German stealth aircraft

The United States is not the only nation to have invested in stealth airplane technology. The Low Observable site lists projects from the UK, Germany, Russia and China. This site will focus on the German projects, and is an attempt to collect whatever information is in the public domain (AFAIK, very little has been published about these projects).

In the 1980s, the German government ordered MBB to do some research into stealth technology. This resulted in the Lampyridae demonstrator.

A second project is even less well known: the Dornier LA 2000.

According to Doug Richardson's 1989 book "Stealth Warplanes", Dornier has done design work on a stealthy ground attack aircraft. Called LA-2000, it had a delta wing, "the pure shape of which was only marred by a raised section along the centerline. This incorporated the small canopy close to the apex of the delta. The two engines were located in a propulsion bay mounted under the wing. The inlet was between 1/4 and 1/3 of the way back from the nose". It had 2 turbofans with 25 kN thrust, feeding into a single twodimensional vectoring nozzle. It had an internal weapons bay of about 6 m^3. Drawings were published in a 1986 issue of Flight International (4014/15).

If you have more information on either of these projects, I'd appreciate hearing from you. You can mail me here (note: remove the NOT from the e-mail address).

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