Ceremony Celebrates Golden Anniversary of Warplane

A B-2 Stealth bomber, looking like something out of a Batman movie, zoomed low over Hawthorne Municipal Airport on Tuesday to celebrate the golden anniversary of one of its ancestors.

The first flight of the XB-35--considered the grandfather of the Stealth bomber--took place 50 years ago at the Hawthorne airport and ended at Edwards Air Force Base about 55 minutes later.

Hundreds of people stood on the runway or on buildings to watch the B-2 bomber sweep over the runway and then into the sky before it disappeared.

Max Stanley, the test pilot who made that first flight in the XB-35 on June 25, 1946, watched as the long-range aircraft, with a 172-foot wing span, rumbled over head. “I wish I was there flying it,” said Stanley, who was a test pilot with the Northrop Corp. for 27 years. Now 87, he retired in 1972.

“When you start to see it on the horizon, your heart beats,” said Lisa Bubion, a systems engineer with Hughes Electronics, who has seen the bomber three times. “It’s an elegant, powerful masterpiece.”

There are no original models of the XB-35, which was part of the Flying Wing bomber series, a tailless aircraft with a shape much like the B-2. They were built in the 1940s by Northrop Corp., which is now called the Northrop Grumman Corp. and is headquartered next to the Hawthorne Municipal Airport.

A smaller forerunner of the XB-35, called the N-9M, which also was part of the Flying Wing series, was brought in for the ceremony. The N-9M, the only one of its kind, was restored last year. It was flown in Monday from the Planes of Fame Museum in Chino.

Standing before the crowd, Stanley talked about that day in 1946 when he and his flight crew decided to fly east toward Edwards Air Force Base, called Muroc Army Air Base at the time, so they could avoid the more densely populated area of Hawthorne.

He remembers that rabbits lived in the weeds beside the runway. As he took off, he saw one hopping along the runway and became concerned. “I looked out and I was not gaining speed on this rabbit. I thought, either something’s wrong or that’s one hell of a fast rabbit,” he said. But the plane lifted into the air and made it to the base 55 minutes later.

The Flying Wing series was started in 1939 by John Northrop, founder of Northrop Corp. that built the Hawthorne airport and turned it over to the city in 1948.