Military Jet Bombers, Jet Model Airplanes.

Dear Jeff, I am writing you a quick note about the Northrop YB-49 flying wing bomber per your request on the web site.  I worked for the Northrop corporation as a preliminary design engineer during the development of the current B-2 Spirit in 1982, and had access to the company records and flight data of the original flying wing bomber, which I absorbed with fascination.

The flying qualities of the original B-49 were better than all of it's contemporaries, it flew stable and was very maneuverable compared to it's competitors, it held both payload, range and point to point speed records at the time, and it was also recognized at having a very low radar signature (radar was a relatively new technology at the time, and considered a major future threat).

The persistent rumors of poor flying qualities and stability problems are out right lies and speculations by so-called "experts".  They stem from a tragic accident that had nothing to do with the flight qualities.  The flight crew during had exceeded it's design load factor during flight test of the flying proto-type .  They were doing high g "pull-ups" from shallow dives and exceeded the flight envelope as outlined in the flight test plan.  No one knows for sure why, but perhaps control felt good to the flight crew and did not realize the danger they were in pushing the proto-types limits, or perhaps the clean design caused them to exceed the design speed faster than expected.  In any case they overloaded the airframe and sheared off the outer wing panels at high g.  The investigation report stated these outer wing panels were failed upwards.  On a swept wing design this is the equivalent of losing the horizontal tail on a conventional design.  And it tumbled end over end to Murdoc dry lake below with the loss of everyone on board (the same way a conventional aircraft would without a horizontal tail).  The pilot name was Edwards, and the air force base bears his name.

Despite this loss, the newly formed air force was so impressed with the design after the then required fly-off of all the competing designs, they placed large orders to replace all of their old Army Airfare bombers.  There was a crooked senator who was chairman of the equivalent to today's Armed forces Appropriations Committee who was offered some sort of stock option if the contract went to Consolidated Vultee (later to become Convair).  After the contract was granted to Northrop  after the production had began, and after qualifying of the first production examples had began, this senator had called Jack Northrop personally and told him that the government did not want to support a lot of smaller companies in the post war period and he would have to merge with Consolidated Vultee to keep the contract.  He found out that it was not a merger, but rather a take over of his company that he had started some years before the war.  He called the senator back and said no thanks, a week later the contract was illegally canceled and all the production aircraft and tooling ordered scraped.  And one of the worst bombers the US has ever bought, the Consolidated Vultiee B-36 became our front line bomber.  Several years later this senator was investigated and Jack Northrop had perjured himself on the stand because he was afraid of his company being black listed.  Despite that the senator went to jail for corruption.

I have more details, dates, names, etc. available somewhere in my files at home.  If you want to know more I will be happy to dig them up for you.  This was all detailed at about the time of Jack Northrop's death in 1979 (I think) in the Los Angeles Times newspaper.  I may have even kept the article somewhere, and I know I have more information in some of my personal files.

Many people who are familiar with the advantages of the all wing design for long range heavy lifters (as in freight or bomber aircraft) think if it was not for this corruption, many air liners today would have been all wing designs.  While at Northrop I had run across drawings and a performance report of using the B-49 design as the basis for a passenger airliner.  The rows of seats ran span wise within the wing, the windows were all in the wing leading edge, giving all the passengers a pilots eye view of the flight

Some of the details I have outlined above may not be quite correct since I wrote this from memory, but I will be happy to go find what I have on this shameful event in us the flying wing history.  It is good see someone is still offering a model of the history making, even if ahead of it's time, YB-49 bomber.  The father of our current front line B-2 bomber.  I also have a number of personal experiences to relate about how and why the B-2 bomber came about, if you are interested.