A draughtsman with one idea

Jack Northrop never went to university. He started in 1916 as a draughtsman for the Loughead brothers in Santa Barbara, helped Douglas design the World Cruisers that first flew round the globe, and then drew the Lockheed Vega, the fast wooden monoplane that Amelia Earhart and Wiley Post made famous. All the while one idea nagged at him: get rid of the fuselage and the tail, and let the whole aircraft be a wing.

Third time lucky in Hawthorne

It took him three companies to find a home for it. Avion, founded in 1929, was sold to United Aircraft and Transport within a year. A second Northrop Corporation, set up in El Segundo in 1932 with Donald Douglas’s backing, built the Gamma and Delta and the A-17 attack bomber, then slid into Douglas’s hands. So in 1939 he started again, on a patch of land in Hawthorne that co-founder Moye Stephens, a stunt and airline pilot, had picked out. This time the company was his.

The wings they cut up

War made it. The first contract was 24 N-3PB floatplanes for exiled Norwegian airmen, and then came the P-61 Black Widow, the first American aircraft designed from the outset as a radar night fighter; 706 were built. Meanwhile the flying wings grew from the little N-1M of 1940 to the giant piston XB-35 and the eight-jet YB-49. In June 1948 the second YB-49 broke up over the Mojave, killing Captain Glen Edwards, whose name the test base still carries. The production order was cancelled and by the early 1950s the surviving wings had been scrapped.

The fighter nobody ordered

Northrop went into a long, bitter retirement in 1952. Three decades later he claimed in a television interview that the Air Force had killed the wing because he refused to merge with Consolidated Vultee; Air Force Secretary Stuart Symington called the charge preposterous, and later historians who studied the papers sided with the budget, not the conspiracy. Either way, the company had to find another way to make money, and it did it with small jets.

Tom Jones and the dark years

In the mid-1950s Northrop designed a light, cheap, twin-engine supersonic fighter that no American service had asked for. The Air Force bought the trainer version instead: the T-38 Talon, the world’s first supersonic trainer, 1,187 of them by 1972, and still the jet in which American fighter pilots learn their trade. The fighter became the F-5, sold to allies through US aid programmes; together the two shared a production line in Hawthorne that turned out more than 3,800 aircraft.

Ten months to see the B-2

The man who sold them was Thomas V. Jones, president from 1959 and chairman from 1963. His era was spectacular and murky. In 1974 he pleaded guilty over illegal corporate donations to Nixon’s re-election committee, and the company later admitted some $30 million in payments to officials abroad. The private-venture F-20 Tigershark, flown in 1982, found no buyers; two of the three prototypes crashed and the programme was dropped in 1986. In February 1990 Northrop pleaded guilty to 34 counts of falsifying test data on cruise missile and Harrier parts.

And yet the old idea won. In 1981 Northrop was picked to build a stealth bomber shaped exactly like Jack’s wing, with the same 172-foot span as the YB-49. Shortly before he died in February 1981, the frail founder was cleared to hold a model of it; he reportedly wrote that he now knew why God had kept him alive for 25 years. The B-2 flew in 1989, only 21 were built, and in 1994 Northrop paid $2.17 billion for Grumman and became Northrop Grumman.

Factories

• Hawthorne plant · Hawthorne, California — Headquarters and main works from 1939; built the P-61, F-89, Snark, F-5 and T-38
• Air Force Plant 42 · Palmdale, California — B-2 final assembly; bomber rolled out here 22 November 1988
• Precision Products Division · Norwood, Massachusetts — Site of the falsified test data in the 1990 guilty plea

People

• Jack Northrop · founder, designer (1895–1981) — Led the company 1939–1952; designed the Vega at Lockheed before going it alone
• Moye Stephens · co-founder, pilot — Chose the Hawthorne site
• Thomas V. Jones · president 1959, chairman 1963, retired 1990 — Drove the F-5 and B-2; pleaded guilty over Nixon campaign donations in 1974
• Kent Kresa · chief executive from January 1990 — Led the Grumman takeover
• Glen Edwards · USAF test pilot — Killed in the YB-49 crash of 5 June 1948; Edwards AFB named after him

Records and firsts

• P-61 Black Widow: first US aircraft designed as a night fighter
• F-89 Scorpion: first combat aircraft armed with air-to-air nuclear weapons
• T-38 Talon: world’s first supersonic trainer and the most produced
• N-156F prototype went supersonic on its first flight, 30 July 1959
• northrop.com, registered in 1985, was the sixth .com domain ever created