National Defense: Flying Manta

John Knudsen Northrop, 45, has designed such crack planes as the Lockheed Vega, the Army’s A17, but it became evident last week that a big part of his heart and head was really in something very different. For, like most U.S. aircraft manufacturers, Northrop is an incurable visionary.

His dream ship is an entirely new type of airplane: a tailless, two-engined flying wing. The idea itself is not new. Long have designers known that the tail of an airplane, necessary as it always has been for rudders, elevators, leverage, is a drag on a plane’s speed. So Jack Northrop started on a new design 18 years ago.

The great thing about the Northrop flying wing is that it now flies. It flies so well, in fact, that the Army Air Forces took it over, kept it so dark that little information about it leaked out until last week. By then exhaustive tests were over, and Jack Northrop was sure he had something.

Crouched on California’s Muroc Dry Lake in May 1940 for its first flight, the flying wing, like most airplanes on the ground, looked terrible. Tailless as a Manx cat, it squatted on a three-wheeled undercarriage. Its wing tips (span 38 feet) drooped forlornly. Two pusher propellers poked out of its rump like something an insane designer had tacked on as an afterthought. From its blunt beak thrust a long rod carrying the head of its airspeed indicator. It looked like a ruptured, weather-racked duck, too fatigued to tuck in its wings.

Vance Breese, famed, ruddy test pilot, took it for its first ride. Off the ground he held the ship down, stuck close to earth to make the crash easy on himself if it came. It didn’t. Grinned Jack Northrop, after he had landed: “It looks like we have a plane with a 20-foot ceiling.”

Later Vance Breese really took the ship upstairs, and for the first time Designer Northrop saw his ugly duckling truly in her element. With her wheels tucked up, her humming propellers invisible, she looked like nothing more than an airborne Manta, slack-chinned, glowering through the orifices where her engines take their cooling air. Test Pilot Breese reported that she flew like any other good airplane.

She made more than 200 flights, between times was crated and carted back to Northrop’s research plant at Hawthorne, Calif, for changes. By the time the Air Forces had taken charge, Northrop Aircraft Inc.’s plant (now turning out Vultee dive-bombers under license for the British and the Army) was whistling with rumors that the little yellow creature on Muroc Dry Lake was forerunner of a line of bigger, more powerful flying wings for the armed forces.

By Jack Northrop’s account, all her virtues are usable in a bigger design. Biggest of all virtues is that the flying wing, shedding her tail, has some 40% less wind resistance than a normal design. Her pilot and engine are buried in her thick wing. Except for her propeller-shaft housings, every square inch of her body goes into lift. Thanks to this economy, the Northrop’s design can get the same speed with half the horsepower of conventional planes, or with the same horsepower can turn out 25-30% more speed. It is also lighter, less complicated than ordinary planes.