 | |
| Industry | Aerospace |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1939 |
| Founders | Jack Northrop |
| Defunct | 1994 |
| Fate | Merged with Grumman |
| Successor | Northrop Grumman |
| Headquarters | , United States of America |
Key people | |
| Products | Aircraft |
| Subsidiaries | Radioplane Company |
Northrop Corporation was an American aircraft manufacturer from its formation in 1939 until its 1994 merger with Grumman to form Northrop Grumman. The company is known for its development of the flying wing design, most successfully the B-2 Spirit stealth bomber. [1]
Jack Northrop founded 3 companies using his name. The first was the Avion Corporation in 1928, which was absorbed in 1929 by the United Aircraft and Transport Corporation [2] as a subsidiary named "Northrop Aircraft Corporation" (and later became part of Boeing). [3] The parent company moved its operations to Kansas in 1931, and so Jack, along with Donald Douglas, established a "Northrop Corporation" located in El Segundo, California, which produced several successful designs, including the Northrop Gamma and Northrop Delta. However, labor difficulties led to the dissolution of the corporation by Douglas in 1937, and the plant became the El Segundo Division of Douglas Aircraft. [4]
Northrop still sought his own company, and so in 1939 he established the "Northrop Corporation" in nearby Hawthorne, California, a site located by co-founder Moye Stephens. The corporation ranked 100th among United States corporations in the value of World War II military production contracts. [5] It was there that the P-61 Black Widow night fighter, the B-35 and YB-49 experimental flying wing bombers, the F-89 Scorpion interceptor, the SM-62 Snark intercontinental cruise missile, and the F-5 Freedom Fighter economical jet fighter (and its derivative, the successful T-38 Talon trainer) were developed and built. [1]
The F-5 was so successful that Northrop spent much of the 1970s and 1980s attempting to duplicate its success with similar lightweight designs. Their first attempt to improve the F-5 was the N-300, which featured much more powerful engines and moved the wing to a higher position to allow for increased ordnance that the higher power allowed. The N-300 was further developed into the P-530 with even larger engines, this time featuring a small amount of "bypass" (turbofan) to improve cooling and allow the engine bay to be lighter, as well as much more wing surface. The P-530 also included radar and other systems considered necessary on modern aircraft. When the Light Weight Fighter program was announced, the P-530 was stripped of much of its equipment to become the P-600, and eventually the YF-17 Cobra, which lost the competition to the General Dynamics F-16 Fighting Falcon.
Nevertheless, the YF-17 Cobra was modified with help from McDonnell Douglas to become the McDonnell Douglas F/A-18 Hornet in order to fill a similar lightweight design competition for the US Navy. Northrop intended to sell a de-navalized version as the F-18L, but the basic F-18A continued to outsell it, leading to a long and fruitless lawsuit between the two companies. Northrop continued to build much of the F-18 fuselage and other systems after this period, but also returned to the original F-5 design with yet another new engine to produce the F-20 Tigershark as a low-cost aircraft. This garnered little interest in the market, and the project was dropped.
In 1985, Northrop bought northrop.com, the sixth .com domain created. [6]
Based on the experimentation with flying wings the company developed the B-2 Spirit stealth bomber of the 1990s. [7] [8]
In 1994, partly due to the loss of the Advanced Tactical Fighter contract to Lockheed Corporation and the removal of their proposal from consideration for the Joint Strike Fighter competition, the company bought Grumman to form Northrop Grumman.
