Restoration Team Takes Odd Warbird Under Its Wing

Ed, they said with tolerance, it just can’t be done. . . .

Not in the West of the ‘50s that is trying to forget World War II. Not when government support and donors’ monies are going to air museums back east, to the Smithsonian Institution and the Air Force Museum at Wright-Patterson AFB.

But Ed Maloney opened his Planes of Fame museum anyway--now a healthy cluster of hangars and compounds at Chino Airport and a display of 60 war birds from a 1916 French biplane to Korean-era jets.

Ed, they repeated in the ‘70s, that plane simply will not get off the ground. . . .

Not a Japanese Zero that hasn’t flown for three decades. Not when it is all bent bits and broken pieces and the only plans disappeared with World War II.

But Maloney did rebuild his Guadalcanal green fighter--and in 1978, at the invitation of the Japanese government, he took the Zero to Japan for a commemorative flight over Tokyo.

Ed, they’re now saying, you certainly won’t pull this one off. . . .

Not the restoration of a Flying Wing of the ‘40s, a concept of tailless flight that even pioneer designer-builder Jack Northrop, the Air Force and its best test pilots were unable to tame. Heavens, the government chopped up the program’s leftovers in 1949 to make sure this airplane stayed dead.

But true to form and his deaf ears, Maloney is resurrecting yet another relic, a 1942 Northrop N-9 Flying Wing.

Says Maloney, 57, an inveterate scavenger of military boneyards and indefatigable curator of war bird history: “If you put something aside until you’re ready, if your goal never changes, if you keep working away at something a little at a time, nothing is impossible.”

This latest impossibility is the sole survivor of four scaled-down prototypes that evolved into the giant and subsequently aborted B-35 and B-49 Northrop Flying Wing bombers.

Panel by rib, aileron by longeron, this wood and aluminum boomerang is currently resuming its shape at a warehouse “somewhere in Los Angeles.” The exact location is well guarded. For when one is bringing a dodo back from extinction, Maloney explained, there’s no time for non-productive chatter with the curious.

Each weekend, 12 to two dozen (depending on individual availability set largely by the STF--Spousal Tolerance Factor) volunteers, including former Northrop engineers who worked on the airplane 44 years ago, show for work. They’ve been at it every Saturday, from first coffee to Miller Time, for five years. They’ll likely work for another two years before the N-9 flies again.

Project manager is Ron Hackworth, 47, of Long Beach and McDonnell-Douglas. He has restored antique airplanes before and happily concedes that the N-9 project is “the biggest mistake of my life . . . because I don’t think anyone fully realized the complexities of this airplane.

“It’s always harder to restore than build because you are restoring someone else’s development.”

Ward Parker, ex-Northrop, is in charge of rebuilding the N-9’s complex hydraulic system. His wife, Beryl, assists. So does a son, Keith, his wife Gail, and their children Brian and Robin.

Worked on the Original

Bion (“that stands for Bionic”) Provost, 71, another Northrop man who worked on the original, is a journeyman engineer capable of working everything from the airplane’s resin-impregnated woods to its all-hydraulic, irreversible controls. At 71, this phoenix has become the largest purpose in his life.

“I think this is one of the greatest things I could ever be involved in,” he said. Provost is re-creating a wing rib using old, rotted shards as a form. “I look forward to getting up every Saturday and coming down here.”

John Benjamin, non-pilot, non-engineer, but an aerospace executive recruiter adept at finding anyone, is in charge of procurement, purchasing, scavenging and light larceny. It has cost him, he said, time, money, relationships and a social life.

“My contribution is getting all the parts,” Benjamin said. “Fortunately, 99% of the parts we have obtained we’ve got free, and for five years my apartment has looked rather like a parts bin.”

“There probably are 200 vendors (subcontractors) still out there who worked on the N-9 and we’re contacting them whenever and wherever needed. Goodyear has come up with wheels and tires. Bendix and Crane’s Hydro-Aire Division at Burbank are helping with the hydraulics. The engines were eight-cylinders built by Franklin who are out of business but Precision Aero at Long Beach is rebuilding them . . . so, basically, the airplane will be zero time (brand new).”

On Its Own Three Legs

The airplane is standing on its own three legs and new tires. Its center section, including welded, tubular steel frame, engine drive shafts and propellers have been refurbished to pristine. Outer wing spars and panels are forming. The work, however, hasn’t always looked this good.

“When we got this (N-9) it was just so much rusted junk,” Benjamin said. “Plus it was made largely from wood which had rotted out. The first time I looked at it I said: ‘I don’t know.’ ” So, apparently, did others.

“We had people who showed up once or twice and never came back. Others had what we called ‘wing burnout’ where they stayed away for a couple of months before showing up again. But about six months ago we finally reached that point where we realized that all of this junk was finally starting to look like an airplane.”

To Maloney, a commercial restorer of airplanes in addition to those he rebuilds for his museum and its annual air show, returning the N-9 to flight status may represent his greatest satisfaction.

“All of aviation is interesting, but this (Flying Wing) has always been a special category airplane for me,” he explained. “If you look at a conventional airplane, 60% of its (speed reducing) drag is fuselage. If you can eliminate the fuselage, put passengers in the wing, you can obviously go further, faster and much more economically.

“Jack Northrop (1895-1981) saw the Flying Wing always as a military plane able to carry a great load a tremendous distance. I see it as a unique design that would have put us (American aviation) 20 years ahead of the world.”

