The Dream Of The Flying Wing
There is generally an enormous gulf between aeronautical engineering and flight as a subject for poetry and art. The artist deals with soaring metaphors and human emotions; the designer, even while Grafting wings and fuselages with the exquisite care of a sculptor, works instead from calculations and technical principles. Poets may admire an airplane’s grace but know little of its structural design; engineers, in creating that design, build it strictly along functional lines, paying no heed to the merely ornamental.
Yet one leading aeronautical designer, Jack Northrop, spent his career working to bridge this gulf. His goal was elegance; he sought to reduce the airplane to its simplest and most natural form. He believed that that form would be a flying wing—essentially an enormous boomerang, lacking all semblance of fuselage or tail. What was more, he came astonishingly close to realizing it and making it a mainstay of Air Force power. But he failed in his quest, and the failure broke him, leaving him bitter to the end of his days.
The passion and drama of his adult years contrast markedly with his thoroughly ordinary youth. John Knudsen Northrop was born in Newark, New Jersey, on November 10, 1895, and spent part of his childhood in Nebraska, which he later described as “a pretty dreary place to live—flat country, either too cold or too hot and very little to see.” California proved far more inviting, and the Northrops soon settled in Santa Barbara.
Young Jack found his pathway into aviation within that town in a rather casual way. Near the beach stood an auto garage and an airplane shop, together in a small building. The airplane outfit was run by two brothers, Allan and Malcolm Loughead, who pronounced their name “Lockheed”; in time they would found the aircraft company of that name. By 1916 the youthful Northrop, who had graduated from high school three years before, was a frequent visitor.
He had no university degree and never would get one. As he later recalled, “I had a little experience as a garage mechanic and I worked for a year as a draftsman for an architect, and I worked for my father who was in the building business, and this sort of qualified me to design airplanes.” The Lougheads’ work was very much a matter of guess and golly; they were building an aircraft without engineering drawings. When Jack Northrop joined them, his high school physics and algebra qualified him to do stress analyses in an elementary but still useful fashion.
America’s entry into World War I brought new business for the Lougheads, but Northrop’s world remained fixed within Santa Barbara. He joined the Army, which quickly sent him back home to help build flying boats. Then, in 1918, out of the Army and self-supporting, he married his high school sweetheart, Inez Harmer. So far as he and Inez were concerned, life promised the simple happiness and modest prosperity of their parents, with no thought of renown in the wider world.
Already, though, he was beginning the search for elegance that would mark his career. It came to the fore immediately after the war, when he set out to design his first complete airplane. He listened with great interest when the Lougheads’ foreman, Tony Stadlman, described a captured German “Albatros” fighter that he had seen on display in San Francisco. The “Red Baron,” Manfred von Richtofen, had flown it in combat, and Northrop knew that its fuselage amounted to a shell of molded plywood. He adopted this feature in designing his own plane, the Loughead S-1.
This construction technique was demanding. Most plane builders were assembling their fuselages simply by covering a framework with fabric. By contrast, Northrop had to carefully shape a concrete mold, soak plywood in water to make it flexible, and then force the wood against the sides of the mold by inflating a balloon. His reward for all this work was a new freedom in design, yielding a gracefully curved fuselage shaped like a torpedo. It broke decisively with the boxy, angular forms that were the norm during and after World War I.
Unfortunately, the early postwar years were very bad for the aeronautical world. In the wake of World War I, the nation was awash in war-surplus engines and aircraft. Many were high-quality but inexpensive, having survived the ruthless aerial competitions of combat. Few people cared to order new designs, and with little business coming in, the Loughead enterprise folded in 1920.
Northrop went back to architectural drafting and spent the next three years working in his father’s building business, but in 1923 that folded as well. He made his way to the Los Angeles area and found new work in aviation, joining a hole-in-the-wall outfit run by the plane builder Donald Douglas. Douglas was struggling, like everyone else in the industry, but at least he had a project: the Army’s World Cruiser aircraft, which in the spring and summer of 1924 would fly around the globe. Soon Northrop was designing bits and pieces of the plane.
