From: (robert arndt)



Laugh this off Tex. The US captured the DFS 228 rocket recon sailplane
in 1945 and took it back home.

They took the first prototype to England where it was scrapped in 1947. The
second prototype was destroyed before the war ended. Neither ever flew under
their own power or over 23kilofeet. Powered sailplane looking aircraft were
nothing new by WW2. A Soviet man flew from the U.S.S.R. to Alaska in the 1920s
in what would today probably be called a motor-glider. Your country only
adapted other people's ideas to a specific use. Everybody does that.

The aircraft was designed to fly at
(wait for this)... 80,000 ft and carry two Zeiss cameras (IR types
too).
So you think the U-2 came from US sources... uh, no. The funny thing
is the DFS even had a pressurized escape pod, something the U-2
didn't.

Which is why your airplane never would have made it to 80kilofeet.

And then of course is the German radar-absorbing paint
"Schornsteinfeger"- a carbon paint to scatter radar that was the
inspiration for US Ironball paint applied to the U-2. I agree it
wasn't that effective for that time period, but the US got the idea
from the Germans.

The Brits and the Americans had already figured out the carbon would not work.

Germans had stealth first- a fact you cannot deny. The Go-229 flew in
Feb 1945, a hell of a long time before the B-2.
Still laughing?

Rob

Once again, flying wing designs were flying in glider form in the late 1880s in
your country, England, France and the U.S. with varying degrees of success.

Dan, U.S. Air Force, retired