Posts Tagged ‘Jets’

Mark Felton Demolishes the Claims for Die Glocke, Hitler’s Anti-Gravity Time/Space Machine

June 21, 2021

Yesterday I posted up a piece by the military historian, Dr Mark Felton, considering the evidence for Nazi flying discs. Felton’s an expert on World War II and the military technology of that time. He came to the conclusion that if the Nazis were experimenting with flying discs, then they were almost certainly failures given the spectacular failures of later, post-War experimental disc-shaped aircraft like the Avrocar. In this video he casts a similarly bleak, withering gaze over claims that the Nazis were working on a secret antigravity craft, called Die Glocke, or ‘the Bell’ because of its resemblance to the musical instrument installed in church towers. Not only is it claimed that the Glocke used antigravity, but it was also apparently a time/space machine. I thought immediately of Dr Who’s TARDIS. Did the Nazis really possess such a device, or have the people who are pushing this watched too many episodes of Dr Who, Time Tunnel and so on?

Felton begins in his usual dry manner. ‘Did’, he asks, ‘the Nazis possess antigravity? Could they flip between dimensions? And did Adolf Hitler escape to the Moon using such a craft? No, I haven’t been self-medicating,’, he says, and goes on to explain he’s only considering the claims made in ‘certain documentaries’. He wants to know if they contain any truth or are just ‘bovine excrement’. I think after watching this the answer lies far more on the side of bovine excrement, but I’ve never been persuaded by the Nazi saucer myth. But Felton states that the Americans and their Allies were astounded by how advanced German aerospace engineering was. The Nazi regime produced a number of highly advanced air- and spacecraft, like the Messerschmitt 262 jet plane, the Bachem Natter rocket interceptor, the V1 Flying Bomb, the V2 rocket. It was a secretive regime, operating from underground bases using slave labour, and so it was ideal for distortion of historical truth. Much of that distorted history was created by the Nazis themselves, and by their successors since then.

The video states that the Glocke entered public consciousness in a book published in 2000. This, followed by others, claimed that the project was under the control of Hans Kammler, the head of the V2 project. Kammler was the stereotypical Nazi leader, straight out of a comic book. He disappeared at the end of the War and was never seen again. It was supposedly powered by a highly volatile substance, red mercury. But Felton eschews discussing how it worked because it’s all theoretical. He just gives a physical description of the putative machine, stating it was 12-14 feet tall, shaped like a Bell, and had a swastika on its side, just so’s people knew where it came from. Is there any documentary evidence for this? No. The only evidence comes from an interview between an author and a Polish intelligence officer, who claimed access to a dossier produced by the SS personnel working on the project. Various names have been suggested for the scientists and officers in charge. One of them is Werner Heisenberg, due to a close similarity between his name and one of the scientists supposedly involved. Heisenberg was the German physicist in charge of the Nazis’ atomic programme. He produced a nuclear reactor, which partially worked, and an atomic bomb which didn’t. Mercifully. But everything is known about what he did during the War, and he was captured and thoroughly interrogated by the Americans afterwards. He didn’t mention the Glocke. Which in my view means that he very definitely wasn’t involved.

The video goes back further, stating that claims of the Glocke actually go back even further, to 1960 and the publication of the French author’s Bergier and Pauwels’ Le Matin des Magiciens, translated into English in 1963 as The Morning of the Magicians. This made a series of claims about the Nazis, including UFOs and occultism, that were roughly based on fact. The Horten brothers had designed flying wing aircraft, which resemble UFOs. After the War their plane ended up in America. Felton says that it clearly influenced later American planes, like the Stealth aircraft. He suggests the Horten flying wing plane contributed to the flying saucer craze of the late 1940s. It has been suggested that what Kenneth Arnold saw in his 1947 flight over the Rockies, which produced the term ‘flying saucer’, was in fact the Hortens flying wings being secretly flown. As for Nazi occultism, Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, was an occultist. He intended Wewelsburg castle to be a pseudo-pagan temple, but claims of Nazi involvement in the occult have been greatly exaggerated. Indeed they have. Nicholas Goodricke-Clarke, in his book on Nazi paganism, states that Hitler drew on the bizarre evolutionary ideas of the neo-Pagan cults in Germany and Vienna, like the Ariosophists, whose ideas really were bizarre and quite barking. He also had some contact with the Thule society. However, the pagan sects were banned during the Third Reich because Adolf was afraid they’d divide Germans. He concludes that real Nazi paganism was slight, except in the case of Himmler and the SS, who really did believe in it and wanted his vile organisation to be a new pagan order. Pauwels and Bergier’s book fed into the nascent 60s counterculture and then into the later New Age. Their book is notorious, and has certainly been credited as a source for much New Age speculation and pseudo-history by magazines like the Fortean Times. I think there was a split between the two authors. Bergier was an anti-Nazi, who had spent time in a concentration camp. I think he may even have been Jewish. Pauwels, on the other hand, gravitated towards the far right.