This was not enough for him. The Loughead S-1 had given him a taste for designing aircraft that would be entirely his, and now he was ready to reach beyond that plane’s restrictions. Though it had a novel streamlined fuselage, its biplane wings were entirely conventional. After 1920, though, another wartime plane builder, Anthony Fokker, who had emigrated from Holland to America, introduced planes with strong single wings made of wood. Other designers were sticking with their biplanes, but the venturesome Northrop believed that he could break new ground by combining a Fokker-type wing with a streamlined fuselage. That combination would be the next step in his pursuit of elegance.
Working in his spare time, Northrop prepared a design for his new plane, the Vega. “It was a radical design,” he later declared, “far removed from the more conventional types that Douglas was building, and I felt he would not be interested.” Allan Loughead, on the other hand, was very interested. He too had left aviation, to become a real estate developer, but he was still interested in aeronautics, and he thought that the Vega might offer him a route back into the field. A Los Angeles venture capitalist named Fred Keeler was ready to back Loughead. In Santa Barbara everyone had known that name, but in other cities it invited such mispronunciations as Loghead or Loafhead. Keeler therefore insisted on using phonetic spelling, and late in 1926 the Lockheed Aircraft Company opened for business.
Northrop and a handful of employees set to work in a rented shop in Hollywood, and the design turned out to be almost too strange even for Loughead. The monoplanes of 1927, such as Charles Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis , all had at least a few external struts to brace the wings, but the Vega would have none. “Allan kept insisting that we must put some brace struts on, whether they had anything to do or not,” Northrop later recalled, “because he felt that nobody would buy the airplane unless there was something that could be seen to hold the wing up. I finally won out.” The first Vega was ready in mid-1927, just in time for the boom that followed Lindbergh’s flight to Paris.
It was an immediate hit. With a 225-horsepower engine it cruised at 135 miles per hour, at a time when few civilian planes were topping 100. Morepowerful motors would boost this speed to as much as 170. William Randolph Hearst’s son George ordered a Vega, as did Amelia Earhart and Wiley Post. Hubert Wilkins used one for his trans-Arctic flight in 1928. The plane found work as an airliner, carrying six passengers; it also set records. Wiley Post’s model, Winnie Mae , reached 55,000 feet. Later it led the field in a race from Los Angeles to Chicago. At the 1927 National Air Races, it took a Vega to beat a Vega. Lockheed built five of them a month from mid-1928 through 1929 and then continued production at a slower rate.
At Lockheed Northrop was the man of the hour. He could look ahead to new designs that would build on the Vega, creating it anew in aluminum rather than wood while adding the latest forms of streamlining. Yet his hopes now ran far beyond such notions. He saw a new goal: “to build an airplane where there was nothing but the wing, where everything was included in it—powerplant, passengers, every function that was necessary.”
The flying wing was already a wellestablished concept in aeronautics. Germany’s brilliant Hugo Junkers had hailed it as the plane of the future and had directed his own efforts toward its realization. It offered the ultimate in elegance, for by eliminating fuselage and tail it truly would reduce the airplane to its essentials. Building it would be a first-class technical challenge, for such a wing would somehow have to achieve stability in flight, unassisted by tail surfaces.
No one had built a practical flying wing, not even Junkers. But if Northrop could succeed, he might have more than just an elegant design; he might break new ground. Lacking the weight of a fuselage and tail, a successful flying wing would have a much greater range than standard planes. Alternatively, it could offer unparalleled power in lifting heavy loads of cargo.
As with so much else in Northrop’s life, his vision of the flying wing had developed during his years in Santa Barbara. In that coastal town he had drawn inspiration from the sea gulls. They were mostly wing, with minimal bodies, and he had decided that an all-wing aircraft would be the natural way to fly. He had done little to realize this vision, keeping it as his personal hope. But after the Vega had made his reputation as a pathbreaker and an innovator, he was ready to give it a try.
To Allan Loughead, however, he might as well have been proposing to power an airplane with gossamer moonbeams. Worse, Northrop soon found himself working with a new manager who insisted on telling him how to design airplanes. A few weeks later he quit. The Hearst family, of publishing fame, quickly came to his rescue, staking him to a new company called the Avion Corporation. Northrop then proceeded with two projects: the flying wing, which he would build for love, and the Alpha, an all-aluminum follow-up to the Vega, which he hoped to build for money.
