During the fighting in 1942 in WW2, the a Focke Wulf design team lead by Hans Multhopp was tasked with designing a turbojet fighter. Three years later, in 1945, the Focke Wulf team reveiled the Ta 183 Huckebein.
Originally powered by a Heinkel HeS 011 jet engine (the pre-production versions would have had a Junkers Jumo 004), with the intake going under the cockpit, the Ta 183 would have been armed with 4x30mm cannons. Plans for a bomb under the fuselage were also envisioned.
The wings were swept back at 40Ā°, and were located on a mid wing configuration.
The empennage was swept at 60Ā°, with the elevators also exhibiting also a considerable dihedral.
During the Emergency Fighter Programme in 1945, the Oberkommando der Luftwaffe (OKL) stated that the Focke Wulf factory would build sixteen trial Ta 183s, the first three having the Junkers Jumo 004 engine, before the Heinkel HeS 011s were ready to be delivered.
Maiden flight was supposed to be done in May/June 1945, and the first production aircraft were to be delivered by October 1945. However, the Focke Wulf factory was captured by the advancing British Army, and the project of the Ta 183 was officially ended.
With the surrender of Germany in May 1945, Kurt Tank took with him the plans for the Ta 183 and fled to Argentina, where General Juan Domingo PerĆ³n (a Fascist sympathiser), greeted the many German scientists and pilots fleeing Germany.
In 1950, after a period of 5 years of design, the Pulqui 2 took to the skies, a design which was very similar to the Ta 183. Only 5 Pulqui 2 prototypes were produced before the cancellation of the project in 1959.
The Germans came up with a lot of interesting designs at the end of the war. One of, if not the first āflying wingā design aircraft and even a coal powered plane. All very radical, but a lot was learned.
Ya, I heard about that. Did they ever actually bring that to fruition? If I recall a prototype was built in Germany but it didnāt fly? I could be incorrect but they did some wild things regardless.
The Horten 229 flew three times, but it crashed in the third flight, killing its pilot.
When the Horten brothers moved to Argentina, they produced several gliders which were rather successful.
Interesting. They really were interested in the flying wing design it would seem. Even if they only made one it seems like they really were fond of high sweep angles, and delta wings. Weāre any of them designed to be supersonic? Obviously no one made it till a few years later when the Bell X-1 did it, but a lot of their designs seem to have sort of supersonic type designs. Then again our knowledge of Delta wings and their shortcomings in subsonic flight have come a long way since then so perhaps that seemed like a good idea at the time.
The only supersonic machine Iām aware of from the Third Reich was the Silbervogel, a machine that was supposed to takeoff from a launch pad similar to those of the V-1 flying bombs, climb high to the stratosphere, bomb the US and land back in Germany, but none were produced.
