Northrop Corporation

They've given us a pair of 48 scale releases, the wonderfully unusual TBD-1A Devastator floatplane, followed by something considerably more familiar, the Messerschmitt Bf 109 E4.

Like Ramiro, are releasing a 48 scale Northrop M2 F3.

They've improved the detailing and the geometry compared to the 72nd scale, and this is currently in the mould making stage.

And we'll finish the aviation this month with another of the show sponsors inside the armour where we've got two new detail sets.

It looked like exactly what it was, a working airplane, built for one job in the worst possible conditions.

The design grew out of the Northrop BT-1 in the mid-1930s before Douglas refined it into the SBD.

By December 7, 1941, the Dauntless was already the primary carrier-based dive bomber in the Navy.

Powered by a Wright Cyclone radial engine developing around 1,200 horsepower, it could reach roughly 255 miles per hour in level flight, which sounds adequate until you remember that the Mitsubishi Zero could run it down with energy to spare.

the sound of a pair of Monasco inlines trailing behind it like a whisper.

That is the Northrop N9M flying wing.

There is exactly one left on this earth, and the story of how it got there and what it means is one of the most remarkable chapters in all of aviation history.

I'm TailDragger, and this is The Hangar on Radio Hangar.

He sketched it on whatever paper was nearby.

He ran the numbers.

By the late 1930s, he had his own company, Northrop Corporation, and enough backing to actually build one, the N1M.

They called it the Northrop Jeep.

Well, I was actually born in Saudi Arabia.

My dad used to work with an American company called Northrop and Grumman, you know.

And so I was born in Saudi Arabia.

I was only four when I moved to Pakistan.

the aircraft that connects basic flight training to sitting in a real combat cockpit with a weapon system that can actually hurt someone.

Turkey currently operates the Northrop T-38 Talon for advanced jet training.

The T-38 has been doing that job since the early 1960s.

It is a remarkable airplane with a long and distinguished service record, but it is also an airplane that was designed when John Glenn had just orbited the Earth.

It looks like the future decided to show up in 1942 and nobody thought to send word ahead.

That airplane is the Northrop N9M Flying Wing, and I want to tell you its story today because it is one of the most bittersweet and ultimately triumphant tales in American aviation history.

I'm Tail Dragger.

This is The Hanger on Radio Hanger.

A bomber using that design could theoretically fly from bases in the American heartland to targets deep in Europe or Japan and return without landing, without needing forward bases in England, without a chain of supply depots stretching across the Atlantic.

Take off from Nebraska, do the job, come home.

That was the vision Jack Northrop carried through the 1930s and into the war years.

By 1942, he had convinced the Army Air Forces it was worth pursuing seriously.

The shape had a longer history.

Northrop built large flying wing prototypes during the Second World War.

Germany's Horten brothers tested swept wings.

Delta designs later appeared on Cold War jets.

Those aircraft flew through normal aerodynamics.

Their outlines still looked unfamiliar beside a bomber with a tube-shaped body and a tail.

Northrop kept pursuing the flying wing after the war.

Aviation magazines printed photographs of broad wings with no usual fuselage.

Neither sounds like a war winner, but that is exactly what it was.

The SBD came out of the mid-1930s, developed from an earlier Northrop design called the BT-1.

When Douglas acquired the El Segundo division that built it, their engineers took what worked and fixed what did not.

By 1940, the Dauntless was in production and heading to the Navy and Marine Corps.

The f- the front, the back, the everything is McDonnell Douglas.

F-18s and others have, like, two names, Northrop and McDonnell Douglas, or they're two, you know, companies joined together.

But I grew up with the F-15, and I, uh, there was an opportunity, I can't tell you the year, Kelly, unless I pull out some old papers.

That's okay.