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

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

Furthermore, newer and better aircraft were on the way, including Boeing's B47 and others. Members of the Air Staff doubted that the YB-49 was worth saving:

If procurement was initiated for the B-49, it would not reach tactical units before other bombers of the same class having equal performance and with provisions for carrying the A-bomb. Therefore it is felt that unless the B-49 can be modified to carry the atom bomb, further procurement is unwarranted. (Powers, 1946)

Air Materiel Command was well aware of the shortcomings:

Although the YB-49 has obvious limitations, primarily due to the fact that it is a modification, it is considered that the airplane will be extremely valuable as a research project. (Hodge & Feicht, 1946)

The first of the two YB-49s made its maiden flight on October 21, 1947 ("Jet wing flies," 1947). The subsequent flight test program was vastly more successful than the XB-35's, but it revealed a crucial problem: The aircraft's instability in pitch and yaw made it impossible for it to bomb accurately. A stability augmentation system eliminated some of the yaw problems, but none of the pitch problems. The result was that bomb runs by experienced bombardiers took four times as long as in the B-29, and average miss distances of 3,000 feet were twice those of other bombers (Williams, 1948).

But the PBS documentary quoted Northrop test pilot Max Stanley as saying that the Air Force had declared the YB-49 "an acceptable bombing platform." Not so, according to Colonel Russ Schleeh, the Air Force test pilot who flew the bombing tests:

I flew the airplane eleven times, evaluating the aircraft as a bombing platform both with and without the autopilot. The bombing results were very poor....I never said it was acceptable, and none of us who flew bombers and knew bombing ever said it was an acceptable bombing platform. (R. E. Schleeh, personal communication, July 20, 1983; R. E. Schleeh, personal communication, to E. T. Wooldridge, National Air and Space Museum, November 24, 1982.)

Still the flight test program continued, until June 5, 1948. The second YB-49 had flown only about 66 total hours when Major Daniel Forbes, Captain Glen Edwards, and crew took off to perform a series of stall tests. A memo found in the records of the subsequent investigation indicated that at least one of the test pilots had concerns about the stall performance of the YB-49: "It is known

that the pilot was reluctant to attempt the higher power stalls" (Collins, no date). (3)

Evidently the concern was well-founded: the aircraft disintegrated that morning, high over the Mojave Desert, and all five crew members died.

Surprisingly, the crash did not kill the YB-49 program. The surviving YB-49 was grounded for a time, but then resumed flying. On March 15, 1950, it was destroyed in a high-speed taxi test (History, 1950, p. 103). The pilot that day, then Major Russ Schleeh, had been the first on the scene of the Forbes/Edwards crash in 1948. He was luckier than they were: Badly injured in his own crash, he survived and became an important source for this article.