Villainous Nazi super-scientists also became part of SF pulp fiction of the 1960s and 70s. The Nazis were supposed to have discovered the secrets of space and even time travel. One of the books flashed up in this part of the video is Norman Spinrad’s The Iron Dream. This came out in the 1980s, and pondered what would have happened if Hitler had emigrated to America and become a pulp SF writer. The West German authorities weren’t impressed, and it was banned in Germany under the Basic Law outlawing the glorification of the Nazis. I found it in a secondhand bookshop in Cheltenham. It proudly boasted that it contained the SF/Fantasy novel Hitler would have written. Well, Hitler didn’t go to America, and never wrote any SF or Fantasy novels, and the book actually looked really dull. So I saved my money and didn’t buy it. This type of literature flourished because the Americans had been so impressed by genuine German scientific achievements. And the post-War atomic age and UFO craze allowed imaginations to run riot. So Nazi scientists also turned up as the villains in various SF film and TV shows. One prize example of that is the X-Files, in which the secret programme to breed human-alien hybrids at the heart of the UFO mystery is done by Nazi biologists, who came to America under Operation Paperclip.

The video then asks whether the Nazis really did experiment with antigravity. Well, they experimented with everything else, including occultism. NASA was also experimenting with antigravity from the 1990s onwards, as were the Russians and major aerospace corporations like Boeing in the US and BAe Systems in Britain. The Russians even published a scientific paper on it. But despite their deep pockets, these were all failures. And it seems that Operation Paperclip, which successfully collected German rocket scientists, chemical and biological weapons experts, and aerospace engineers, somehow failed to get their antigravity experts. We don’t have the names of any of the scientists and engineers, where they worked or even any credible documents about them. If the Glocke really had been built and its scientists captured by the US and USSR, why were the Americans and Russians trying to build it all from scratch. And if Hitler did have antigravity and UFOs, then how the hell did he lose the War?

Some sources claim that the project was also run by SS Gruppenfuhrers Emil Mazuw and Jakob Sporrenberg, both deeply noxious individuals. Mazuw was the governor of Pomerania, one of the former German territories later given to Poland after the War along with Silesia. He was the head of the SS and high police in Pomerania, and was deeply involved in the Holocaust. Before the War he was a factory worker. What use would he have been to a secret scientific project at the cutting edge of physics? Ditto Sporrenberg. He was also deeply involved in the Shoah, and had zero scientific or engineering background.

The video then considers the 1965 Kecksburg UFO crash, which is also cited as the evidence for the Glocke’s existence. That year a bright fireball was seen in the sky over six US states and Ontario in Canada, coming down in Kecksburg, Pennsylvania. The US army was mobilised, cordoning the area off and taking something away. In 2005 NASA revealed that the object was a capture Russian satellite, the Cosmos 96, which had re-entered the atmosphere and broken up. But this has provided much material for certain TV documentaries from the 90s to the present.

Felton concludes that if the Glocke ever existed, it was probably part of the German nuclear programme, and not a time machine. That’s if it ever existed at all. Echoing the X-Files‘ Fox Mulder, he finishes with ‘The truth is out there, as they say’.

