Flying wings

Flight Journal, Oct 2003 by Tucker, Charles, Quinn, J J

I watched the G-meter carefully during the pullout to make sure I didn't overstress the airplane. I did pull 2 1/2G but recovered from the resulting dive at about 7,000 feet; the airplane wasn't damaged, although, as I recall, the indicated airspeed considerably exceeded 300mph. Luckily, no secondary stall developed on our recovery from the first stall, and I immediately felt a great relief at having survived that one!

That was it for the day, so I cleaned up the airplane and started home. I remember one of the engineers calling on the radio and asking whether I planned another spin. I told him that was it! 1 asked Frank what he thought of the spin and, to my amazement, he wasn't aware that we had spun at all! This was the end of the stall tests, as I didn't think it healthy to spin such a heavy airplane.

I recently talked to Sal Xifo, a former Northrop employee who watched the incident through a theodolite; he said he had been amazed at the speed of the aircraft's spin. I have also learned that, on the ground, someone captured the entire episode on film. The film has not yet surfaced, but I do have prints of several frames from it.

I think the Forbes/Edwards crash was caused by overstressing the airplane during a spin recovery. They were too low and probably had to react much more violently to try to recover because they had insufficient remaining altitude. If I hadn't added 10,000 feet to our starting altitude, I am not sure that I could have recovered, either.

I flew the airplane for about a year after that and amassed about 100 hours in it. During this time, Northrop added a stability-augmentation system that pretty much solved the directional damping problem. This made the airplane completely stable in all flight regimes.

The Air Force rejected the YB-49 for several reasons: the bomb bay was not large enough to contain the nuclear bombs then being built (this could have been remedied); the "top brass" thought there was something inherently wrong with an airplane that required a stability-augmentation system, even though the system worked perfectly. That was the feeling at that time. The engines were sadly lacking in power and not at all fuel-efficient; but larger, more fuel-efficient engines were already being built and would have been easy to install. The airplane also needed a much more functional copilot station. Buried in the leading edge of the wing and with few available controls, the original station was practically worthless. Making all these modifications would have resulted in the YB-49's being a combat-ready airplane.

Politics also played a large part in the YB 49's eventual demise. It was just too radical for its time, and some people, both in and out of government, had their own agendas to push. The validity of the flying-wing concept was proved by the Northrop B-2, which is now a mainstay of the U.S. Air Force bomber force. The B-2 is supposed to be transparent to radar (stealth technology) but during specific trials on at least one occasion, the YB-49 could not be detected on radar, either.