Clipped Wings: The Death of Jack Northrop's Flying Wing Bombers

Acquisition Review Quarterly, Fall, 2001 by Dr. Bud Baker

One of the mysteries in defense acquisition has concerned the fate of the Northrop Flying Wing bombers, canceled by the Air Force more than 50 years ago. Aviation experts have long suspected that the 1949 cancellations were motivated more by politics than by the Wings' technical shortcomings. However, public records, declassified Air Force documents, and personal interviews -- never before published -- reveals that the cancellation of the Flying Wings was a sound decision, based on budgetary, technical, and strategic realities; and the issues addressed here are as pertinent to defense acquisition today as they were 50 years ago. Like today, decision makers struggled to balance cost, schedule, and technical performance. They also had to deal with shrinking defense budgets, a declining defense industrial base, and a world situation in which the only constant was change. Nearly all the interviewees for this research -- including Secretary (and Senator) Symington, Generals LeMay, Norstad, and Quesada -- are gone now, but their recollections here serve to make clear what really happened to the predecessors of today's B-2 bomber. The lessons of the Flying Wings remain pertinent today.

More than 50 years ago, a series of remarkable aircraft took to the skies of America. These huge all-wing bombers were the product of the genius John Knudsen Northrop, and they promised to revolutionize the aviation world. But just a few short years later all of the giant bombers were gone, leaving only photos and videos to mark their passing. Ever since their demise, rumors and accusations have swirled around their memory: Were the Northrop wings victims of their own technical shortcomings? Or were they pawns in a high-stakes political power play, as Jack Northrop contended? This article will answer those questions.

For decades, doubts and rumors about the demise of the Flying Wings went unresolved. A congressional investigation in 1949 seemed to absolve the Air Force of blame, and Mr. Northrop himself testified then that he had received no political pressure from Air Force leadership concerning his Flying Wings. But all that changed in 1979, when Mr. Northrop claimed that he had in fact been improperly pressured by the Secretary of the Air Force, and that his resistance to that pressure was the true cause of the Wings' cancellation.

The research for this paper made use of declassified government documents and other historical records. Far more important, though, were the author's lengthy interviews with most of the major government decision makers, including former Secretary of the Air Force (later Senator) W. Stuart Symington, General Curtis E. LeMay, General Lauris Norstad, and other retired Air Force leaders. Two retired Air Force Flying Wing pilots, Brigadier General Robert Cardenas and Colonel Russ Schleeh, contributed their perspectives. Thomas Jones, longtime chairman of the Northrop Corporation, provided his opinions, based on his knowledge of the parties involved.

The interviews contained in this article were done nearly 20 years ago as part of the author's doctoral dissertation. These conversations have never before been published: Shortly after this research was completed, the author was assigned to the "black world" environment of what was then called the Advanced Technology Bomber (ATB). The very fact that the ATB (today the B-2 Stealth Bomber) was itself a successor to Jack Northrop's Flying Wings was then a closely guarded secret, so public acknowledgment of any connection between the ATB program and Northrop's Flying Wings remained off-limits through most of the 1980s.

The similarities between the Flying Wings of the 1940s and today's B-2 bomber go far deeper than attributes such as shared dimensions, appearance, and flight control configurations. Much of the programmatic difficulty described in these pages was repeated, 40 years afterward, with the B-2. The capacity limitations of the 1940s described here still limited Northrop's ability to produce large numbers of bomber aircraft four decades later. This and other issues caused major delays for both the Flying Wings and the modern B-2, so that both programs came to fruition in geopolitical worlds vastly different from those in which they were conceived.

The events described in this paper took place more than 50 years ago, but they resonate clearly in today's acquisition environment. Perennial issues of cost, schedule, and technical performance are of course as pertinent today as they were then. But so too are other issues: preservation of the industrial base in a time of severe defense downsizing; programmatic turbulence caused by changes in defense leadership; and the role of government in encouraging (or discouraging) business consolidation among defense contractors.

This story embodies those issues and more: accusations and counteraccusations, congressional hearings and investigations, and momentous decisions that quite literally changed the shape of American aviation.