20 SMITHSONIAN | March 2020
p rologue
The wingless
Horten Ho 229 V3
on display with
other Nazi aircraft.
I
N THE YEARS after World War I,
when aviation was all the rage in
Europe and North America but
the Treaty of Versailles banned
the production of military air-
craft in Germany, glider clubs
sprang up across the country.
The brothers Walter and Reimar
Horten, just 13 and 10 years old,
respectively, joined the Bonn glider club in 1925,
and soon turned from fl ying kites to a far more
ambitious activity—experimenting on a futuristic,
tail-less aircraft known as a fl ying wing.
The idea was not unprecedented; the German
aerospace engineer Hugo Junkers had patented
a fl ying-wing design in 1910. The concept is that
an airplane’s fuselage and tail, while they provideARTIFACT