Cub Driver wrote in message . ..
I can't understand why Argentina's government invested time and money
on such weird ideas, when IMHO they should have invested FIRST on
developing their "conventional" (so to speak) aircraft industry and
THEN on "revolutionary" projects.

Well, they had Reimar. He was certainly their best shot at a
breakthrough, and a breakthrough probably seemed their best shot at
developing significant aircraft.

There are always those who believe that the conventional wisdom is
wrong--that there is a carburetor that gives 80 mph to a gallon, only
the oil companies bought it up and suppressed it. The notion that hard
work and heavy investment is the way to progress is hard to swallow
for these people.

Argentina was in a tough spot in the 1950s. Twenty years earlier it
had been one of the important countries of the world, and now it was
sliding into irrelevance. No doubt Reimar looked good to the Peron
government, as a short-cut to the riches that should have been
Argentina's.



I wouldn't be so hard on them. Flying wings provide impressive
performance as several Boeing stidies have shown and the US certainly
experimented with several Northrop designes.

The WW2 Horten HXVIIIA flying wing Jet bomber
http://www.luft46.com/horten/ho18a.html was on the basis of
conservative calculations capable of a round trip bombing mission to
the USA at 600mph using the same fuel gussling Jumo 004B engines on
the Me262. This I am sure would have been technically impossible in a
conventional layout. (Presumably the more reliable Jumo 004D then in
production would have been needed for reliabillity)

Flying wings have a few problems:
1 unique stability problems (more easily controlled with modern
fly-by-wire controls but still solvable without)
2 Finding cargo space. (B2 has woefull low altitude performance
because the bulged center section was increased to improve bombload at
the expense of low altitude drag)
3 Burried engines must be small diameter or multiples someting that
Northrop got wrong in the YB49: they thickened the wing rather than
thining the engines.

As a business strategy it problably wasn't to bad either. Rather than
take on the US and UK industry head on you jump past it using radical
technology.

It turns out that in anycase that the UK industry, the Asutralian
Industry, the Canadain Industry all failed to varying degrees so the
Argentinain industry is by non means unique. The US industry was
helped by a huge domestic market and rather generous funding for
achieving technical supremacy over the Soviets.

I suspct the legendariy designers like Kurt Tank, The Hortens and to a
lessor extent Messerschmit many have been given too much freedom and
not enough surpervision or they may simply have been trying to do to
much with too little.

Argentina was excluded from a lot of trade agreements because of its
neutrality during WW2.



all the best -- Dan Ford
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