| Model name | First flight | Number built | Type |
|---|---|---|---|
| Northrop Alpha | 1930 | 17 | Single-engine transport |
| Northrop C-19 Alpha | 1930 | 3 | Single-engine transport |
| Northrop Beta | 1931 | 2 | Single-engine sport airplane |
| Northrop Gamma | 1932 | 60 | Single-engine transport |
| Northrop Delta | 1933 | 13 | Single-engine transport, 19 additional aircraft built by Canadian Vickers |
| Northrop XFT | 1933 | 1 | Prototype naval fighter |
| Northrop YA-13 | 1933 | 1 | Prototype attack aircraft |
| Northrop A-17/Nomad | 1935 | 411 | Attack/light bomber |
| Northrop BT | 1935 | 55 | Dive bomber |
| Northrop N-1M | 1940 | 1 | Experimental flying wing |
| Northrop N-3PB | 1940 | 24 | Floatplane patrol bomber |
| Northrop P-61 Black Widow | 1942 | 706 | Night fighter |
| Northrop N-9M | 1942 | 4 | Experimental scale flying wing proof of concept for B-35 |
| Northrop XP-56 Black Bullet | 1943 | 2 | Prototype tailless fighter |
| Northrop F-15 Reporter | 1945 | 36 | Reconnaissance aircraft based on P-61 |
| Northrop XP-79 | 1945 | 1 | Prototype jet flying wing fighter |
| Northrop YB-35 | 1946 | 2 | Prototype strategic bomber |
| Northrop Pioneer | 1946 | 1 | Trimotor transport |
| Northrop YB-49 | 1947 | 6 | Prototype eight-jet-engine strategic bomber |
| Northrop F-89 Scorpion | 1948 | 1,052 | Interceptor |
| Northrop X-4 Bantam | 1948 | 2 | Experimental trans-sonic tailless aircraft |
| Northrop YC-125 Raider | 1949 | 23 | Trimotor transport |
| Northrop F-5 | 1959 | 2,246 | Lightweight fighter |
| Northrop T-38 Talon | 1959 | 1,146 | Advanced trainer |
| Northrop X-21 | 1963 | 2 | Experimental boundary layer control aircraft |
| Northrop M2-F2 | 1966 | 1 | Experimental rocket powered lifting body |
| Northrop HL-10 | 1966 | 1 | Experimental rocket lifting body |
| Northrop M2-F3 | 1970 | 1 | Experimental rocket lifting body |
| Northrop YA-9 | 1972 | 2 | Prototype attack aircraft |
| Northrop YF-17 | 1974 | 2 | Prototype fighter, led to F/A-18 |
| Northrop Tacit Blue | 1982 | 1 | Experimental stealth aircraft |
| Northrop F-20 Tigershark | 1982 | 3 | Prototype lightweight fighter derived from F-5 |
| Northrop B-2 Spirit | 1989 | 21 | Strategic stealth bomber |
| Northrop YF-23 | 1990 | 2 | Prototype stealth fighter |
The NorthropB-2 Spirit, also known as the Stealth Bomber, is an American heavy strategic bomber, featuring low observable stealth technology designed for penetrating dense anti-aircraft defenses. Designed during the Cold War, it is a flying wing design with a crew of two. The bomber is subsonic and can deploy both conventional and thermonuclear weapons, such as up to eighty 500-pound class (230 kg) Mk 82 JDAM GPS-guided bombs, or sixteen 2,400-pound (1,100 kg) B83 nuclear bombs. The B-2 is the only acknowledged aircraft that can carry large air-to-surface standoff weapons in a stealth configuration.
A day fighter is a fighter aircraft equipped only to fight during the day. More specifically, it refers to a multi-purpose aircraft that does not include equipment for fighting at night, although it is sometimes used to refer to some interceptors as well.
A flying wing is a tailless fixed-wing aircraft that has no definite fuselage, with its crew, payload, fuel, and equipment housed inside the main wing structure. A flying wing may have various small protuberances such as pods, nacelles, blisters, booms, or vertical stabilizers.
A strategic bomber is a medium- to long-range penetration bomber aircraft designed to drop large amounts of air-to-ground weaponry onto a distant target for the purposes of debilitating the enemy's capacity to wage war. Unlike tactical bombers, penetrators, fighter-bombers, and attack aircraft, which are used in air interdiction operations to attack enemy combatants and military equipment, strategic bombers are designed to fly into enemy territory to destroy strategic targets. In addition to strategic bombing, strategic bombers can be used for tactical missions. There are currently only three countries that operate strategic bombers: the United States, Russia and China.
Stealth aircraft are designed to avoid detection using a variety of technologies that reduce reflection/emission of radar, infrared, visible light, radio frequency (RF) spectrum, and audio, collectively known as stealth technology. The F-117 Nighthawk was the first operational aircraft specifically designed around stealth technology. Other examples of stealth aircraft include the B-2 Spirit, the F-22 Raptor, the F-35 Lightning II, the Chengdu J-20, and the Sukhoi Su-57.
The Northrop F-89 Scorpion was an American all-weather, twin-engined interceptor aircraft built during the 1950s, the first jet-powered aircraft designed for that role from the outset to enter service. Though its straight wings limited its performance, it was among the first United States Air Force (USAF) jet fighters equipped with guided missiles and notably the first combat aircraft armed with air-to-air nuclear weapons.
The Northrop YF-17 is a prototype lightweight fighter aircraft designed by Northrop aviation for the United States Air Force's Lightweight Fighter (LWF) technology evaluation program. The LWF was initiated because many in the fighter community believed that aircraft like the F-15 Eagle were too large and expensive for many combat roles. The YF-17 was the culmination of a long line of Northrop designs, beginning with the N-102 Fang in 1956, continuing through the F-5 family.
