Beauty, Stealth Ability : Flying Wing Boomerangs Into Favor

It has titillated fliers and designers and eccentrics for half a century--an airplane fully contained within a sleek boomerang-shaped wing, an aesthetic tour de force, a flying wing.

Once it had a promising future on both sides of the Atlantic and then it faded away, the victim of aerial instability and lost government contracts. In America, it survived only among the artifacts of the Smithsonian Institution’s Air and Space Museum, one tiny flying wing rescued from rust and dry rot by 11,000 tedious hours of work by experts.

But now there is promise of a renaissance.

Snowmobile Engine

In Nampa, Ida., one Gilbert Davis, haunted by flying wing pictures he had seen as a small boy, built a 950-pound plane with a wingspan of 35 feet. He outfitted it with a snowmobile engine and, though he had previously piloted nothing hotter than a Piper Arrow, he flew the wing successfully and repeatedly.

About a year ago, though, he took off overloaded, bound for an air show in Oshkosh, Wis., and wound up floating in the Snake River, the snowmobile engine still putt-putting like a motorboat. Davis came out of it with “nothing worse than a bruised ego.”

Now the wing is being put back into flying condition and the pilot-designer is pressing onward with plans to market a Davis flying wing kit for $16,500, plus change. (Engine not included.)

In Chino, not far from Ontario airport, Ed Maloney, with a platoon of volunteers, including some who worked on flying wing bombers in the 1940s, is restoring a flying wing prototype to operating condition.

Built to Prove Concept

It is one of four 60-foot-wingspan models that aviation pioneer John K. Northrop built to prove the concept he had tinkered with since the 1920s. Maloney, the founder and president of the Planes of Fame aircraft museum at Chino, expects to see it in the air again in about two years.

“The flying wing never really died,” said E. T. Wooldridge, an assistant director of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum and author of a flying wing history, who lectures around the country on the trials and tribulations of the extraordinary design. “But now there is really a revival,” he said.

The revival that brings hundreds of flying wing buffs out to hear Wooldridge’s talks was fired anew two months ago when it was disclosed that the United States’ new stealth bomber, being developed by Northrop Corp., is a flying wing.

Flying wing buffs took the news as a long-overdue vindication of John Northrop, who abruptly retired from his company in 1952 after his huge flying wing bomber was rejected by the Army Air Force in favor of the B-36.

When Northrop designed his famous XB-35 flying wing, the United States was looking for a new plane that could carry the 10,000-pound atomic bomb 10,000 miles. Forty years after the XB-35 made its first flight, the Air Force is turning to the flying wing because of its range but, more than that, because its strange shape helps it to go undetected by enemy radar.

‘Nothing But a Knife Edge’

“We knew something about radar then, although it was still new,” said William R. Sears, the aerodynamicist who shared some of Northrop’s patents on the design. “Jack was very much aware of the visible cross section of the wing, that, from the front or the back, it was nothing but a knife edge in the sky. So he must have known something about stealth principles.”

What the design also did was to make it possible to achieve great range without enormously increasing a plane’s size. Without a tail structure or a fuselage, and without engines mounted on wings, drag was dramatically reduced. Bombers, cargo planes or passenger planes could be dramatically more efficient. Planes with vast range and payload capacity could be smaller and cheaper.

Stability Problems Found

The Air Force opted for the B-36 that was favored by Gen. Curtis LeMay on grounds that the XB-35, and the jet-powered YB-49 flying wing bomber, which quickly followed, had stability problems.

Northrop produced 15 flying wing bomber airframes, but only six of them flew and two were lost in accidents.

Although it is conceded that the XB-35, pushed by eight four-bladed propellers, had serious problems in its flight test program, the YB-49 is remembered as a classic, a plane that dwarfed World War II Flying Fortress bombers but was so maneuverable it could turn inside fighter planes.

Northrop was delighted with it because it confirmed his belief that a good airplane was also aesthetically pleasing. “To him, the new version looked the way an airplane should,” Sears said, “not even propellers to mar its beauty.”

To maintain stability, the jet version required small vertical fins on the trailing edge of the wings, a development that Northrop found a blight on an otherwise perfectly clean design.

When the Pentagon turned to the B-36, the surviving Northrop bombers were unceremoniously cut into scrap while Northrop employees who had worked on them watched.

After that, believers in the flying wing insisted that the plane had been killed for political reasons and not because of its instability.

Won Contest, Northrop Said

Not long before he died in 1981, Northrop said in a television interview that he had been told in June, 1948, that his flying wing had won the competition with the B-36 and that the Air Force would need 200 to 300 planes. But, he said, Air Force Secretary Stuart Symington later ordered him to merge his company with Consolidated Vultee in Ft. Worth, and when he did not, the B-36 was selected and his flying wing bomber was killed.

Symington has denied the story adamantly. In response to a question from The Times last week, he said: “General LeMay, then head of the Strategic Air Force, and the Air Staff all recommended the B-36 bomber over any other submitted design; and, of course, I followed their recommendations.”

Wooldridge said he has been unable to substantiate Northrop’s story, and a study by Air Force Col. Francis Baker concluded that the flying wing was rejected for technical rather than political reasons.

Sears said he suspects that public fascination with the flying wing design is because of its streamlined beauty.

“There are flying wing fanatics,” Wooldridge said. “They come up to me at lectures and seminars and show me the flying wings they have built.”

“It is a deeply held fascination. Everybody who ever saw YB-49 remembers it and they almost brag about seeing it.”

In Nampa, Ida., Davis, who turned to Northrop flying wing veteran Joe Rosales for help in designing his own flying wing, said: “I just got the feeling that I had to do it for Mr. Northrop and Joe.” He went to work on his plane in 1983, finished it in 1986, went down in the river in 1987 and in 1988 labors to fly again.

There are rumors that the flying wing also will make a reappearance in the new advanced technology fighter being planned by the Navy and in the new stealth reconnaissance plane being developed as a replacement for the SR-71.

Visions of Cargo Carriers

Northrop once had visions of giant cargo-carrying flying wings with a wing thickness reaching 15 to 20 feet.

Today, they are referred to as “span loaders,” and there is increasing interest in them as cargo planes of the future.

“I think there are flying wings in the future of aviation,” Sears wrote last year, not yet knowing of the stealth design.

With control problems eliminated and automatic stabilization giving designers new freedom, flying wings will be able to take off and land with new high lift devices, which, he said, will give them a range that “will be spectacular.”