Walter were German aircraft homebuilders. Their relatively short aircraft-building careers extended from 1933 until the end of World War II, though they did some minor work in Argentina after the war as expatriate Nazis. Had they lived 40 years later, chances are they would have been busy members of an EAA chapter in Germany, making a living selling kits for their high-performance flying-wing sailplanes.

The Hortens weren’t Burt Rutans. Talented, yes, but not the aeronautical geniuses they’ve been called by some. They built a series of increasingly sophisticated iterations of the same basic design—graceful sweptwing, tailless gliders, though several of their wings were powered. The Hortens produced a grand total of 44 airframes of their dozen basic designs. History has portrayed them as aeronautical visionaries, for in 1940 Messerschmitt Me-109 pilot Walter Horten, who scored seven Battle of Britain victories as Adolf Galland’s wingman, proposed putting a pair of Germany’s new axial-flow jet engines into a Horten glider. The result was the Ho IX. (Brother Reimar was the aerodynamicist and designer; Walter was the facilitator, eventually holding an important Luftwaffe position that allowed him to divert government supplies, staff and facilities for his brother.)

The jets were first going to be two BMW 003s, but when they underperformed the Hortens switched to Junkers Jumo 004Bs. The Ho IX V2 (Versuch 2, or Test 2—the V1 was an unpowered research glider) officially flew three times, crashing fatally at the end of the third flight when one of its two Jumos failed.

No Horten IX ever flew again, but the brothers had undeniably built and tested the world’s first turbojet flying wing. The Ho IX V2 first flew in March 1945, more than three and a half years before Northrop’s eight-jet YB-49 flying-wing bomber took off. In a number of ways, the Hortens were well ahead of Jack Northrop and his engineers, though Northrop never admitted that. After the war, it was suggested to Northrop that he hire the brothers. “Forget it, they’re just glider designers,” he said condescendingly. The success of the Ho IX was pointed out to him, but Northrop dismissed it as a Gotha design, not a Horten. ...

https://www.historynet.com/horten-brothers-jet-flying-wing/
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Decades ahead of its time, but difficult to fly properly without computerised assistance.
 
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