The
Northrop Corporation was a leading United States
aircraft manufacturer from its formation in 1939 until its merger with
Grumman to form
Northrop Grumman in 1994. The company is known for its development of the
flying wing design, although only a few of these have entered service.
History
Jack Northrop founded three companies using his name. The first was the
Avion Corporation in 1927, which was absorbed in 1929 by the
United Aircraft and Transport Corporation as a subsidiary named "Northrop Aviation Corporation". 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.
Northrop still sought his own company, and so in 1939 established the "Northrop Corporation" in nearby
Hawthorne, California, a site located by co-founder
Moye Stephens. The corporation lasted until 1994. It was there that the
P-61 night fighter, the
Flying Wings (
B-35 and
YB-49), the
F-89 interceptor, the
Snark intercontinental
cruise missile and the
F-5 Freedom Fighter jet fighter (and its derivative, the successful
T-38 trainer) were developed and built.
The F-5 was so successful that Northrop spent much of the 1970s and 1980s attempting to duplicate its success with similar light-weight 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 must-haves 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
F-16 Fighting Falcon.
Nevertheless the YF-17 Cobra was modified with help from
McDonnell Douglas to become the
F/A-18 Hornet in order to fill a similar light-weight 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 1994, partly due to the loss of the
Advanced Tactical Fighter contract to
Lockheed Martin and the removal of their proposal from consideration for the
Joint Strike Fighter competition, the company bought
Grumman to form
Northrop Grumman.
Flying wings
The company was notable during the 1940s for experimentation with
flying wings; although a number of designs were flight-tested, only the
B-2 stealth bomber of the 1980s ever made it to production and deployment.
See also
Category:Defunct aircraft manufacturers of the United StatesCategory:Companies established in 1927Category:Articles lacking sources (Erik9bot)ar:نورثروبcs:Northropda:Northrop Corporationde:Northrop Corporationes:Northrop Corporationfa:نورثروپfr:Northrop Corporationhr:Northrop Corporationit:Northrop Corporationhe:נורת'רופnl:Northropja:ノースロップno:Northrop Corporationru:Northrop Corporationsl:Northropsv:Northrop Corporationzh:諾斯洛普公司
