Highlights from a visit to the Lyon Air Museum, March 2016

The Lyon Air Museum near John Wayne Airport in Santa Ana, California, was established in December 2009, named in honor of USAF Major General William Lyon. When I first went to the new museum months after its opening, I was amazed to see a dazzling array of aircraft on display from the World War II era, not the least of which are the Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress, Douglas DC-3/C-47, Douglas A-26 Invader, and North American B-25 Mitchell. Since then, there have been some changes to the museum's inventory, especially in the addition of the Cessna O-1 Bird Dog and North American AT-6/SNJ Texan. Therefore, I wanted to highlight some conspicuous sights during my trip to the Lyon Air Museum in March 2016.

Side view of North American SNJ-6 Texan advanced trainer aircraft (Navy BuAer No.112277)

The North American Texan was the most prolific single-engine American training aircraft of World War II, with a total of 15,495 aircraft built for the armed forces of not just the United States but also the British Commonwealth (UK, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa) and some other countries. Given the widespread use of the Texan, but also due to the different aircraft designation systems devised by the US Army Air Force and US Navy, the Texan was designated the BC-1, BC-2, AT-6, and AT-16 by the USAAF and the SNJ and TJ by the Navy, while the British referred to the Texan as the Harvard in line with the RAF tendency to name trainer planes after colleges or universities (e.g. Harvard, Cornell, Oxford). The Texan trainer that I saw at the Lyon Air Museum is an SNJ-6 delivered to the Navy in June 1945 and given the Navy Serial number BuAer (Bureau of Aeronautics) No. 112277. It was sold to civilian operators in 1950, and it was put on permanent display at the Lyon Air Museum in August 2013. 

Close-up view of North American B-25 Mitchell Guardian of Freedom (serial number 42-29465)

The North American B-25 Mitchell is the medium bomber aircraft made famous by the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo on April 18, 1942 (for starters, the B-25s had to fly from the USS Hornet because all island chains closest to Japan were under Japanese control). Designed by North American Aviation's chief designer Lee Atwood, it first flew on August 19, 1940 and became the premier American medium bomber of WW2, serving in all theaters of the war. Nearly 10,000 aircraft were constructed, and compared to another USAAF medium bomber, the Martin B-26 Marauder, the B-25 had a good safety record in contrast to that of the B-26, called the "Widow Maker" by airmen due to early models suffering high accident rates. It is also noteworthy that the B-25 Mitchell was named in honor of Brigadier General William "Billy" Mitchell (1879-1936), an influential advocate of American airpower in the 1920s (never mind that Mitchell viewed bombers as essential to smash an enemy into submission, while making the case for the United States having an air force independent of the Army and Navy).

Top: Douglas A-26 Invader "Feeding Frenzy" (serial number 44-34538) with shark mouth logo.
Bottom: Douglas XA-26B serial number 41-19588.

Next up on my trip, across from the B-17 and Texan trainer, is a Douglas A-26 Invader nicknamed "Feeding Frenzy". The Douglas A-26 Invader was a World War II close air support plane built by the El Segundo Division of Douglas Aircraft as a successor to the company's A-20 Havoc, which was designed for the same role as the A-26. The Invader, of which 2,503 were built, saw action in WW2, and when the US Air Force classified A-for-Attack aircraft as bombers, the A-26 was re-designated B-26 (not to be confused with the Martin B-26 Marauder). The Invader later saw action in the Korean and Vietnam Wars, but also the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion in April 1961 and Angola, Biafra, Congo, and Indonesia. Besides being armed with guns and bombs, the A-26 could attack ground targets with a battery of ten 5-inch HVAR rockets mounted on pylons under the outer wing panels; these rockets were used to attack North Vietnamese and Vietcong positions in South Vietnam during the Vietnam War. The United States Navy operated ex-USAAF A-26 airframes for use as utility aircraft or target drone tugs under the designation JD-1 (J=Utility; D=Douglas).

