Jack Northrop (John Knudsen Northrop), the aviation pioneer and American industrialist 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]
Northrop Corporation wordmark from 1960
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 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.
Aircraft:
Northrop Alpha Single-engine transport
Northrop C-19 Alpha Single-engine transport
Northrop Beta Single-engine sport airplane
Northrop Gamma Single-engine transport
Northrop Delta Single-engine transport, 19 additional aircraft built by Canadian Vickers
Northrop XFT Prototype naval fighter
Northrop YA-13 Prototype attack aircraft
Northrop A-17/Nomad Attack/light bomber
Northrop BT Dive bomber
Northrop N-1M Experimental flying wing
Northrop N-3PB Floatplane patrol bomber
Northrop P-61 Black Widow Night fighter
Northrop N-9M Experimental scale flying wing proof of concept for B-35
Northrop XP-56 Black Bullet Prototype tailless fighter
Northrop F-15 Reporter Reconnaissance aircraft based on P-61
Northrop XP-79 Prototype jet flying wing fighter
Northrop YB-35 Prototype strategic bomber
Northrop Pioneer Trimotor transport
Northrop YB-49 Prototype eight-jet-engine strategic bomber
Northrop F-89 Scorpion Interceptor
Northrop X-4 Bantam Experimental trans-sonic tailless aircraft
Northrop YC-125 Raider Trimotor transport
Northrop F-5 Lightweight fighter
Northrop T-38 Talon Advanced trainer
Northrop X-21 Experimental boundary layer control aircraft
Northrop M2-F2 Experimental rocket powered lifting body
Northrop HL-10 Experimental rocket lifting body
Northrop M2-F3 Experimental rocket lifting body
Northrop YA-9 Prototype attack aircraft
Northrop YF-17 Prototype fighter, led to F/A-18
Northrop Tacit Blue Experimental stealth aircraft
Northrop F-20 Tigershark Prototype lightweight fighter derived from F-5
Northrop B-2 Spirit Strategic stealth bomber
Northrop YF-23 Prototype stealth fighter
Low Res Footage courtesy of the San Diego Air and Space Museum Archives
#northrop #aircraft #pioneer
Негізгі бет Ғылым және технология Northrop | Aviation Pioneer And American Industrialist | Upscaled Original Documentary
Пікірлер: 30