The Northrop N-9M Flying Wing, Jack Northrop's Subscale Dream at Planes of Fame, and the Fifty-Year Road from Muroc Dry Lake to the B-2 Spirit

There is exactly one airworthy Northrop N-9M flying wing on earth. It lives at Planes of Fame Museum in Chino, California, and it flies. That sixty-foot tailless aircraft - built as a subscale testbed for a wartime bomber program that was ultimately cancelled and scrapped - represents the direct aerodynamic lineage of the B-2 Spirit, a connection fifty years in the making.

Jack Northrop’s Case Against the Fuselage

Jack Northrop was not chasing novelty. He was solving an engineering problem that had bothered him since the early days of powered flight.

Every conventional aircraft carries structural dead weight. The fuselage is a tube that creates drag. The tail assembly adds weight while solving problems the fuselage itself created. Every rivet in the empennage exists only as a consequence of configuration choices made upstream. Northrop kept returning to the same question: what if the entire aircraft was lifting surface?

He founded the Northrop Aircraft Corporation in 1939 with the flying wing as his central ambition. He would spend the next decade trying to prove the concept could work at bomber scale.

The Army’s Extreme Range Requirement

Around 1941, the Army Air Forces issued a requirement that gave Northrop’s obsession a military purpose. Planners were concerned about a scenario in which American forces lost access to European air bases entirely. If Britain fell, or political circumstances forced bombers back to the western hemisphere, what would it take to reach Germany from North America?

The requirement: a round-trip range of 10,000 miles carrying 10,000 pounds of bombs.

Conventional aerodynamics could not meet that number. The structural penalty of a fuselage-and-tail configuration is too severe when you run the fuel fraction math at extreme range. Every pound of structure had to earn its keep in lift. Northrop’s numbers showed that a flying wing - burying crew, fuel, and bombs inside the lifting surface itself - could hit that range figure with margin to spare.

The Army said yes. The XB-35 flying wing bomber program was underway.

Why Northrop Built the N-9M First

The XB-35 was going to have a 172-foot wingspan and weigh over 100,000 pounds fully loaded. No responsible program manager builds something like that and hopes for the best. Northrop built a subscale testbed first.

That testbed was the N-9M.

Northrop built four airframes: the N-9M, N-9MA, N-9MB, and a fourth. Each was roughly one-third the linear scale of the XB-35 - a 60-foot wingspan, two Franklin engines buried in the wing producing around 300 horsepower each and driving pusher propellers. Fully loaded, each aircraft weighed approximately 6,000 pounds. They were large enough to generate useful aerodynamic data and small enough that losing one was not a program-ending event.

They flew from Muroc Dry Lake in the Mojave Desert starting in late 1942.

What It Was Like to Fly a Tailless Wing

The N-9M asked pilots to unlearn nearly everything.

The cockpit sat just forward of the wing’s leading edge. There was no nose ahead of the pilot - nothing but open air. The visibility was extraordinary. What wasn’t visible was any part of the aircraft itself, because the aircraft was entirely behind the pilot.

There were no rudder pedals. Yaw control came from split drag flaps on the trailing edge of each wing: deflect one side, slow that wing, yaw that direction. The response was slow and required anticipation rather than reaction. Pilots had to abandon years of conventional tailwheel muscle memory and start from scratch.

Pitch and roll were both handled by elevons - surfaces doing double duty depending on the input. And pitch stability was marginal. A flying wing without a horizontal tail has no natural pendulum to push the nose back down after a disturbance. Every gust was a test.

In spring 1943, the program lost the original N-9M and its pilot in a low-altitude departure from controlled flight. Pitch control was identified as a contributing factor. The program absorbed the loss, modified the surviving aircraft based on accumulated data, and continued.

The YB-49 and the Program’s Collapse

By the time the XB-35 made its first flight in summer 1946, the world had moved past it. World War Two was over. The jet engine was no longer experimental. Propeller-driven bombers were becoming relics before they entered service.

The Air Force wanted the flying wing in jet form. The result was the YB-49: a refined flying wing structure powered by eight Allison jet engines. In fall 1947, a YB-49 completed a headline-grabbing nonstop flight from Muroc to Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington. Newspapers called it a ghost ship. Something that didn’t belong to ordinary airspace.

Then, on June 5, 1948, a YB-49 broke apart during a test flight over the Mojave. All five crew members were killed. One of them was Captain Glen Edwards. In 1950, Muroc Dry Lake was renamed Edwards Air Force Base in his honor.