The first flying wing came out of the shop with a wingspan of thirty feet and room for a pilot and a 90-horsepower engine. It proved awkward in flight, and Northrop realized that he did not know how to control it, so he compromised. He mounted tail surfaces behind the wing, supported by two long booms. That made it easy to handle during takeoff and landing, while its wing provided a particularly fast rate of climb. Then, having done what he could for the moment, he turned to the Alpha.
The Alpha was a conventional airplane, but it had all the trimmings. Its wing and fuselage combined great strength and light weight. Northrop reduced its drag considerably by enclosing the engine within a cowl. For additional streamlining, he surrounded the landing gear with aluminum “trousers” that resembled stubby wings. The Alpha had a cruising speed of 140 mph, but because it was meant to carry mail rather than passengers, Northrop would build only seventeen. Still, when it made its first flight, in March 1930, it stood as a clear demonstration of what was possible.
By then the Depression was under way, and Avion was running short of cash. The plane builder William Boeing responded by arranging to buy him out. Northrop had hoped to continue working near Los Angeles, but in 1931, with the Depression deepening, his management decided to cut costs by combining his operation with an existing firm in Kansas. Northrop had no wish to return to the Great Plains, not after his childhood in Nebraska, so once again he cut loose. He got in touch with his old friend Donald Douglas and set up a subsidiary of Douglas Aircraft, just in time for his structural designs to see use in the DC-2 and DC-3. These were two of the era’s pathbreaking airliners, setting the pace within a burgeoning commercial industry.
Northrop’s life held many satisfactions. He was happy with his wife and their three children. He was quiet and modest, winning his employees’ loyalty by showing a sincere respect and personal concern. He also knew that his lack of a formal education had posed no handicap. To the contrary, he had repeatedly grasped opportunities that others had overlooked.
Nevertheless, he found himself in the same old bind. He held a substantial interest in his Douglas subsidiary, but he was working entirely on aircraft of conventional type. Northrop wanted more. To him, traditional aeronautical engineering amounted to “inventing rubber gloves to use with a leaky fountain pen.” In the words of his long-time colleague and biographer Ted Coleman, “he was still not at ease with himself, did not consider himself fully successful. For a reason he could not understand, there was a continuing frustration in not being his own boss, in not being able to make the important decisions himself.”
His chance came in 1937, when Douglas bought him out. This left him flush with cash, and he soon secured more through a Wall Street financier, LaMotte Cohu. Together they launched Northrop Aircraft, Inc. It would build some aircraft of conventional type; its P-61 “Black Widow,” a twin-engine night fighter, would serve with valor in the Pacific. But part of the company’s funds would go toward Northrop’s personal inventions. In particular, he would pursue his road not taken by returning to the flying wing.
The first of them, the N-1M (the M standing for mockup), took to the air during 1940 and 1941. It was definitely an experimental model, built of wood so that Northrop could readily tweak its design. Still, in learning about its aerodynamics, he was no longer flying blind; he had the counsel of Theodor von Kárman, the nation’s leader in the field. Flight tests showed that to make the craft stable in the air, its wings would have to be swept back, to move its center of gravity to a more advantageous spot. The N-1M was underpowered, but a test pilot, Moye Stephens, succeeded in reaching altitudes of 4,000 feet.
Meanwhile, across the Atlantic the Nazis had unleashed their military forces upon an unready Europe. In January 1941, while Britain stood alone, a planning group within the U.S. Army Air Corps considered for the first time what America might do if Britain fell. The planners decided that the United States might still be able to attack Germany by using intercontinental bombers, able to make round-trip flights from the East Coast. That August, when President Roosevelt met with Prime Minister Winston Churchill, the two leaders agreed that America would try to develop such aircraft.
The goal was easy to define but hard to achieve: “10,000 pounds for 10,000 miles.” Such a bomber would carry a five-ton load across the Atlantic to Berlin, then return home without landing or refueling en route. The specifications proved to be over-optimistic; it would be well into the 1950s before airplanes would routinely fly the Atlantic nonstop and one way, let alone make round trips. To even approach the goal, designers would have to call upon considerable reserves of ingenuity.
