- 5/11/2025
For educational purposes
STRANGE SHAPES presents the most remarkable shapes ever sent into the air, from an early Flying Wing at Northrop in the 1920s that didn't work to one that does, the Stealth Bomber.
Also includes other remarkable shapes such as the Flying Pancake and the Tailless Fighter.
Aviation oddities featured include planes with backward wings, moving wings, small wings and even no wings at all; planes with backward engines that "pushed" instead of "pulled", planes with engines that pushed and pulled, planes with huge tails and planes with no tails.
Strange Shapes concentrates on the unusual forms that often grace the engineer's drawing board.
Eliminating the fuselage on aircraft was an interesting idea that didn't come to fruition. However, the concept of a smaller, more aerodynamic plane did.
Out of this idea, the Flying Wing was born. Seen in everything from the 1929 Halten Meteor, to the modern-day Stealth Bomber, this smooth design works.
Aircraft seen include Flying Wings, Bell X-5, XP-57 "Bat", SR-71 Blackbird, F-7 Cutlass, "Lifting Bodies", X-24 and X-29.
STRANGE SHAPES presents the most remarkable shapes ever sent into the air, from an early Flying Wing at Northrop in the 1920s that didn't work to one that does, the Stealth Bomber.
Also includes other remarkable shapes such as the Flying Pancake and the Tailless Fighter.
Aviation oddities featured include planes with backward wings, moving wings, small wings and even no wings at all; planes with backward engines that "pushed" instead of "pulled", planes with engines that pushed and pulled, planes with huge tails and planes with no tails.
Strange Shapes concentrates on the unusual forms that often grace the engineer's drawing board.
Eliminating the fuselage on aircraft was an interesting idea that didn't come to fruition. However, the concept of a smaller, more aerodynamic plane did.
Out of this idea, the Flying Wing was born. Seen in everything from the 1929 Halten Meteor, to the modern-day Stealth Bomber, this smooth design works.
Aircraft seen include Flying Wings, Bell X-5, XP-57 "Bat", SR-71 Blackbird, F-7 Cutlass, "Lifting Bodies", X-24 and X-29.
Category
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LearningTranscript
00:00Thank you for listening.
03:00In today's sense, there was no scientific basis to the avenues explored by designers.
03:06They tended to follow engineering ideas and mechanical advances, operating on a combination of intuition and experience that often led them astray, sometimes fatally.
03:15Quite often, their results looked downright comic to our eyes, though presumably, at the time, the designs that worked looked no less unlikely than those that didn't.
03:26So, by the 1940s,
03:53the variety of shapes considered were, in the main, based around configurations that we would recognise clearly as capable of flight.
04:01Although still, there was a certain amount of hopeful supposition about some elements.
04:05Here, Alexander Savesky, who founded what was to become the Republic Corporation, shows a model of his pet project for a long-range passenger seaplane.
04:14With its huge retractable pontoons and accommodation within the wings, the plane displays an attachment to past certainties, harking back to the flying boats.
04:23But it also exhibits quite modern considerations of drag, and, one suspects, had it been built, it would have been fairly successful in meeting its design objectives.
04:32At the time, it represented the informed view of an aviation expert on what the future of the aeroplane would be.
04:39Today's designer looks to the aid of sound scientific information and the huge capability of computers to study and assess his propositions.
04:48The shapes he looks at in his considerations of future demand can be extensively tested without being built,
04:54and those that will be built, and those that will be built will have already been refined to extreme tolerances, with little to no uncertainty about their ability to perform.
05:03The restrictions he has to conform to relate to the complexity of the aeroplane and the cost of its construction.
05:09The shape of a plane is, of course, largely dictated by its function, and enough is known to suggest a shape once the parameters of the job a plane is to do are defined.
05:18For much of aviation's history, however, trial and error has been the order of the day.
05:29The Wright Brothers plane was configured with the propeller behind the wing, with the blades pushing the plane through the air.
