Search results

Here's a portion of a vid (not too long, 5 minutes +/-), that is a quick summary. Pretty good. Part of it is the narrative of a Gigante pilot who was brought down by a B-26 over the Mediterranean and survived. There's also a portion with some odd cheery almost Disney-quality music showing a...

Ran across some background that the Gigante was the outcome of Hitler's decision to invade Britain. This would be the Me-321 (the glider), the Me-323 was a later development That invasion was never part of Hitler's original plan. You all might know the story of his blank stare at his foreign...

Look what I found, a "tiny" Gigante. The soundtrack is what sold me.... https://youtu.be/yFxwLb6NmDA

Grim stuff. You can almost hear the conversation in the Engineering Department now: - "Well. That didn't work so well." - "Yeah, you're right. Let's tweak it a little and see how that works." - "Okay. Now, who's next in our pilot rotation?" :burn::3dAngus:

Easy enough with today's computer capabilities to synchronize thrust of that thing from the six engines. But I'm imagining that was a l-i-t-t-l-e trickier back in the day when that subtlety was likely managed mostly through seat-of-the-pants "engineering" from the pilot. Any multi-engine...

Absolutely, and then when you consider recent conversation in the SR-71 "Blackbird" Thread about issues of yaw in-flight, this thing must have had some of those issues.

The number of airfields you can operate from with that airframe must have also been an issue. Wonder if they ran it through any Immelmann Turns or Barrel Rolls during test flights?! :naner:

I stumbled by accident on her autobiography, and if you have time to read her story you won't be disappointed. She was not your everyday wallflower. I recall she wrote something about the "complexity" (she understated most everything she did) of using three tugs to get the Gigante glider...

Found a short vid showing loading-in of some Gigantes: https://youtu.be/ZVTP4ZnYI4Y

I found a reference to Hannah Reitsch and her test pilot flying of the Gigante (as it was called). It's the last post (by a guy named Root66), in this thread attached: http://www.falfiles.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-400833.html

PS Great stuff, ColdWarrior, thanks for the thread!

That was the first prototype if I recall right. One of the test pilots for that beast was a lion of a flyer named Hannah Reitsch, a petite woman who gets little press (she was an unrepentant Nazi). She also was the pilot for the first flight ever of a helicopter (and she pulled that off...