The Northrop/McDonnell Douglas YF-23 is an American single-seat, twin-engine stealth fighter aircraft technology demonstrator designed for the United States Air Force (USAF). The design was a finalist in the USAF's Advanced Tactical Fighter (ATF) competition, battling the Lockheed YF-22 for a production contract. Two YF-23 prototypes were built, nicknamed "Black Widow II" and "Gray Ghost".
The Northrop XB-35 and YB-35, Northrop designation N-9 or NS-9, were experimental heavy bomber aircraft developed by the Northrop Corporation for the United States Army Air Forces during and shortly after World War II. The airplane used the radical and potentially very efficient flying wing design, in which the tail section and fuselage are eliminated and all payload is carried in a thick wing. Only prototypes and pre-production aircraft were built, although interest remained strong enough to warrant further development of the design as a jet bomber, under the designation YB-49.
The Northrop YB-49 was an American prototype jet-powered heavy bomber developed by Northrop Corporation shortly after World War II for service with the United States Air Force. The YB-49 featured a flying wing design and was a turbojet-powered development of the earlier, piston-engined Northrop XB-35 and YB-35. The two YB-49s actually built were both converted YB-35 test aircraft.
The McDonnell Douglas/General Dynamics A-12 Avenger II was a proposed American attack aircraft from McDonnell Douglas and General Dynamics. It was to be an all-weather, carrier-based stealth bomber replacement for the Grumman A-6 Intruder in the United States Navy and Marine Corps. Its Avenger II name was taken from the Grumman TBF Avenger of World War II.
The Advanced Tactical Fighter (ATF) was a demonstration and validation program undertaken by the United States Air Force to develop a next-generation air superiority fighter to counter emerging worldwide threats, including Soviet Sukhoi Su-27 and Mikoyan MiG-29 fighters under development in the 1980s. Lockheed and Northrop were selected in 1986 to develop the YF-22 and the YF-23 technology demonstrator aircraft. These aircraft were evaluated in 1991 and the Lockheed YF-22 was selected and later developed into the F-22 Raptor.
John Knudsen Northrop was an American aircraft industrialist and designer who founded the Northrop Corporation in 1939.
The Lockheed/Boeing/General Dynamics YF-22 is an American single-seat, twin-engine fighter aircraft technology demonstrator designed for the United States Air Force (USAF). The design was a finalist in the USAF's Advanced Tactical Fighter competition, and two prototypes were built for the demonstration/validation phase of the competition. The YF-22 won the contest against the Northrop YF-23, and entered production as the Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor. The YF-22 has a similar aerodynamic layout and configuration as the F-22, but with differences in the position and design of the cockpit, tail fins and wings, and in internal structural layout.
Lockheed Have Blue was the code name for Lockheed's proof of concept demonstrator for a stealth bomber. Have Blue was designed by Lockheed's Skunk Works division, and tested at Groom Lake, Nevada. The Have Blue was the first fixed-wing aircraft whose external shape was defined by radar engineering rather than by aerospace engineering. The aircraft's faceted shape was designed to deflect electromagnetic waves in directions other than that of the originating radar emitter, greatly reducing its radar cross-section.
A supersonic aircraft is an aircraft capable of supersonic flight, which is an aircraft able to fly faster than the speed of sound. Supersonic aircraft were developed in the second half of the twentieth century. Supersonic aircraft have been used for research and military purposes, but only two supersonic aircraft, the Tupolev Tu-144 and the Concorde, ever entered service for civil use as airliners. Fighter jets are the most common example of supersonic aircraft.
The Lightweight Fighter (LWF) program was a United States Air Force technology evaluation program initiated in the late 1960s by a group of officers and defense analysts known as the "Fighter Mafia". It was spurred by then-Major John Boyd's 'energy-maneuverability' (E-M) theory, which indicated that excessive weight would have severely debilitating consequences on the maneuverability of an aircraft. Boyd's design called for a light-weight fighter with a high thrust-to-weight ratio, high maneuverability, and a gross weight of less than 20,000 lb (9,100 kg), half that of its counterpart, the McDonnell Douglas F-15 Eagle. It resulted in the development of the General Dynamics YF-16 and Northrop YF-17. Late in the program, in 1974, with the promise of European sales, the Air Force changed the program name to Air Combat Fighter (ACF), and committed to purchasing 650 models of the YF-16, adopted as the F-16 Fighting Falcon. The U.S. Navy adopted a modified version of the YF-17 as the McDonnell Douglas F/A-18 Hornet.