At Consolidated Aircraft in Fort Worth, attention turned to the B-36, a behemoth that would press the limits of size. With twice the weight of the wartime B-29, the B-36 could carry the vast lakes of fuel that would be needed to sustain its long range. It mounted six of the most powerful piston engines available, and when one of these aircraft flew overhead, you could hear the ground shake.
A second long-range-bomber contract went to Jack Northrop. He had only his small N-1M to test the principles of the flying wing, but range was its strong suit, and he argued persuasively that he could scale it up to a full-size intercontinental bomber, the B-35. Without the weight of a fuselage and tail, it could be smaller and lighter than the B-36, mounting four piston engines instead of six. If it worked out, the flying wing would emerge as an important instrument of national power.
As the war progressed, these projects lost priority. It became clear that development of an intercontinental bomber would take a while, so the military decided to concentrate its resources on established aircraft, like the B-29, that could enter early production. In addition, Britain had managed to hold up under a withering German air assault, so the United States could base its bombers in England. Nonetheless, both the B-35 and the B-36 were well along at war’s end. Northrop had continued to validate his theories with flight tests of additional experimental craft, proving that his flying-wing concepts were technically sound. Late in 1944 he proposed to turn the B-35 into a jet-powered bomber, the B-49. He would do this by replacing its four piston engines with eight turbojets from General Electric.
The first version of the B-35 made its initial test flight on June 25, 1946, and with it Northrop presented Consolidated’s B-36 with a twofold challenge. He was offering a radically new concept, which he hoped might send conventional aircraft into the limbo reserved for the biplane. He also wanted to show, if he could, that the turbo-jet, which was thought to be good for speed but bad for range, could beat the piston engine in the new field of intercontinental bombers.
The B-36 made its first flight that August and quickly flew into serious trouble. Already it had encountered lengthy delays and numerous cost overruns. In December the head of the Strategic Air Command, Gen. George Kenney, reported that the B-36 would have a range of only 6,800 miles when flown in wartime. His men were the ones who would have to fly the craft, and he declared that the projected range was “not sufficient to permit the B-36 to reach and return from profitable targets in Europe and Asia from bases in the United States or Alaska.”
His colleagues responded by placing their hopes in a new supercharger, a type of pump that would force more air into the B-36’s engines. That would allow the plane to fly at higher altitude, decreasing drag and thus increasing range. But in April 1948 Air Force officials learned that the new supercharger was a flop. It still would not allow the B-36 to fly 10,000 miles. The B-36 was already in production, but now its cancellation appeared imminent.
No such difficulties had attended Northrop’s B-35, and his jet-powered B-49 had also progressed in a straightforward way, making its first flight on October 24, 1947. With the B-36 in serious trouble, the Air Force turned to Northrop’s alternative. Late in June 1948 Gen. Joseph McNarney paid him a visit. McNarney was the man who signed purchase orders for Air Force planes, and he had such an order among his papers. It directed Northrop to build 30 RB-49As—a modified version to serve for photo reconnaissance. “The order is only a drop in the bucket,” McNarney added. “Consolidated’s Fort Worth bomber plant, owned by the government, will be made available to you for production of the RB-49. In large numbers.”
That plant had a vast enclosed hall that had been used for wartime bomber production. It was now building the B-36. Northrop had his own production facilities, in Hawthorne, California, but they were too small to turn out his RB-49 on an adequate schedule. The Air Force’s decision meant not only that he had the superior airplane but that Consolidated, his principal rival, would carry out its production.
On a personal level the stakes were higher still. The search for elegance had been Northrop’s great passion and the leitmotif of his career. Early on, his Vega had broken decisively with the strut-and-wire biplane. Then, because future aircraft would necessarily be made of aluminum, he had developed high-quality all-metal wings. That had led to the DC-2 and DC-3, which lofted commercial aviation into an era of spectacular growth.
Now, in his early fifties and at the top of his form, Northrop would put the true flying wing into production. This would be the capstone of his career. Moreover, it would show that Jack Northrop was the great plane builder of recent decades, the man whose work had repeatedly opened the most fruitful paths in aeronautical design. At the convergence of those paths would stand the flying wing.