The YB-49 had a genuine operational problem beyond the accident: the aircraft wandered directionally on the bomb run. The autopilot systems of 1948 could not compensate adequately for a platform that needed to hold rock-steady during weapons release. In 1949, the Air Force cancelled the flying wing program. All XB-35 and YB-49 airframes were ordered scrapped.

The Cancellation Controversy

Jack Northrop went before Congress and testified that the cancellation had nothing to do with the aircraft’s performance. He said he had been pressured to merge Northrop Aircraft with Consolidated Vultee Corporation, manufacturer of the rival B-36 Peacemaker. He said he refused the merger. He said the contract cancellation followed shortly after.

Whether that account is complete, historians continue to debate. What is not disputed: by 1950, the flying wing was dead, the aircraft were scrap aluminum, and Northrop had been vindicated in nothing.

How the N-9MB Survived

Three of the four N-9M testbeds were destroyed in accidents or scrapped when the program ended. The N-9MB turned up at Edwards Air Force Base - not in a museum, not in climate-controlled storage. Just parked on the desert ramp. It sat there, slowly deteriorating, through the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s as the test center moved on to faster, higher, stranger things.

It was still there in the late 1980s when the team from Planes of Fame Museum in Chino tracked it down.

The Restoration at Planes of Fame

Planes of Fame has been at Chino Airport since the 1960s. It is a nonprofit operation, and its philosophy is straightforward: airworthiness is a moral position, not a budget line. Their collection includes flyable examples of aircraft no one else in the world has flying.

The N-9MB was in serious condition. Structural elements had degraded. Fabric control surfaces needed complete replacement. The engines had not run in decades. The pusher propeller installations had to be rebuilt from scratch. There is no parts bin for an N-9M - every replacement component was fabricated from original Northrop engineering drawings and from physical measurements taken off the airframe itself.

This was aircraft archaeology as much as aircraft restoration.

The work took years. In 1994, more than five decades after the original N-9M first lifted off from Muroc Dry Lake, the N-9MB flew again over Chino, California.

Jack Northrop, the B-2, and What He Was Told in 1980

Jack Northrop died in February 1981. The B-2 Spirit would not be publicly unveiled until its rollout ceremony at Palmdale in November 1988 - seven years after his death.

But there is a documented account from his final months.

In early 1980, Northrop was 84 years old, confined to a wheelchair following a stroke. The Air Force arranged for him to receive a classified briefing on what was then called the Advanced Technology Bomber program. They could not show him everything. But they could show him enough.

By the accounts of those present, when Northrop left that briefing, he said he now understood why God had kept him alive long enough to see it.

He died less than a year later.

The Number That Connects Everything

The B-2 Spirit has a wingspan of 172 feet - the same span Jack Northrop drew for the XB-35 in 1942. Forty years of fly-by-wire technology, flight control computers, and materials science had finally solved the stability problems that killed the YB-49. The shape was right from the beginning. It just needed the tools to catch up.

When Planes of Fame flies the N-9MB at their annual airshow in Chino and a B-2 Spirit makes a flyover, the entire arc of the idea is visible from the ground: the sixty-foot subscale testbed and the 172-foot operational stealth bomber, the beginning and the end of a fifty-year obsession, sharing California airspace.

The museum is on the east side of Chino Airport. Primary sources for this history include the Planes of Fame Museum, Northrop Grumman’s published corporate history, and the research of aviation historian Garry Pape, who wrote the most thorough account of the Northrop flying wing programs.

Key Takeaways

The Northrop N-9MB is the sole surviving airworthy example of the N-9M series - restored to flight by Planes of Fame Museum after decades of open-air deterioration at Edwards Air Force Base, with its first post-restoration flight in 1994.
Jack Northrop’s flying wing concept rested on a specific engineering argument: eliminating the fuselage and tail was the only way to make a 10,000-mile round-trip strategic bomber mathematically possible.
The YB-49 flying wing jet bomber was cancelled in 1949 following the fatal June 5, 1948 breakup over the Mojave and an unresolved directional stability problem that 1940s autopilot technology could not correct.
The B-2 Spirit shares the exact 172-foot wingspan Northrop specified for the XB-35 in 1942 - the same aerodynamic concept, finally realized four decades later with fly-by-wire flight controls.
Jack Northrop received a classified briefing on the Advanced Technology Bomber program in early 1980, less than a year before his death - and reportedly left that briefing knowing his life’s work had not been a dead end.