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
|