Well, yes, the truth is out there. But as Scully was also fond of reminding Mulder, so are lies. And the Glocke is almost certainly one of these. The UFO world is riddled with fantasists and liars, some of whom are government agents apparently on a mission to spread misinformation. I think this is to destabilise the UFO milieu and stop them getting too close to real secret military aircraft. There’s the case of a civilian contractor working near one of the US secret bases, who became convinced that it really did contain a captured alien, with whom he was communicating over the internet. It seems he was being deliberately led up the garden path and pushed into madness by two air intelligence operatives, who first fed him information apparently supporting his views, and then told him it was all rubbish. It’s a technique known in the intelligence world as ‘the double-bubble’. They lead the target first one way, pretending to be whistleblowers, and then tell them it’s all lies, leaving them confused and not knowing what to believe.

Some UFO sightings are almost certainly of secret spy aircraft, including balloons. The Russians also encouraged belief in UFOs as a spurious explanation for secret space launches from Kapustin Yar, their main rocket complex. I also think that some of the stories about crashed UFOs, secret Nazi research were disinformation spread by the superpowers to put the others off the scent. The extraterrestrial hypothesis was only one explanation for UFOs after the War. It’s been suggested that when Major Quintillana said that the US had captured a flying disc at Roswell, he was deliberately trying to mislead the Russians and hide what had really come down, which was a Project Mogul spy balloon. Friends of mine are convinced that the Russians were similarly running a disinformation campaign about Soviet official psychical research in the 1970s. A number of western journos were given tours of secret Russian bases where experiments were being conducted into telepathy, telekinesis and so on. Some of the more excitable American generals were talking about a ‘psychic cold War’. One of the most bonkers stories I’ve heard was that the Russians were supposed to have developed hyperspace nuclear missiles. Instead of passing through normal space, these rockets were to be teleported to their destinations by trained psychics, rather like the mutated navigators folding space in the David Lynch film of Frank Herbert’s Dune. The hacks who followed up these stories found the secret bases were actually bog-standard factories. Workers told them that their places of work had been briefly taken over by the government, new rooms constructed, and a lot of strange equipment put in which was subsequently taken out. It looks very much like the Russian government believed it psychic research was all nonsense – hardly surprising for an officially atheist regime committed to philosophical materialism. The whole point of the exercise was to convince the Americans it worked, so they’d waste their money going down a technological and military blind alley. It wouldn’t surprise me if the Polish intelligence agent at the heart of this claim had been engaged on a similar project. Or perhaps he was just lying on his own time.

As for fantasists and yarn-spinners, well, I believe the Montauk project is one prize example. This was the subject of a series of books published in the 90s by two Americans. They claimed there had also been a secret time travel project based on, you guessed it, Nazi research. I think it also involved evil aliens and whatever else was going round the UFO world at the time. Kevin McClure and the Magonians were highly suspicious of it, not just because it was bullsh*t, but because it also seemed to glorify the Third Reich. They suspected the authors of writing far-right propaganda.

The Montauk project also appears to be partly based on the Philadelphia Experiment. This was the claim that during the War the Americans had conducted an experiment to render warships invisible to radar using magnetism, following Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. This had gone seriously wrong. The crew of the ship under test suffered terrible effects. Some burst into flame, another walked straight through a bulkhead before the ship itself vanished. The story was later turned into a time travel movie of the same name in the 1980s.

Was it true? Naaah. Although I’ve seen it in various UFO books, the claims seem to come down to one man. I’ve forgotten his name, but someone who knew him wrote in about him to the Fortean Times. The man had been his uncle, an alcoholic and spinner of tall tales, who had precious little, if anything, to do with science or the military.

It looks to me very much like the Glocke antigravity time/space machine is yet another of this myths or pieces of disinformation. I don’t think it was ever built, and the Polish intelligence officer who claimed it was, was a liar. As for the authors of the subsequent books and articles claiming its all true, no doubt many of them are sincerely genuine. But it doesn’t mean they’re right.

And some of the people pushing the Nazi saucer myths are real Nazis, seeking glorify the regime through sensational claims of secret technology and bases in the Canadian far north, Antarctica and the Moon. They do it to enthral people with the glamour of Nazi technology to divert attention away from the real horrors it perpetrated.

I’m sure most of the people, who believe in Nazi UFOs are decent people, who are genuinely appalled at the atrocities committed by Hitler and his minions. But there are Nazis out there trying to manipulate people, and that’s the danger.

Nazism and Fascism need to be fought and any claims of Nazi superscience or occult power critically examined, even if it seems to be harmless nonsense.

