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.