Northrop
 
T-38 Talon
Photo: Robert Deering 7/21/2018
Frontiers of Flight Museum
Love Field (DAL)
Dallas, Texas
Northrop Corporation was a major United States aircraft manufacturer which merged with Grumman in 1994 to form Northrop Grumman.
AIRCRAFT        
Commercial Aircraft        

Alpha
       
Military Aircraft        

A-17

B-2
Spirit

F-5
Freedom Fighter

F-89
Scorpion

N-1M

P-61
Black Widow

RQ-4
Global Hawk

T-38
Talon

AT-38
Talon

X-4

HISTORY

Jack Northrop founded three companies using his name. The first was the Avion Corporation in 1927, which was absorbed in 1929 by the United Aircraft and Transport Corporation as a subsidiary named "Northrop Aviation Corporation". 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.

Northrop still sought his own company and in 1939 established the "Northrop Corporation" in nearby Hawthorne, California, a site located by co-founder Moye Stephens.  It was in Hawthorne, California that the P-61 Black Widow night fighter, the flying wings (B-35 and YB-49), 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.

The F-5 was so successful that Northrop spent much of the 1970s and 1980s attempting to duplicate its success with similar light-weight 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 must-haves 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 light-weight 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.

Based on the experimentation with flying wings the company developed the B-2 Spirit stealth bomber of the 1990s.  In 1994, partly due to the loss of the Advanced Tactical Fighter contract to Lockheed Martin and the removal of their proposal from consideration for the Joint Strike Fighter competition, the company bought Grumman to form Northrop Grumman.

Source: Wikipedia 

AIRCRAFT    
A-17/ Nomad 1935 Attack/light bomber
Alpha 1930 Single-engine transport
Alpha C-19 1930 Single-engine transport
B-2 Spirit 1989 Strategic stealth bomber
Beta 1931 Single-engine sport plane
BT 1935 Dive bomber
Delta 1933 Single-engine transport
F-5 1959 Lightweight fighter
F-15 Reporter 1945 Reconnaissance aircraft based on P-61
F-20 Tigershark 1982 Prototype lightweight fighter derived from F-5
F-89 Scorpian 1948 Interceptor
Gamma 1932 Single-engine transport
HL-10 1966 Experimental rocket lifting body
N-1M 1940 Experimental flying wing
N-3PB 1940 Floatplane patrol bomber
N-9M 1942 Experimental scale flying wing proof of concept for B-35
M2-F2 1966 Experimental rocket powered lifting body
M2-F3 1970 Experimental rocket lifting body
       
P-61 Black Widow 1942   Night fighter
Pioneer 1946   Trimotor transport
RQ-4 Global Hawk 1998   High-altitude, remotely-piloted surveillance aircraft 
T-38 / AT-38 1959   Advanced trainer
Tacit Blue 1982   Experimental stealth aircraft
X-4 Bantam 1948   Experimental trans-sonic tailless aircraft
X-21 1963   Experimental boundary layer control aircraft
XP-56 Black Bullet 1943   Prototype tailless fighter
XA-9 1972   Prototype attack aircraft
XA-13 1933   Prototype attack aircraft
XP-79 1945   Prototype jet flying wing fighter
YB-35 1946   Prototype strategic bomber
YB-49 1947   Prototype eight-jet-engine strategic bomber
YC-125 Raider 1949   Trimotor transport
YF-17 1974   Prototype fighter, led to F/A-18
YF-23 1990   Prototype stealth fighter
YFT   1933   Prototype naval fighter