The Brothers
Walter and Reimar Horten weren't career aerospace engineers — they were glider enthusiasts who'd spent years building tailless designs as a hobby, convinced flying wings were simply more efficient than any conventional airframe.
Both brothers served as Luftwaffe pilots, but their real passion was aircraft design, built on years of privately constructed flying-wing gliders through the 1930s. Reimar, the more technically driven of the two, was largely self-taught in aerodynamics rather than formally credentialed, which made his later achievement even more unusual: convincing the Reich Air Ministry to fund a jet-powered version of a concept most conventional engineers still treated as a curiosity.
Their pitch rested on a simple aerodynamic argument: a tailless flying wing produces far less drag than a conventional fuselage-and-tail design, because there's no separate tail structure creating extra resistance. Less drag meant more range and more speed from the same engines — exactly the tradeoff a fuel- and time-strapped Luftwaffe needed by 1943.