Mark Felton Examines Nazi Flying Saucer Research

June 20, 2021

This might interest some of the readers of this blog, who are interested in the rumours that during World War II the Nazis were engaged in developing Flying Saucers. Mark Felton, according to the biographical note to his channel’s videos, is an historian and the author of 22 books as well as numerous appearances on various TV shows. His channel, Mark Felton Productions, puts up videos about the Second World War and particularly its military technology. Three days ago on the 17th June 2021, he put up this video entitled ‘Hitler’s Flying Saucers – Fact or Fantasy?’

The video begins with the statement that German aeronautical engineering during the War was excellent and in advance of the Allies, as shown by the Messerschmitt Komet rocket plane and the V2 rocket. But there have also been rumours that they were developing disc-shaped craft. The video shows here a photo of the Sack AS-6, which really does look like a flying disc. The engineer credited with this research is Joseph Andreas Epp, who designed a circular aircraft with helicopter blades mounted on top, inspirited by the Focke-Wulf FW61 helicopter. He created four designs for these disc-shaped craft, all helicopters with adjustable rotor blades, and claimed to have built a 1/10 scale model, which he sent to the Ministry of Aviation in 1941. These designs and the model were examined by staff belonging to General Ernst Udet. The material was then passed on Walter Dornberger, the head of the Peenemunde V2 research base. A facility was supposedly built at Prague airport to develop these novel aircraft and the project placed under the authority of Rudolf Schriever and Jurgen Habermohl, and given assistance from a number of firms and organisations including the Luftwaffe and Skoda. It was run by Albert Speer’s armaments ministry until 1944 when it was absorbed into the V2 under the SS, led by Hans Kammler. One flying disc was supposedly built, dubbed the Flugkreisel, which incorporated some of Epp’s designs amongst other, later innovations. Epp allegedly took a grainy photograph of the disc in flight from Prague airport through vegetation as he was approaching it one day in his capacity as consultant. This was one of four unofficial flights, and the aircraft made its first official flight in January 1945. This is supported by Georg Klein, who was supposedly one of the craft’s designers at Prague, and a sworn statement from a test pilot, Georg Langer, after the end of the War. But Felton cautions that all this must be taken with a pinch of salt.

In addition to Epp, Schriever and Habermohl, there was a third project to develop flying discs carried on at the airport. This was supposedly a joint German-Italian programme under Richard Miethe and the Italian professor Giuseppe Belluzzo. It’s existence is also supported by the testimony of the staff involved, but these could be lying. There are designs for such an aircraft dating from the Second World War as well as a second photo of a disc in flight, but this could have been planted after the War to add verisimilitude.

In addition to the Germans, other countries were also active developing saucer-shaped craft. These included America with the Vought V-173 ‘Flying Pancake’ and the Vought XF5U. The German projects were abandoned 15th April 1945 as the Red Army closed in on Prague. The designs were packed up and taken away and the vehicles themselves taken out of their hangars and burned. Schriever later set himself up as an inventor, also working as a trucker for the occupying Allies to support himself. In 1948 his workshop was burgled and his materials on flying discs were stolen. He claimed he was approached by the western intelligence agencies for material on flying discs, but refused to cooperate. He officially died in 1953, but people who knew him later claimed they had seen him alive in the ’60s. Epp continued working on flying discs, and claimed he had built a flying model in 1946, and continued flying them into the 1950s. He also wrote about Nazi flying discs and appeared on German television talking about them. He claims that he approached the Americans with his ideas, but was rebuffed. He married, and briefly settled in East Germany, returning to West Germany in 1959. He applied for a patent, but this was blocked by the Americans for ten years. This conflicts with what is known about the American interest in Nazi technology, such as Operation Paperclip, the programme that saw the transfer of the V2 scientists and personnel to America to continue their rocket research.

