Jack Northrop - Flying Wing and Other Aircraft

Flying Wing and Other Aircraft

While working at this company, Northrop focused on the flying wing design, which he was convinced was the next major step in aircraft design. His first project, a reduced-scale version tested in 1940, ultimately became the giant Northrop YB-35. The Northrop XP-56 Black Bullet, a welded magnesium fighter was one of his most innovative of his World War II designs, along with the Northrop P-61 Black Widow, the first American night interceptor, of which more than 700 were constructed, and which performed effectively in every theater of the war.

His genius continued into the postwar era of jet aircraft, to produce the Northrop F-89 Scorpion all-weather interceptor, the Northrop YB-49 long-range bomber, the Northrop Snark intercontinental missile, and automatic celestial navigation systems. He produced a number of flying wings, including the Northrop N-1M, Northrop N-9M, and Northrop YB-49. His ideas regarding flying wing technology were years ahead of the computer and electronic advances of "fly-by-wire" stability systems which allow inherently unstable aircraft like the B-2 Spirit flying wing to be flown like a conventional aircraft.

The flying wing and the pursuit of low drag high lift designs were Northrop's passion, and its failure to be selected as the next generation bomber platform after World War II, and the subsequent destruction of all prototypes and incomplete YB-49s ordered by the federal government were a blow from which he never recovered, causing his association with Northrop Aviation to become almost non-existent for the next 30 years.

In an interview for the Discovery Channel's documentary The Wing Will Fly, his son John Northrop Jr. recounted his father's devastation and lifelong suspicions that his flying wing project had been sabotaged by political influence and backroom dealing between rival Convair and high-ranking officials in the Air Force. In the same documentary, Northrop test pilot John Meyers states:

"He was so basic and honest and decent...and a genius...a real genius. I once heard Donald Douglas Sr say that Jack Northrop had done more for aviation than any other man in his time. It was my privilege to work for him".