And thereby hangs a greater fascination of an already prodigious project.

Forgotten Controversy

For as word of the N-9’s $1.6-million restoration has spread, as fund-raising dinners have presented Flying Wing pilots and pioneers, as the inevitable bumper sticker campaign has begun, renewed interest in the Flying Wing has stirred a forgotten controversy and a new realization.

The new: Max Stanley of Brentwood is a retired Northrop test pilot who flew the piston-engined B-35 and jet-powered B-49 Flying Wings. He remembers several 1947 missions from Muroc Army Field (now Edwards AFB) that crossed the California coast in full electronic view of military radar facilities at Half Moon Bay near San Francisco.

“On the three or four times we tried it, they couldn’t pick us up at all,” Stanley said. “Even when they knew we were coming in.”

The test pilots saw no great mystery to their invisibility. Head on or broadside, the Flying Wing was flat, an aluminum sliver that provided a small Radar Cross Section (RCS) and an imperceptible signature on an operator’s screen.

“There were no vertical surfaces, no engines hanging down, no cowlings to reflect radar signals,” Stanley continued. “But apparently it (invisibility) didn’t impress anyone at the time.”

Today, 40 years later, it is impressing someone.

The characteristic is called Stealth, a resistance to radar interception created by the design of an aircraft (a flat, rounded profile minimizing its RCS) and full use of exotic materials (from carbon-fiber components to signal-absorbing paint) in its construction.

A Stealth bomber is currently being built in super secrecy in Southern California. The builder is Northrop Corp. of Hawthorne and Palmdale, inventors of the Flying Wing. And last year, Sen. Barry Goldwater, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he has seen a full-scale model of the Northrop warplane and added: “It does look like a Flying Wing.”

Then there’s the old controversy: About a dozen Northrop Flying Wings of all types, from the two-place N-9s used for pilot training to the 15-man, eight-jet B-49 bomber with a wing span wider than a 747, were built between 1942 and 1949.

A Tragic Irony

The radical airplanes underwent military testing at what would become Edwards (named, by tragic irony, after Capt. Glenn Edwards who was killed in the crash of a Flying Wing) to determine their suitability as Strategic Air Command’s main bomber.

They were considered, with certain reservations, an adequate airplane. Barely.

Retired Brig. Gen. Robert Cardenas of San Diego, a test pilot and an Air Force major 40 years ago, was in charge of evaluating the Northrop Flying Wing.

Cardenas said that after 40 hours of test flying the B-49, his official report stated: “With regard to the airplane as a bombing platform, there was marginal stability about the vertical axis (yaw) and the lateral axis (pitch) . . . also that when you turned the airplane, clamshell rudders on the wing tips opened up and the airplane would pitch in a turn.” He recommended “a very thorough R&D; (Research and Development) program to develop a stability augmentation system.

“But 40 years ago there was no stability augmentation device. The problem with that (Flying Wing) airplane was that it was 30 years ahead of its time.”

That wasn’t its only problem.

When retrofitted with jet engines, the Flying Wing’s fuel consumption increased mightily while its range decreased savagely from 10,000 miles to an unacceptable 3,000 miles. Or less. Without bombs.

Writing last year in the Canadian Aeronautics and Space Journal, Joseph Foa, former head of the propulsion branch of the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory, said his 1947 analyses showed the Flying Wing to be the worst possible aerodynamic configuration for long-range, jet-propelled bombers.

That was his report to the Air Force.

Contract Canceled

In 1949, Northrop’s contract to build the B-49 was canceled. The Consolidated Vultee (now Convair) B-36 became Strategic Air Command’s long-range bomber.

Six years ago, almost in a death bed revelation, Northrop claimed that his Flying Wing contract was canceled because he refused an order to merge his small company with established Convair. Northrop alleged that then Air Force Secretary Stuart Symington issued the order and the cancellation.

Symington, now 86, who went on to become a Democratic senator from Missouri, has denied he killed the contract. Other researchers have cast doubts on the accuracy of Northrop’s recall.

There have been rumors that Washington politicians benefitted financially from cancellation of the Flying Wing and adoption of the B-36. These have never been substantiated.

Whatever the reasons, the B-49 was reduced to a research vehicle, then aviation history. Bombers under construction were cut up at the Northrop plant. No one seems to know what happened to all the two-place, twin-engined N-9s used at Edwards to train pilots for the larger Flying Wings . . . but one was relegated to the base boneyard where Maloney found it and bought it (“I never discuss prices”) in the mid-’50s.

To Maloney, the history of the Flying Wing continues to smack of skulduggery.

To others, such as Benjamin, the mystery shares the same multiple shadows and guesswork as conspiracy theories surrounding the disappearance of Amelia Earhart.

“Our concern is to rebuild this airplane and get it back up in the air as a flying memorial to Jack Northrop,” Benjamin said.

Luftwaffe’s First Combat Jet

Then there will be shop room for another of Maloney’s ideals. Right now it is sitting dormant and dented in the back of a hangar at Chino. But at one time, this leopard-mottled fighter came close to returning command of European skies to Nazi Germany. It is a Messerschmitt 262, the Luftwaffe’s first combat jet.

“In 1944, this airplane was 200 miles per hour faster than our bombers and 100 miles per hour faster than our best fighter,” Maloney said. “There are American jet engines that we could use to replace the original Jumo engines, the nacelles are big enough, structurally the airplane is in much better shape than the N-9 was. . . . “

Naturally, he said, there are people telling him that it can’t be done.