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Aircraft industrialist and designer, founder of Northrop Corporation

John Knudsen Northrop (November 10, 1895 – February 18, 1981) was an American aircraft industrialist and designer who founded the Northrop Corporation in 1939. His career began in 1916 as a draftsman for Loughead Aircraft Manufacturing Company (founded 1912). He joined the Douglas Aircraft Company in 1923, where in time he became a project engineer. In 1927 he joined the Lockheed Corporation, where he was a chief engineer on the Lockheed Vega transport. He left in 1929 to found Avion Corporation, which he sold in 1930. Two years later, he founded the Northrop Corporation. This firm became a subsidiary of Douglas Aircraft in 1939, so he co founded a second company named Northrop.

Born in Newark, New Jersey in 1895, Northrop grew up in Santa Barbara, California. In 1916 Northrop's first job in aviation was in working as a draftsman for the Santa Barbara based Loughead Aircraft Manufacturing Company. After the outbreak of the First World War, Northrop was drafted into the U. S. Army, where he served in the Army Signal Corps. Northrop served in the military for 6 months before Loughead successfully petitioned for his return to work in the private sector. In 1923 Northrop joined Douglas Aircraft Company, where he participated in the design of the Douglas Round the World Cruiser and worked up to project engineer. In 1927 he rejoined the Loughead brothers and their newly founded (in 1926) Lockheed Aircraft Company, working as chief engineer on the Lockheed Vega, the civilian transport monoplane with a cantilever wing that produced unusually high performance for that period, and was widely used by such top pilots as Wiley Post, Amelia Earhart, and Hubert Wilkins. In 1929 he produced an all metal monoplane with an engine within the wing structure. Although this aircraft had booms to attach the tail group, it was in fact the first step toward the flying wing.

In 1929, Northrop struck out on his own, founding the Avion Corporation, which he was forced to sell to United Aircraft and Transport Corporation in 1930. In 1932, Northrop, backed by Donald Douglas of Douglas Aircraft, founded another company, the Northrop Corporation in El Segundo, California. This company built two highly successful monoplanes, the Northrop Gamma and Northrop Delta. By 1939 the Northrop Corporation had become a subsidiary of Douglas Aircraft, so Northrop founded another completely independent company of the same name in Hawthorne, California, a site located by Moye Stephens, one of the co founders.

While working at this company, Northrop focused on the flying wing design, which he was convinced was the next major step in aircraft design. His first project, a reduced scale version tested in 1940, ultimately became the giant Northrop YB 35. The Northrop XP 56 Black Bullet, a welded magnesium fighter was one of the more significant of his World War II designs, along with the Northrop P 61 Black Widow, the first American night interceptor, of which more than 700 were constructed. His inventions continued into the postwar era of jet aircraft, to produce the Northrop F 89 Scorpion all weather interceptor, the Northrop YB 49 long range bomber, the Northrop Snark intercontinental missile, and automatic celestial navigation systems. He produced a number of flying wings, including the Northrop N 1M, Northrop N 9M, and Northrop YB 35. His ideas regarding flying wing technology were years ahead of the computer and electronic advances of "fly by wire" stability systems which allow inherently unstable aircraft like the B 2 Spirit flying wing to be flown like a conventional aircraft. The flying wing and the pursuit of low drag high lift designs were Northrop's passion and its failure to be selected as the next generation bomber platform after World War II, and the subsequent dismantling of all prototypes and incomplete YB 49s, were a severe blow to him. He retired at age 57 in 1952 and virtually ended his association with the company for the next 30 years.

He broke a decades long silence on the Flying Wing's demise in a 1979 television interview, accusing the Air Force of killing the project to punish him for refusing to merge his company with Consolidated Vultee. He alleged that Air Force Secretary Stuart Symington threatened him by saying, "You’ll be goddamned sorry if you don’t". Symington later left the government to head the very same Consolidated Vultee company Northrop had refused to merge with. "There was a tremendous overcapacity in the industry following World War II". He said Northrop came to him, seeking more business to help his struggling company. Symington said, "I may very well have suggested that he merge his company with Convair, who we knew was going to get business." The B 2, for example, has the same 172 foot wingspan as the jet powered flying wing, YB 49. He died ten months later.

In 1947 he received the Spirit of St. Louis Medal from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers for "meritorious service in the advancement of aeronautics." Investiture in the International Aerospace Hall of Fame came in 1972, and in the National Aviation Hall of Fame in 1974. He was posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2003. Northrop's passion for tailless flight was honored by the naming of a giant tailless pterosaur Quetzalcoatlus northropi. Hawthorne Municipal Airport is also known as Jack Northrop Field in his honor.