prologue
22 SMITHSONIAN | March 2020Clued In
BECAUSE THE BEST WAY TO SOLVE A PUZZLE IS TO READ
By Sam Ezerskydoctorate in mathematics; he spent the rest
of his life working on aircraft in Argentina.
Walter, back in Germany, joined the new,
postwar Luftwaff e.
The V3 prototype , meanwhile, was shut-
tled from Germany to France to the United
States, reaching the Smithsonian around- While it sat in storage for decades,
it became an object of gossip and fasci-
nation. Some aviation enthusiasts have
posited that if the war had gone on longer,
the Germans could have used the Hortens’
designs to achieve the fi rst stealth bomber.
That idea arose not only because the sleek
V3 resembles today’s stealth aircraft in
some ways but also because Reimar Hort-
en claimed in the 1980s, implausibly, that
he had wanted to add a layer of charcoal
to the V3’s skin to diff use radar beams ; by
all accounts, a charcoal coating would not
have allowed the craft to evade radar any-
way. Though the Horten Ho 229 V3 never
saw combat, reincarnations have taken
fl ight in popular culture, such as the pro-
peller-driven, Horten-style fl ying wing
that appears in an airport fi ght scene in
Raiders of the Lost Ark.
The V3 and its ancestral prototypes were
taken seriously, though. One of America’s
leading aircraft designers, Jack Northrop,
showed keen interest in the Horten broth-
ers’ fl ying-wing glider back in the 1930s
and built fl ying-wing airplanes of his own
in the 1940s. For three decades the corpo-
ration now known as Northrop Grumman
has provided the U.S. military with stealth
aircraft, which are essentially shaped like a
fl ying wing.
Sometime after the V3 arrived in the
States, American engineers studied it close-
ly, according to Russell Lee, a curator at
the National Air and Space Museum, who
helped restore the aircraft in 2011. “When
we took these wooden panels off of the bot-
tom of the center section, we discovered
there were burn marks there,” says Lee, “and
it suggests that the engines may have been
run.” But there’s no evidence this experi-
mental jet, still strangely intriguing after all
these years, ever got off the ground.
TO SEE IMAGES OF Smithsonian
curators restoring the aircraft, go to
Smithsonianmag.com/HortenAcross
1 Movie special eff ects inits.
4 Frequent choices at
microbreweries
8 Jabba the ___
10 Word that partners with “ruin”
11 Jazz legend Fitzgerald
12 What 32-Across promised
from her products
13 Grandma Moses’ specialty
15 Prominent part of a pout
16 Victorian ___, setting for the
Crimean War
17 Percentage of CO2 inhaled
at which “distracting
discomfort” begins
18 Cause of
death aboard the HL Hunley
21 One of the fi ve W’s
22 Meaning of “sum” in
Cogito ergo sum
23 Bobby in the Hockey Hall of
Fame
24 Home of Geneva, and a
Geneva who lived there
28 Still ___ (cooked extremely
rare, in diner-speak)
30 Thieves’ hideout
31 Sins
32 Madame who touted Fruitcura
33 Long feature of a
brachiosaurus
34 Setting for a submarine
attack See the solution on Page 70.^Down
1 Toque wearer
2 Word in the scientifi c name
for wolverines, from the Latin
for “glutton”
3 “Don’t worry, ___ all work
out”
4 Good name for a fi nancial
adviser?
5 Pope at the start of
Elizabeth I’s reign
6 Like volcanoes that still erupt
7 Alternative to FaceTime
9 Assume, as responsibility
10 In need of a towel
12 Obeying a “Stop” sign, e.g.
14 Basketball shot’s path
17 Gene Stratton-Porter’s
called her “Little Bird Woman”
18 ___ Tuesday, day before Ash
Wednesday
19 Like the actions of Florence
Nightingale
20 Hunk of cash
21 Herstory subjects
24 Good connections to have
25 Some small batteries
26 The world’s longest river
27 465 acres, for what remains
of Limberlost
29 Of the same ___ (similar)1 2 3 4 5 6 78 9 1011 1213 14 1516 1718 19 2021 222 3 2 4 2 5 2 6 2728 29 3031 3233 34