However, he faced an immediate problem in negotiating the formal arrangements whereby Consolidated would build his bomber. A pair of meetings between officials of the two companies during July brought no agreement. Then on July 16 the Air Force Secretary, Stuart Symington, hosted a third meeting.
“There are too many aircraft companies,” he announced baldly. “The Air Force cannot afford to support another large aircraft manufacturer. We’re going to have to cut one down.” He looked right at Northrop. “I want Northrop combined with Consolidated.”
Northrop was stunned, but he kept his cool. “Mr. Secretary,” he replied, “what are our alternatives to this move?” Symington answered, “You’ll be goddamn sorry if you don’t.” General McNarney, who was also present, quickly interjected, “Oh, Mr. Secretary, you don’t mean that the way it sounds.” Symington replied, “You’re goddamn right I do!” Northrop Aircraft still held its production contract, but it had to respond to Symington’s demand. Jack Northrop met with Floyd Odium, who controlled Consolidated, but was unable to agree on terms for a merger.
While Northrop contemplated his company’s demise, the B-36 was coming back to life. During the second half of 1948 a series of spectacular flights showed that it could indeed serve as the Air Force’s main bomber. As early as May a long test flight had shown that the aircraft could top 9,000 miles in range. Then, in early December, a B-36 flew out of Carswell Air Force Base near Dallas, dropped a 10,000-pound load into the ocean off Hawaii, and returned to base.
Symington responded by setting up a review board to advise him on procurement policy. Just after New Year’s in 1949, this panel recommended stepping up production of the B-36. To do so would require canceling other production programs, for President Truman had insisted that the entire Pentagon live within a total budget of only $14.4 billion. On January 11 the Air Force announced that the canceled projects would include Northrop’s thirty flying-wing bombers.
The B-49 did not go down without a fight. Plenty of people wondered why the Air Force had so suddenly embraced the B-36 when a few months earlier the plane had been on the brink of cancellation. Talk of a Northrop merger had not gone unnoticed in the industry. Rumor had it that Symington had hidden interests in a merger and was misusing his post as Air Force Secretary to advance his own career by selling out the United States.
According to the rumors, Symington was seeking to build a “General Motors of the air” by pushing not only Northrop but also Curtiss-Wright into a merger with Consolidated. Symington allegedly would head the enlarged corporation. He had favored the B-36, it was said, not because it was the best airplane available but because its continued production would provide business for his company.
In May 1949 Rep. James Van Zandt, a Pennsylvania Republican who was a member of the House Armed Services Committee, blew the lid off the scandal. In a spectacular speech he leveled accusations against Symington and Consolidated. His committee responded by authorizing an investigation. If Van Zandt could support his accusations, the B-36 would be discredited and Symington would stand open to criminal charges.
Van Zandt’s charges turned out to rest on nothing more than a scurrilous document prepared by one Cedric Worth, an aide to a Navy undersecretary. Worth, in turn, had worked from nothing more than newspaper columns and industry gossip. The committee held its hearings during August, and Air Force officials were loaded for bear. Telling testimony came from Gen. Curtis LeMay, who had succeeded General Kenney as head of the nation’s bomber force. LeMay was known for being hard to please and having unquestioned integrity, and he stated that he personally had recommended stepping up B-36 production on the basis of the plane’s merits. When Van Zandt responded with nothing more than newspaper clippings, it was clear that Symington would receive complete vindication.
In fact, the B-49 contract had been nothing more than an expedient to which the Air Force had turned out of desperation, at a moment when the B-36 program stood on the brink of collapse. In the subsequent words of von Kármán, the B-49 “was doomed to failure because it appeared at the wrong time in aviation history. Northrop had insisted that the crew, fuel, and everything else had to go into the Wing. This load made the wings thick, which is all right at speeds of three hundred to four hundred miles per hour.” But at higher speeds “the Flying Wing was unsatisfactory.” It was neither fish nor fowl, for it lacked both the range of the B-36 and the speed of a thin-winged jet bomber.
Jack Northrop was crushed by the rejection of his plane, and a further humiliation lay in store. Eleven nearly complete B-49s were parked outside his plant, but the Air Force didn’t want them. Yet they were all government property, and they were cluttering up the grounds. In November 1949 the order came down to scrap them. The work took three months, with cutting torches and axes; Northrop watched as trucks hauled away the aircraft that had stood at the center of his life.