05:36This arrangement recurred throughout the piston engine era, with several notable and successful aircraft being pushers.
05:42The Japanese Shinden, or Magnificent Lightning, of World War II was not only a pusher, but employed Kanaar winglets in a tail-first arrangement that's reappeared in very modern fighters of today.
05:55Although orders for the plane were placed, it never made it into production.
06:03During World War II, the US Air Force experimented with several advanced pusher-propped piston-engined fighters.
06:10One of the adventurous designs was the Northrop XP-56, a plane that showed its lineage in its tailless design, complex control systems and swept-back wing.
06:21It was originally designed without a dorsal fin, but one was added before its first flight on the 6th of September 1943.
06:29The plane used contra-rotating propellers, spinning behind the fins.
06:33music
06:34Music
06:48The first example crashed due to undercarriage failure and the plane was a total write-off.
07:11The pilot, John Myers, though badly injured, survived and recovered to fly again.
07:18With its wingtip Venturas, elevons, air-operated bellows rudders and wing-root intakes, the XP-56 exhibited the innovation and design daring that was the hallmark of the Northrop Company.
07:31Only two XP-56s were built, but for such an extreme design, they were quite successful planes.
07:39The Germans, meanwhile, were developing the Dornier 335, with propellers at both ends.
07:44The plane actually went into series production, but only a few had been delivered to the Luftwaffe by the end of the war.
07:52Here, the designers' experimentation with engine placement saw two embedded in tandem in the fuselage,
07:57one behind the cockpit driving the rear propeller by means of a shaft.
08:02Two versions of the 335 went into production, the single-seat fighter bomber and a two-seat night fighter.
08:09One of the successful pusher concepts, and certainly the biggest, was the B-36 Peacemaker,
08:21with its six engines positioned along the trailing edge of its huge wing.
08:25One of the main reasons for this arrangement was so that the wing's lift was not disrupted by the engine nacelles
08:31and the airflow over the wings was not disturbed by the massive turbulence of the propellers.
08:49The arrival of the jet engine set a whole new range of problems and options to the designers.
08:55Not the least of the considerations they now faced was the limited power of the early jets,
09:00which saw the emergence of aircraft like the Junkers 287,
09:03which, in addition to its forward-swept wings, employed multiple engines,
09:07in this case in a pair on the nose and another pair on the wings.
09:11And this still left the Junkers light on for power,
09:13and it often employed rocket pods to assist take-off.
09:16The Germans experimented with several large multi-engined jets,
09:20and some of their designs have either influenced or mimicked the efforts of post-war designers in other countries.
09:27Martin's XB-51 had two of its three engines slung on pylons under the fuselage,
09:33with the third mounted in the tail.
09:35The placement of the engines was decided upon to keep the intakes clear of the disturbed air around the plane's fuselage.
09:42One reason for such an arrangement.
09:44Another reason for an arrangement where the engines sit clear of the fuselage on pylons
09:49is best exemplified by the A-10,
09:51where the possibility of damage to one engine sending bits of debris into the other
09:55is minimised by keeping the engines as far apart as possible,
09:59so that hopefully the plane will survive battle damage.
10:03The location of the engines of a plane, and the number of engines to be used,
10:07remain variables that designers weigh in developing new aircraft.
10:11Even today, new planes appear with shapes that we find odd,
10:15like the way that the nearly familiar shape of Boeing's YC-14,
10:19suggesting the Hercules' and Lockheed's other transports,
10:22is disrupted by the positioning of the engines in their barrel-like housings before the wing.
10:28This is no accident or whim that reflects the particular role intended for the plane,
10:33with the wings deflecting the engine's thrust to shorten take-off.
10:36The Heinkel 162, designed in the last desperate months of the war to be rapidly mass-produced by slave labour,
10:59simply lumped the engine on top,
11:01giving it clean airflow and keeping it away from the wing to avoid disruption of the wing's lift,
11:05and perhaps also because such a location was a simple and cheap design option.
