#yb-49

Jack Northrop spent his entire career obsessed with this design, convinced it was the future of aviation. And he wasn't wrong — he was just about 40 years too early. The program was cancelled, the aircraft were scrapped, and the dream seemed buried.

Then in 1989, the B-2 Spirit rolled out of a hangar and the whole world finally understood what he was talking about.

The YB-49 never made it into production. But looking at this image, it's hard not to feel that something genuinely important was lost — and remarkable that one man's vision survived long enough to reshape the skies anyway.

Some ideas don't die. They just wait.

Ground crew refueling a Northrop YB-49 Flying Wing on the ramp at Muroc Air Force Base, California.

Date: late 1940s

Northrop YB-49, 1948. One of the "Flying Wings".

(via NEMOさんはTwitterを使っています: 「そうだったのか。 https://t.co/9YL2krwNaE」 / Twitter)

The Northrop YB-49 was an American prototype jet-powered heavy bomber developed by Northrop Corporationshortly after World War II for service with the United States Air Force. The YB-49 featured a flying wing design and was a turbojet-powered development of the earlier, piston-engined Northrop XB-35 and YB-35. The two YB-49s actually built were both converted YB-35 test aircraft.

The YB-49 never entered production, being passed over in favor of the more conventional Convair B-36 piston-driven design. Design work performed in the development of the YB-35 and YB-49 nonetheless proved to be valuable to Northrop decades later in the eventual development of the B-2 stealth bomber, which entered service in the early 1990s.