This Sunday, June 28, National Geographic TV airs Hitler's Stealth Fighter. Set your TiVos or just kick the rest of the family off the TV, because this one should be good.

Back when stealth was very, very secret, a few people quietly advised me to take a look at the Horten Ho229, one of WW2 Germany's most advanced designs - a jet-powered flying wing made of wood. In a German book, a British documentary producer had found something even more interesting:  the Horten brothers, Walter and Reimar, had planned to use a primitive radar absorbent structure (RAS) in the leading edges. They were to be made from a sandwich of plywood around a carbon-loaded filler. The only question: how well would it actually have worked?

Now, we know:

That's a full-scale Ho229, RAS and all, built by Northrop Grumman and mounted on the pylon at the company's radar cross section test site at Tejon Ranch in the Mojave Desert. Director Mike Jorgensen enlisted the company's help to build and test the replica - and on Sunday we can find out how well it worked. (There's also a spoiler at Wikipedia.)

This is not Jorgensen's first breakthrough project. In the late 1990s, he persuaded Boeing and Lockheed Martin to give his team access to their competing JSF demonstration teams for his award-winning Battle of the X-Planes. (Disclosure: Graham Warwick and I were both consultants for the project, as well as all-too-present onscreen talent.)

And before anyone gets any ideas, the replica has already been donated to the San Diego Aerospace Museum. The only surviving Ho229, the never-flown V3, is in storage at the National Air & Space Museum.