Felton speculates that the Americans were interested in flying disc designs, as the Miethe disc resembles an aircraft designed by the British engineer, John Frost, called ‘Project Y’. The Miethe disc contained an internal, rotating jet engine. It was launched from a ramp. For its undercarriage, it used skids like the Komet rocket plane. ‘Project Y’, which looks rather spade-like, was dubbed ‘the Flying Manta’ and developed by Avro Canada, and it was rumoured that Miethe helped with the project. Frost had previously worked for De Havilland in Britain, developing the swept-wing, tailless De Havilland DH108 Swallow. He migrated to Canada in 1947, where he helped to create the CF-100 jet fighter, joining the Special Project Group set up in Avro Canada in 1952. This was set up to develop a VTOL aircraft which could be used after the destruction of airports in a nuclear war. The result was the VZ-9 Avrocar. This used a single turbo rotor to produce lift and thrust. It had difficulty going any higher than 3 feet off the ground, and the project was cancelled in 1961 when the American Air Force, which had supplied the funding, pulled the plug.

The similarities between these projects and those of the Germans may be coincidental, but they allow Felton to suggest the following conclusions:

  1. If Miethe and the Germans were involved in the Avrocar, then its failure shows that they were unable to make their own aircraft fly.
  2. Even if the Canadian project had no input from the Germans, it still faced some of the same problems. Its failure is therefore odd if the Germans, with less resources and knowledge, had been successful years before.
  3. The existence of the Avrocar indicates that the Americans had not captured a Nazi saucer about the time of the Roswell crash, for the reason that if the Americans had, why was the Avrocar a failure? It also shows that UFOs were not American. Here the video shows a clip of Airforce General Sandford talking about UFOs. He states that they have received 3,000 sightings, the great bulk of which could be adequately explained. These are hoaxes, misidentified aircraft, and meteorological and electrical phenomena. But some sightings were still unexplained and the American air force was still attempting to resolve them. But they were convinced that these sightings showed no pattern or purpose that related to a threat to the US.
  4. But did research into flying discs terminate with the Avrocar? The Groom Lake test facility, dubbed Area 51, was active from 1951 and was the place where a series of high-performance military aircraft, including the U2 spy plane, the Blackbird and the stealth fighter, were developed and tested.

Felton also suggests that Nazi disc research could also be entirely fictional and that Epp and co. were lying. This has been turned into a credible story by documentary film-makers, and that flying discs are really a post-War development. As the Nazis experimented with every other form of aircraft, it is credible that some experiments were made. It is not certain, however, if any of these aircraft were ever built of flown. What is certain is that Hitler never flew to a secret Antarctic base in one.

Felton thanks Panzerfux military kits for the use of the photograph of the Miethe disc, and begins his video with the statement that it ‘isn’t going to be like certain kinds of popular TV documentaries, much in vogue at the moment’. This looks like a swipe at some of the programmes on the History Channel, which has run any number of programmes on UFOs. It also has a TV series in which Dr Allen Hynek and a USAF officer try to get at the truth about flying saucers, while von Braun and his team are experimenting with a real one. The first series of the show is out on video, and looks like an attempt to do something vaguely like the X-Files but for the 21st century.

There has been discussion and debate about the possible existence of Nazi flying saucers since the end of the Second World War, and this reached a peak in the 1990s when W.A. Harbinson published Projekt UFO. This concluded that the Nazis really did have flying saucers and that these were now stationed at a secret Nazi base in Antarctica. The Nazis had also created a race of cyborg pilots, surgically altered to fly them and survive the high speeds and dangerous conditions. Kevin McClure and the peeps over at Magonia did some research into these claims, and concluded that they were rubbish. The evidence for some of them is tenuous and contradictory. For example, Giuseppe Belluzzo is also called ‘Bellonzo’ in some of these accounts. Some of the people pushing these stories were neo-Nazis, and it looks like some of the purpose behind their doing so was to keep alive the myth that the Nazis were super-scientists far in advance of the Allies. I’m extremely doubtful about this. The Germans had excellent scientists and engineers, thanks to the Prussian educational system set up in the 19th century. But their scientists and engineers faced some of the problems of official apathy ours did. Ohain, the genius behind the German jet aircraft, was also repeatedly turned down by the German air force and aviation authorities, just as Frank Whittle, the British jet inventor, was over here. Hitler was also initially convinced that the V2 was going to be a failure due to a recurring dream he had of the machine falling over and exploding. His opposition was only reversed after the Peenemunde team invited him to see the progress they had been making in its development.

