The pioneering work of Jack Northrop lives on in the company that bears his name. In 2006, Northrop Grumman won a contract from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for initial work on a supersonic flying wing with variable sweep--that is, the angle of the wing's leading edge relative to the direction of flight.
This artist's rendering of the oblique flying wing shows the aircraft in low-sweep mode for low-speed flights. For supersonic travel, the aircraft might sweep its right wing forward and its left wing back.
The preliminary design work for the project is expected to conclude in November; during this phase, Northrop Grumman also says, rather dryly, that it will "conduct technology maturation to reduce the risk of the critical technologies associated with its OFW concepts." If the project continues past that point, a second phase would involved refinements of the design, construction of a prototype and then flight tests that could begin in 2010 or 2011.
Photo by Northrop Grumman
Caption by Jonathan Skillings
