Customer Reviews

The Horten Brothers and Their All-Wing Aircraft: (Schiffer Military/Aviation History)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

As a Horten model-builder/pilot, this was missing in the collection of books about the flying-wings from the Hortenbrothers, some mistakes in time and subscripts by the foto's are no problem for the Horten-fan. The story is well told, some of the statements are new, the rest is a good detailed overview of Horten-history. I will show it to Mr H. Scheidhauer, the testpilot age 86!, who still lives in Germany, and is a good friend of mine. A big compliment for Mr.D.Myhra. Erik van den Hoogen.

This is the best thing available in English about the Horten brothers and their remarkable Flying Wings, which resembled those built by Jack Northrop in the U.S. (As usual, the Germans got there first.) Myhra has done a first-class job of research and of assembling photographs, but the final result is marred by numerous typographical errors, mistakes in fact, duplications of photos, and what looks very much like fictionalizations. -- Dan Ford

Schiffer books are marvels of their kind. They pile photo upon photo, so generously that sometimes (in the case of Myrha's book) the editors sometimes print the same photo twice. My favorite in this case is the picture that shows an early flying-wing glider in the Hortens' dining room, the wing extending through the door into the next room.

The weak point of the Schiffer organization is that they don't seem to edit their books. Printing the same photo twice is one result. Another is that the most important single fact in the book--the day the Hortens first flew an all-wing aircraft--appears to be wrong by a year.

Never mind! We won't get a better treatment of these German geniuses (well, one genius anyhow, and one brave test pilot) who created aircraft that were 50 years ahead of their time. When the Americans occupied Germany in May 1945, they found a Horten all-wing fighter-bomber on the assembly line, all but ready for combat. In theory, it would have been capable of Goering's dictat that any new warplane must meet a 1,000 X 3 performance envelope: carry 1000 kg of bombs 1000 km at a speed of 1000 km/ph. If the war had gone on a few more months, the Allies might have encountered a surprise as nasty as the Messerschmitt jet and rocket-powered interceptors.

There was even a plan on the drawing board for a Horten "Amerika Bomber" capable of carting a non-explosive atomic bomb to New York. (The Germans, unable to achieve a chain reaction, figured that radioactive debris would serve as well to destroy a city.)

For the serious collector.