All this came as a hideous crisis of the spirit. He still had a company to run, building jet fighters as well as the Snark, a cruise missile of 5,000-mile range. Yet his hopes had focused on flying wings, and their loss took the heart out of him. It carried over to his personal life, as he divorced his wife, who had been with him since high school. He stayed at the helm of Northrop Aircraft for a while longer but retired in 1952, even though the Korean War was bringing new demand for his company’s products. He was only fifty-seven years old.
Jack Northrop never got over the rejection. Never. As late as 1980 he made headlines by charging that Symington had tried to force him into the merger and had canceled the B-49 out of spite when he refused. The chairman of Northrop, Richard Millar, had also been at that 1948 meeting with Symington, and he corroborated Jack Northrop’s tale. Yet these new charges proved to be no more than a rehash of the ones made by Cedric Worth in 1949, which had rested on mere rumor. Neither Northrop nor Millar had been present during the Pentagon reviews that revived the B-36 program. Indeed, far from acting spitefully toward Northrop Aircraft, Symington had favored the firm. In March 1949, after the RB-49 cancellation but before the Cedric Worth charges came into the open, Symington gave Northrop a contract to build the F-89 fighter. It remained in production until 1957.
Certainly Symington had some very large fish to fry at the time. He was the Air Force Secretary in 1948 and 1949, at the time of the Berlin blockade, with its attendant threat of war. Amid this threat, and constrained by Truman’s limited budgets, he had to prepare to attack the Soviet Union with means that were already in hand. The scope of his concern lay far beyond the B-49, beyond even the whole of the aviation industry. It was nothing less than the weighty burden of a public official who fears that if he makes a mistake, the nation may be destroyed. Against this background his peremptory treatment of Jack Northrop could well have amounted to a demand for him to get his plane into production by the quickest possible means, putting the nation’s interests above those of his company.
Northrop’s outlook could hardly have been more different. He was still an artist, still obsessed with the merits of his flying wing. In the words of Ted Coleman, “Jack firmly believed that if something is efficient and beautiful it is right, a principle that guided Northrop throughout his professional career.” For a brief moment his path had coincided with that of Symington, who had breathed life and promise into Northrop’s vision. Yet they could not travel long together, for while Northrop cherished the flying wing as a love nearly won, Symington was concerned only with its value in the face of his preparations for war.
That value, in the end, was not large. Advancing technology, which had brought the flying wing to the brink of realization, now was passing it by. Its limit, again, was speed; while it could indeed lift heavy loads and achieve long range, its thick wing created drag that limited it to little more than 500 mph. In 1949 the Air Force was already buying a jet bomber, the B-47, that could top 600. And while the B-36 was entering service in substantial numbers, it was no more than an interim craft. The future lay with jet bombers even larger than the B-47, which would leave the flying wing far behind.
Yet the flying wing would not be forgotten, for it had an important virtue that Northrop had not foreseen: its shape made it nearly invisible to radar. During later decades jet engines greatly improved their fuel economy, raising the prospect that they could power a flying-wing bomber with particularly long range. New types of electronic flight control also came to the fore, easing the problems of stability that had vexed Northrop. The day came, thirty years after the demise of the B-49, when the Air Force again turned to the flying wing.
In April 1980 Jack Northrop was old and feeble. He needed a wheelchair, and a stroke had taken away his ability to speak. Yet he could still see and hear, and his keen mind was as active as ever. So it was, in the last springtime of his life, that an old friend drove him to visit the Advanced Systems Division of Northrop Aircraft. His company had kept its independence and had grown; it now had divisions and plants all over the Los Angeles basin. And he was about to see a secret, for the facility he was visiting was the firm’s center for preliminary work on new projects.
He saw blueprints for a bomber of the future, the B-2. It would be a stealth aircraft, able to avoid detection by radar. When he saw that it would be built as a flying wing, Northrop smiled with pleasure. His concept would fly again. Once more the Air Force was moving to accept his ideas and would use them as a foundation for the nation’s military strength. And his Northrop Corporation would build these airplanes.
Jack Northrop died the following winter, just a few weeks after his old friend Donald Douglas, convinced that his vision had been vindicated.
