The Northrop N-Nine-M, the Chino Restoration, and the Flying Wing Dream That Outlived the Man Who Built It

The Northrop N-9M is the only surviving example of Jack Northrop’s radical flying wing testbed series, and it still flies today at the Planes of Fame Air Museum in Chino, California. Built beginning in 1942 as a one-third-scale proof of concept for a long-range strategic bomber, it represents one of the most contested and politically charged chapters in American aviation history. Its survival - while every other flying wing of that era was scrapped or cut apart for aluminum - makes it genuinely irreplaceable.

Who Was Jack Northrop?

John Knudsen Northrop - known as Jack - was born in 1895 in Newark, New Jersey. He built his engineering reputation at Douglas and Lockheed before founding Northrop Corporation. From the earliest days of his career, a single concept ran underneath everything else he worked on: the pure flying wing.

The flying wing eliminated everything conventional designers had accepted as necessary. No fuselage. No tail surface. Every pound of structure would do double duty - lifting and containing. Fuel, crew, and engines would live inside the wing itself. Without a fuselage producing parasitic drag or a horizontal stabilizer generating its constant small downward force to prevent pitch-over, the design promised efficiency no conventional airframe could match.

He sketched it on whatever paper was at hand and ran the numbers. By the late 1930s, Northrop Corporation had backing enough to build one.

The N-1M: Proof the Wing Could Fly

The N-1M - nicknamed the Northrop Jeep - flew in 1940 at Muroc Dry Lake, the same high desert that would later host Chuck Yeager and the sound barrier. Wooden construction. A pair of pusher propellers at the trailing edge. Underpowered and awkward, but it flew as a wing.

That was enough. Northrop pushed forward.

What Was the N-9M and How Did It Fly?

In 1942, Northrop began building four flying wing testbeds designated the N-9M, built to roughly one-third scale of a proposed full-size flying wing bomber. 60 feet from wingtip to wingtip. 18 feet from leading edge to trailing edge. A pair of Menasco inline engines buried in the wing structure drove pusher propellers at the trailing edge.

The pilot sat in a small plexiglass bubble canopy right at the leading edge - the very front of an aircraft with no fuselage and no nose. Sixty feet of wing spread to either side. Fuel beneath. Engines behind.

The controls were unlike anything in conventional aviation. Pitch and roll were managed together by elevons along the trailing edge. Yaw was handled by split flaps at the wingtips - no rudder pedals working in the expected sense. Pilots described the first flight as deeply disorienting. Once the instincts recalibrated, they described it as one of the most natural-feeling aircraft they had ever touched.

The XB-35 and YB-49: The Flying Wing Reaches for the Mission

The N-9M program existed to gather performance data for the XB-35, a proposed long-range strategic bomber. The XB-35 was enormous: 172 feet from tip to tip, powered by eight radial engines driving pusher propellers through contra-rotating gearboxes. It would carry a bomb load to targets no conventional bomber could reach.

Those gearboxes were a mechanical nightmare. Prop shafts failed. Gearboxes seized. The XB-35 spent more time on the ground than in the air.

The Army Air Forces converted two XB-35 airframes to jet power - stripping the piston engines and installing eight Allison turbojets buried in the wing - and redesignated them the YB-49. The YB-49 flew beautifully. Smooth, fast, cruising above 500 miles per hour. Test pilots loved it. It was everything Northrop had spent two decades building toward.

The Crash, the Contract, and the End of the Program

In May 1948, one of the YB-49s broke apart over Muroc Dry Lake during a test flight. Major Daniel Forbes and Captain Glen Edwards were killed. Edwards had flown bombers over Germany and survived the war entire. Edwards Air Force Base carries his name today.

The YB-49 program was suspended. A production contract for a full fleet of flying wing bombers was canceled. The work went to the Convair B-36 Peacemaker - a conventional design with a conventional fuselage and tail.

Was the Program Killed by Politics?

Jack Northrop believed so until the end of his life. Secretary of the Air Force Stuart Symington had reportedly told him directly: if Northrop Corporation did not agree to merge with Convair, the contracts would disappear. Northrop refused. The contracts disappeared.

In 1952, he was pushed out of the company he had founded. He retired to California. The XB-35s were scrapped. The YB-49s were cut up for aluminum. Every flying wing was destroyed.

