From flying wings to polar exploration, from air racers and airliners to the Chinese Air Force, here is the complete story of the single-engined airplanes designed and built by Jack Northrop during aviation’s golden age.

From flying wings to polar exploration, from air racers and airliners to the Chinese Air Force, here is the complete story of the single-engined airplanes designed and built by Jack Northrop during aviation’s golden age, as told by Richard S. Allen, author of the recently revised classic Revolution in the Sky.

Creating successively stronger, bigger, and more powerful airplanes, Northrop pioneered all-metal aircraft construction techniques in the United States. The early Northrops were mail carriers and record breakers and flew in regions where no aircraft had ever ventured. Among them were test ships, training planes, and light bombers. Some were failures, but others achieved huge successes.

And the cast of characters who flew and owned Northrop planes includes many of the daring and famous aviators of the time: Frank M. Hawks, Jacqueline Cochran, Howard Hughes, Lincoln Ellsworth, Tommy Tomlinson, and many others. Rick Allen goes on to tell the story of the early planes of TWA and the military Northrops-in China and Spain and the A-17 attack plane. Nor is Jack Northrop’s love affair with the flying wing forgotten (even as the company that bears his name develops the latest controversial flying wing-the B-2 ’Stealth’ Bomber) 

 

 

Rick Allen also applies his extraordinary research skills to compile a unique series of appendixes -including the complete histories of all the Northrop single engined aicraft- and a superb collection of photographs and scale drawings that will make The Northrop Story an indispensable book for all aviation buffs.