And then there’s the very far-fetched story put out in videos like the one in which the Nazis developed real, space-travelling flying saucers from mediumistic messages telepathically received from Aldebaran. In my opinion, this is complete nonsense. I was always sceptical of the idea that the Nazis developed flying discs, but it looks like there may be more evidence for them than I thought.

If they were developed, however, I think they’re far more likely to have been aircraft like the Flying Pancake, Project Y and Avrocar than highly advanced, high performance vehicles or spacecraft.

Book/Magazine on the Secret Warplanes of the Third Reich

December 24, 2019

Luftwaffe Secret Project Profiles, text by Dan Sharp, illustrations Daniel Uhr (Horncastle, Mortons Media 2018).

This is one of those curious magazines, which are really soft-cover book. I found this leafing through the magazine racks of W.H. Smith last Friday, along with the modelling magazine on present day spacecraft. Morton’s have published a series of books on the strange aircraft the Nazis developed during the Second World War. Desperate to snatch away the Allies’ impending victory, they encouraged German aircraft designers and engineers to produce innovative aircraft. And some of these were very weird indeed. They included rocket planes like the ME 163 and Bachem Natter, as well as bizarre planes that incorporated rotor blades around the fusilage and propellers mounted both fore and aft. This book doesn’t cover the weirder designs, but many of those it does include are very unorthodox. The Nazis had developed jet technology, the most well-known examples are the ME 262 and the pulsejet engine that powered the infamous V1 Flying bomb. As this book shows, German engineers also developed other planes incorporating both rocket and jet power.

The blurb for the magazine reads

The constantly evolving nature of the air war from 1939 to 1945 meant existing aircraft types on all sides required constant upgrades and requirements for new types were regularly passed on to aircraft manufacturers.

The German government had already put huge resources into aviation research and development before the War – resulting in significant technological progress. So when the Luftwaffe asked for new aircraft, firms such as Messerschmitt, Focke-Wulf, Heinkel and Henschel were able to draw on cutting-edge aerodynamic research in formulating their designs to meet those requirements.

Competitions were held and the firms’ designs were measured against one another and against the German government’s strict standards – and the result was further evolution and development of even the most advanced aircraft proposals.

Luftwaffe: Secret Project Profiles focuses on the jet-propelled aircraft designs of the German aircraft manufacturers during the Second World War, beautifully illustrated by aviation artist Daniel Uhr.

More than 200 high-detailed full colour profiles cover the full range of German jet ‘secret projects’ from the war years, accompanied by details of why the designs were produced and how they fared against their competitors – based on the latest archival research.

Offering a host of different colour schemes and detailed notes, this is indispensable reading for enthusiasts and modellers alike. 

After the introduction, the book has chapters on

  1. Early jet designs of Messerschmitt
  2. Messerschmitt Me 262 versions
  3. Arado Ar 234 versions
  4. Rocket fighters
  5. Interim night fighters
  6. The 1000 x 1000 x 1000 bomber. This took its name from its intended ability to fly 1,000 km at 1,000 kph carrying 1,000 kilos of bombs.
  7. Pulsejets
  8. The 1-TL-Jager, intended to replace the ME 262
  9. The Volksjager, or ‘People’s Fighter’. This would be an airplane that even untrained pilots could fly into combat.
  10. Ramjet fighters
  11. The first jet bombers

The concluding chapter is on miscellaneous jets.

The designs produced included aircraft with swept or delta wings and a single dorsal fine in the tail, like the ME 163 rocket plane. Some were also tailless, such as the plane designed by Horten. It has recently been suggested that this is what Kenneth Arnold saw when he reported a group of ‘flying saucers’ over the Rockies in 1947. It has also been suggested that the Soviets were planning to stage a fake alien landing using an adapted version of the aircraft with children surgically altered by Mengele, which just seems to me to be distasteful bullsh*t. Some of the planes had twin tails, or replaced the standard tail fin with a V-shaped arrangement, or had two dorsal fins at the end of the lateral fins. There was also a flying wing design, and a ramjet plane which would have replaced the tail with a large dorsal fin containing the cockpit. Other unusual planes were two-stage aircraft. Some of these had a rocket engine as the first stage, one of which was very like the V-2 rockets that hit London. Another design consisted of a carrier aircraft, from which another plane was launched.