All but one.

How the Last N-9M Survived

The final surviving N-9M had moved through various storage locations for decades, somehow avoiding the scrap heap that consumed everything else. By the 1980s it had arrived at Cal-Aero Field in Chino, California - home of the Planes of Fame Air Museum.

Planes of Fame is one of the finest collections of airworthy World War II aircraft anywhere in the world. P-38 Lightnings. A Mitsubishi Zero. A Nakajima Ki-43 Hayabusa. Aircraft that fly, not aircraft that stand behind a rope. The museum looked at the N-9M and made a decision consistent with that philosophy: they would restore it to flying condition.

The aircraft was in poor shape. Parts were missing. Documentation was incomplete or gone entirely. The Menasco engines needed complete rebuilds. Some control system components had to be re-engineered from scratch because the original drawings no longer existed.

The restoration team tracked down retired Northrop engineers who had worked on the original program. These men were elderly by then, but the technical details were intact in their heads. They sat with the Planes of Fame crew, reviewed drawings, and answered questions that no parts catalog could have resolved. That knowledge had no other place left to exist.

It took years.

The Return to Flight

On April 1, 1994, the N-9M-B flew again over Chino. It lifted off the runway, climbed out over the valley, and banked over the field in the slow, deliberate turn that makes the aircraft simultaneously impossible and inevitable to watch. No tail to anchor the eye. No fuselage to indicate direction. Just wing.

The crowd on the ramp watched it come around and, by most accounts, did not quite know what to make of it at first. Then it landed, and they understood.

Jack Northrop was not there. He had died in February 1981, thirteen years earlier.

The Moment Northrop Learned He Was Right

Late in 1980, a few months before his death, Air Force officials arranged for Northrop to see something classified. He was 85 years old, had suffered a stroke, and was in a wheelchair. He could no longer speak clearly.

They showed him the early design work for what would become the B-2 Spirit. The Air Force had returned to the flying wing - this time with the advanced digital flight control computers of the 1980s to solve the stability problem that had defeated the YB-49 in the 1940s. Everything Northrop had argued for, everything he had been shown the door for believing, had turned out to be correct. The Air Force simply needed thirty years of computer science to catch up to what he had put on paper in the 1920s.

By most accounts, he wept. He reportedly managed to communicate, in some form, words to the effect of: now I know why God has kept me alive for twenty-five years.

He died a few months later. He never saw the B-2 fly.

The B-2 Spirit: Northrop’s Vindication in the Air

The B-2 Spirit made its first flight in July 1989 - eight years after Northrop’s death. When one banks over a crowd at an airshow or sits on the ramp at Whiteman Air Force Base in the early morning light, the wing geometry connects directly and unmistakably back to those N-9M test flights over the California desert in 1942. The span has changed. The materials are beyond anything Northrop’s engineers could have imagined. The computers that keep it stable would have been science fiction to the men who worked on the XB-35.

The idea is Jack Northrop’s.

Where to See the N-9M-B Today

The Planes of Fame Air Museum in Chino, California still flies the N-9M-B. It appears each May at the museum’s annual airshow. On the right day, in the right California light, a flying wing that has no right to still exist lifts off the runway and banks over the valley - a direct, unbroken line from a young engineer’s sketches a century ago to the aircraft overhead.

Key Takeaways

• The Northrop N-9M-B is the only surviving example of Jack Northrop’s flying wing testbed series and remains airworthy at the Planes of Fame Air Museum in Chino, California
• Four N-9Ms were built beginning in 1942 as one-third-scale testbeds for the proposed XB-35 bomber, featuring 60-foot wingspans and Menasco inline engines in a tailless, elevon-controlled configuration
• The jet-powered YB-49 conversion cruised above 500 mph and impressed test pilots, but a May 1948 crash and alleged political pressure from the Air Force ended the program; Edwards AFB was named for one of the pilots killed
• In late 1980, Northrop - then 85, in a wheelchair, and months from death - was shown early B-2 Spirit design work and reportedly wept; he died in February 1981 never having seen it fly
• The B-2 Spirit first flew July 1989, eight years after his death, and its geometry traces directly to the N-9M flights he authorized over the California desert nearly five decades earlier