Douglas C-47B Skytrain "Willa Dean" (serial number 44-76791)

The Douglas C-47B Skytrain "Willa Dean" was the most familiar non-combat military aircraft on display at the Lyon Air Museum. The Douglas DC-3, originally designed as a sleeper transport by Donald Douglas in the 1930s and one of the most successful American airliners of the Golden Age of Aviation in the 1920s and 1930s, evolved to become a prolific American transport plane in wartime after Pearl Harbor, under the designations C-47 and C-53 and the official names Skytrain and Skytrooper (official USAAF name) and Dakota (Royal Air Force name). (The C-53 differed from the C-47 in lacking the Skytrain's reinforced cargo floor and large cargo door.) Over 10,000 C-47s and C-53s were constructed by Douglas, and the C-47 itself was pivotal in the invasion of Sicily in July 1943 and the D-Day invasion of Normandy in June 1944, with C-47s and C-53s dropping paratroopers into the battlefield and towing troop-laden military gliders. The C-47B "Willa Dean" served with the United States Army Air Force until May 1945, when it was transferred to the French. The aircraft flew for a better part of its career largely unmodified, and in 1967 it was transferred to Israeli ownership. The DC-3, in all its iterations, was such a versatile plane that dozens of DC-3s and C-47s still fly with small civil operators and some air forces.

Takeaways from visit to Western Museum of Flight, June 2016: Northrop flying wing cruise missiles and Alpha mailplane

I paid my first my visit to the Western Museum of Flight back in April 2005, when the museum itself was based at Hawthorne. At the time I was starting to gain knowledge of Southern California's role as a major plane manufacturing hub in World War II and the Cold War, but the motivation for me to visit the Western Museum of Flight was the fact that the original location for the museum was the original home of the Northrop Corporation (now Northrop Grumman). A little over a year later, however, a new real estate management company took over the property in Hawthorne and raised rent from $2,000 to the current market value of $5,000 a month, and because the museum itself could no longer afford the rent, it closed on July 26, 2006.

More than a decade passed before I found out that the Western Museum of Flight had moved to a new hangar at Zamperini Air Field in Torrance, California on March 25, 2007. Therefore, when I went to the museum's new location in June 2016, some of the planes built by Northrop planes originally housed at Hawthorne were located at the new location's hangar. Also, many Northrop/Northrop Grumman-related memorabilia and desktop models of Northrop-related aircraft were present at the museum's new location. Hence, I wanted to describe a few Northrop-built machines at the museum that I found endearing.

Left: The manned technology demonstrator for the Northrop JB-1 jet-powered flying wing cruise missile on display at the Western Museum of Flight. 

Right: The first Northrop JB-1 jet bomb being readied for launch from a rocket-propelled sled at Eglin Air Field, Florida, December 1944.

The Northrop JB-1 Bat prototype cruise missile that I saw at the Western Museum of Flight is unusual in terms of its design philosophy among early US guided missiles and one of only a few surviving Northrop flying wings from the 1940s (the others being the N-1M and N-9M flying wing tech demonstrators). In World War II, American guided missile technology was rather primitive and rudimentary, with early US cruise missiles manifesting themselves in the form of either winged torpedoes, straight-winged pilotless planes filled with explosives ("flying bombs"), or vertical glide bombs. However, the JB-1 stands out among early American guided missiles because its designer, John K. "Jack" Northrop, utilized the flying wing layout of his JB-1 design to store explosive material in a pair of bomb containers in the wing roots. Power was supplied by 2 General Electric B1 turbojets delivering 400 pounds (1.8 kN) of thrust. The US Army Air Force wanted the JB-1 to be used as a precision-guided weapon for Operation Coronet, the planned US invasion of Japan. As the JB-1 Bat was rather radical in design, Northrop built one airframe as an unpowered manned technology demonstrator to test the design's flight characteristics, which flew in August 1944. The first powered JB-1 flight occurred in December 1944 from a rocket-propelled sled, but ended in failure when the machine crashed 400 yards away seconds after launch. The  JB-1 was cancelled due to the unreliability of the turbojet and replaced by the pulsejet-powered JB-10, which had warheads in the wing roots. The maiden flight of the JB-10 occurred in April 1945; of the 10 JB-10 test flights conducted, only two were successful. By January 1946, in light of the end of World War II, the JB-10 program was cancelled.

Large desktop model of the Northrop Alpha mailplane (propeller, stabilizers, cockpit are missing).

The Northrop Alpha mail transport plane was one of the first planes designed by Jack Northrop, but this aircraft was actually built by the Avion Corporation of Burbank, California, which was formed in 1928 and later became a subsidiary of the United Aircraft and Technology Corporation in 1929 (as the Northrop Aviation Corporation). The Alpha was revolutionary in its all-metal construction, wing fillets, and multicellular stressed-skin wing, and it featured a accommodation for six passengers. It first flew in 1930, entering service on April 20, 1931; 17 Alphas were built in total, with most going to Transcontinental & Western Air (later Trans World Airlines), and 3 going to the US Army Air Corps as the YC-19/Y1C-19. Northrop would eventually use the Alpha as the basis of the more advanced Gamma mailplane and A-13/A-17/A-33 dive bomber series.