Many of these radical designs never made it off the drawing board. Others seem to have resulted in a few prototypes, but never went into mass production. The stranger planes look like spacecraft from Science Fiction, or else they were what Dastardly and Muttley from the Hanna Barbara cartoons would have designed if they were set in World War II rather than World War I.

Some of these new designs influenced the development of post-War aircraft. It is no accident that one delta-winged bomber appeared a little like the later RAF Vulcan. After the War the captured aircraft designs and information were taken back to Britain and America. German research on delta-wings, which resulted in the ME 163 rocket interceptor, were used in the development of the Vulcan, and probably Concorde, because delta wings were then able to withstand extremely high speeds better than conventional wings.

This is a fascinating piece of aviation history and will, I’m sure, appeal to people with a genuine interest in the real unconventional craft the Germans were producing. But admiration with wartime German technical innovation should never obscure the fact that the Nazi era was a monstrous dictatorship that had at its heart the organised slaughter of millions.

But also looking at these planes, I also wonder what secret designs we were also producing in the same period, which have yet to be publicised.

Chunky Mark on Increasing Poverty and Cuts, While Boris Wants Private Jet

May 24, 2018

This is another piece bashing Boris Johnson, our vain and incompetent Foreign Secretary. But it also tackles much more than that. This is another video from Chunky Mark, the Artist Taxi Driver. In this piece, he comments on how Boris is tired of flying first class with other people, and now wants his own jet. This is while the rest of Britain is labouring hard with paper hats on, working to pay for the royal wedding, the Tories’ stately homes, and the corporate elite knocking back their Pina Coladas in the Bahamas. He shows the covers of the newspapers, the Daily Mail and the Mirror. The Mail launched an attack on the House of Lords, which Chunky Mark compared to a snake eating itself, beginning with its tail, until only the head remains. Moving on to the Mirror, he comments on their front page story, which is how amused Meghan was when a bee flew into Harry’s ear. And this will go on forever. He makes the point that while this is on the cover, there’s grim news inside. The Tories have cut 700 school nurses, attacking children’s health in schools. Marks and Spencer’s are to shut 100 stores. The cuts in the number of school nurses is to pay for the corporate feasts and the Tories’ garden parties, while the closure of the M&S stores will devastate towns up and down the country. This is Theresa May’s hostile environment: child poverty, homelessness, austerity, Grenfell, Windrush.

The Coeloptere – French Experimental Aircraft

December 15, 2015

This is another neat little photo from 1000 Natural Shocks (Warning: over 18 site) of the Coeloptere. This was a French experimental aircraft tested in the 1950s which sadly, didn’t take off. (Yes, bad pun intended!)

Coleoptere Photo

The plane was the idea of the Bureau Technique Zborowski, a design bureau composed of mainly ex-German engineers. The Coleoptere was to be a vertically launched aircraft, consisting of a small fuselage surrounded by a large wing, wrapped around the aircraft in the form of a giant ring. This wing would form a duct for a large propeller or turbine for a jet engine. It was believed that this design would give the plane additional thrust in forward flight, or allow it to become a ramjet and thus allow it to attain hypersonic speeds.

The French aviation development bureau, SNECMA (whose name does intend sound very close to a piece of profanity in Red Dwarf) took over the idea in 1952, and began tests on a variety of adapted planes. These planes were originally remote controlled. The first manned flight in a Coleoptere aircraft was made on 30 March 1957 by Auguste Morel in a tethered CP.400-P2. Untethered test lights began on the 14th May. This led to the development of the P3, which began testing the following year, 1958. This had the air intakes for the jet engine either side of the plane’s nose, which was shaped like that of a jet fighter. Morel was again the test pilot, occupying an ejector seat. From this configuration emerged the CP.450 Coleoptere, which commenced tether flight on the 17th April 1959, and then began flying freely from the 6th May. The French hoped that this would lead to the development of VTOL fighters powered by a modified Pratt & Whitney jet engine, with a ramjet engine housed in the annular wing. On one of the first free test flights, however, Morel was forced to eject, and the programme was subsequently abandoned.

Flying Atar Pic

The Coleoptere, from Bill Gunston: The Development of Jet and Turbine Aero Engines (Patrick Stephen Ltd 1995) 165.