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“...including the Northrop XB-35 Flying Wing...Jack Northrop was a Man way ahead of His time.” [mabarker1, post 30]

Thanks for the additions.

I’d never studied up on the powerplants installed on the B-35.

Many aviation history enthusiasts look on USAF’s rejection of Northrop’s flying wings as a mistake - a willful refusal to peer into the crystal ball and foresee the future, as it were.

While Northrop was a designer of great imagination, his large aircraft would have been much less useful in actual service for a variety of reasons few people think about.

The most immediate problem turned out to be controllability in flight. The B-35 was only marginally stable while airborne. The B-49 was less stable.

In the 1940s, the level of understanding in aerodynamics and control-system theory was far less advanced than 40 years later when the B-2 was developed; no general solution could be found. Micro-sensors and computers to augment flight control by human hands & brains did not yet exist; it was decided that no crew could control such a machine over the great distances and long mission durations with a sufficient margin of safety. Bombing accuracy was unexciting also. These drawbacks were judged to outweigh the advantage of increased efficiency and added up to unacceptable risk levels.

Less obvious at the time was the impact to systems engineering.

Any flying wing is unavoidably more “densely packed” than a conventional airframe of comparable size: to begin with, components and systems have to be squeezed into a smaller space. But if they have to be moved, every other piece of the aircraft has to be rearranged to make it all function. Maintenance is similarly affected: the ground crew would have had to take out all manner of other parts and devices to get at the one thing that needed fixing.

And the density would have posed much greater problems when it came to modifications and upgrades; if a new system needed to be installed, every other subsystem nearby would have to moved, or redesigned to accommodate the new stuff. Or both.

Large aircraft like the B-29, B-36, C-130, and B-52 owe part of their success and longevity to their large interior spaces: modifications and upgrades fit inside without a lot of complex reworking of other components.