Al Backstrom sent me some fine old snapshots that seem to have been taken on this day and I have posted them on a separate page. To see them click away..
I have put up a fine Douglas Rolfe cutaway drawing of a planned roadable derivative of this version - drive to the airport, fly cross country and drive to the door of your destination. I have no idea how much of the thinking is Rolfe and how much is Horton. The Science and Mechanics magazine I found it in mentions that Bill Horton was thinking of some sort of roadable.
Douglas Rolfe possibly drew more airplanes than anyone.
The Rolfe Cutaway (click here)
I can not improve on what follows, which I received from Andy Kecskes, President of The Wing Is The Thing (TWITT). It appears in the TWITT Newsletter, No. 126, December 1996, pp. 3-4 He added some comments which appear at the end. He has a fine web site dedicated to flying wings
The color pix are from a brochure, which I got from Ben Truwe. He has several that he sells from time to time on eBay. No doubt he'd be willing to sell them directly. Contact him at.. truwe@miNd.net
It was amazing that after all the years that have passed, Horton still hadn't been able to get out from under the Hughes law suits.
Russ Eckre began with a description of how he became interested in the Horton Wingless airplane. He learned of William Horton back in the 1960s while a farm boy in North Dakota and answered an ad about selling franchises for this new airplane. Unfortunately, the business venture didn't go anywhere as will be seen later.
William Horton called it Wingless since it is a low aspect ratio wing. Russ passed around a picture of what was supposed to be a production model of this plane (this is the eBay promotional piece that started all this). Horton had designed the airplane in the early 1950s but didn't have the money to develop it. He then was able to get into a partnership with Howard Hughes and Harlow Curtis, since Hughes obviously had the money for producing the plane.
The
venture failed not because the airplane didn't fly, but because Hughes
wanted to take full credit for the patents and production rights, which
Horton refused to do. To prove that money talks, Hughes slapped a
law suit on Horton that effectively stopped any further development of
the aircraft until this day. Horton, who is in his 80s, is still
fighting to get the legal mess cleaned up so he can again try to see his
idea fly.
Hughes managed to get the prototype and partially constructed production
version destroyed. One aspect of the law suit was a statement the
aircraft couldn't fly, which the video obviously shows to not be true.
At one point in time Horton was put in jail because he was selling stock
in a company for an airplane that "couldn't fly" and had several violent
confrontations with people associated with Hughes and Curtis because of
the law suit and resulting injunctions.
Russ had a video of the prototype making its initial and some subsequent
flights out of what is now John Wayne Airport in Orange County, California.
The video was sort of a theatrical presentation of Horton waiting for the
government to approve the aircraft for flight. The most obvious thing that
caught the group's attention was the fact that on the ground the outer
control wing (which Horton calls air brakes) were able to be retracted.
None of the flight footage show them retracted so we wonder where the term
wingless really came from.
The
engines and general layout of the underside of the aircraft had some similarity
to a Bamboo Bomber. Russ indicated that indeed the basic airframe
was a Bamboo Bomber with a modified cockpit area and of course the low
aspect wing structure. He also mentioned that the engines had been
upgraded to 450 hp each since the original lower horsepower units weren't
sufficient for the aircraft.
Russ managed to get a copy of the patent which turned out to be on
the wing end-plates that
supposedly prevented the air from washing over the top and making the
wing section more efficient.
One of the things that Russ is interested in doing at this point is writing a book about Horton and the plane. He thinks that it would make good reading for aviation buffs, however, he hasn't had the time or money to undertake the venture.
The caption under promo piece included this additional information:
The
"wing" sticking out from the side of the wingless was the air brake and
was designed to be retracted into the side of the end plate during cruise.
The original base price was supposed to be $25,000 based on a factory production of 50 ships per day, with the avionics package an extra charge.
The newsletter also contained a picture of the prototype, however the quality was so poor it cannot be scanned with any reasonable chance of success. It shows the basic configuration similar to the promo picture, but the propellers were stuck out on long extension shafts to get them in front of the cockpit nose section. The promo picture shows the propellers protruding from the front of the outboard fuselage sections and have much shorter extensions. The caption below the picture also notes the 5 ton aircraft had been tested for more than 160 hours.
(ed. - It has obviously been a while since the meeting, but I seem to
recall Russ mentioning the Horton would fly the airplane all over the Los
Angeles area trying to get people interested in it so he could get investors.
Marc was right about the high rate of climb on takeoff, but he forgot to
mention that it also landed very slowly and didn't need a lot of runway.
The flight shots didn't seem to show it had any bad habits, but it was
always being flown with the "air brakes" extended which would have given
it more stability. One can only assume that they weren't retracted
because he had to fly slowly along side the camera plane and needed the
additional control they provided for these maneuvers.)
| * Living room comfort |
| * Dual hot water heating and air-conditioning |
| * Two cloakrooms, fully equipped lavatory with hot and cold running water and two refreshment units with over 6 feet stand up room |
| * Comfortable twin bed |
| * Fold away table for business and dining and also space for books magazines and light office equipment. |
| * The new (nice touch that "new") low price will place the Horton V-16 at the reach of fliers who need a low-priced , practical and useful airplane |
This is a work in progress. Please feel free to write me at..
dannysoar@worldnet.att.net
dannysoar0