11:11This location of the engine appeared in other designs for the Luftwaffe,
11:15and was also suggested much later by the North American company's YF-107,
11:20developed from a design study conducted around the F-100 Super Sabre.
11:24The F-107 had a large dorsal intake, directly behind the pilot's position.
11:29The designers surely had their good reasons for adopting the configuration,
11:34but the pilots were also justified in their detestation of the idea of being both unable to see behind them,
11:40and unable to be certain that, upon ejecting from the plane,
11:44they would not be sucked into the intake or impaled upon it.
11:46The F-107 flew well, and was considered a formidable proposition,
11:52but was edged out of selection by the Air Force by the F-105.
11:56Only three F-107s were built,
11:58and the pilots never got to test the designers' promises that ejection would be safe.
12:02With a plane like the F-107, with the jet buried in the fuselage,
12:19the disruption to the exterior of the plane is caused by intakes to supply air to the engine.
12:25In the past 50 years, jet engines have appeared in almost every possible position
12:29in the basic form of an aeroplane that's imaginable.
12:32An obvious position was to sling the engine underneath,
12:36accepting the drag penalty and simplifying the construction.
12:39However, this plane, Messerschmitt's P-1101,
12:43had another feature that made it the subject of a lot of Allied attention after the war.
12:47It employed a variable position wing,
12:50with three fixed positions between 35 and 45 degrees of sweep set before take-off.
12:56From this basis, the engineers at the Bell Corporation, under Robert Woods,
13:00developed a practical in-flight variable sweep wing mechanism.
13:04The result, complex but functional, was fitted to the company's X-5 experimental plane,
13:10the first successful swing wing aircraft.
13:13One side benefit of the X-5 was that the plane had appalling spin characteristics,
13:18and was difficult to fly.
13:19And studies of what was wrong with the design revealed a lot of information about how to interpret wind tunnel data,
13:26and further, contributed significantly to an understanding of what made a plane susceptible to such bad spin behaviour.
13:32The advantage of a swing wing like the F-111s is that it allows the plane to take advantage of the higher lift
13:43provided by a straight wing at lower speeds,
13:46and also to sweep the wing back to minimise drag problems at high speed.
13:50The designers have incorporated the virtues of both options,
13:54avoiding making a choice and limiting the plane's potential.
13:56Of course, the variation in approaches to wing shape and placement has been large,
14:02and, as with the question of engine placement, much theorising and testing has gone on,
14:06and a great variety of shapes has been seen at one time or another.
14:10Of course, not only do wings provide lift, they provide drag, turbulence and weak points.
14:16Hence, as planes have become faster, and the drag and turbulence,
14:20as well as the forces operating on the wing, have become greater,
14:23attention to the wing shape has heightened.
14:25Alexander Lippisch, the German designer of the Delta Wing,
14:29came to the US after the war and developed the idea for Convair into the XF-92.
14:35A Delta Wing gives advantages in allowing a thin wing,
14:39but one that still contains a lot of storage space.
14:42It also provides a large wing area to allow slower take-off and landing speeds,
14:47and shifts the control surfaces well aft of the centre of gravity.
14:51To counter the desirable aspects, there is a tendency to inferior spin recovery,
14:56and a requirement for high-angle take-off and landing attitude.
15:00The XF-92, with its extravagant fin, is an extreme Delta configuration.
15:06The B-58 Hustler, another Convair Delta Wing, with its dramatic plan form,
15:11is perhaps one of the most memorable of these designs.
15:14It was the Air Force's first supersonic bomber,
15:17but was caught by the development of both anti-aircraft and intercontinental ballistic missiles,
15:22and was not produced in as large a run as had originally been envisioned.
15:27Another approach to the shape of planes was that taken by the McDonnell Company
15:31in developing its first aircraft.
15:34The company had been making components for other manufacturers,
15:37but was determined to strike out in its own right.
15:40In the clamour of war, the Air Force was busy with procurement,
15:44and production designs were given higher priority in access to materials and funding
15:49than were experimental types.
15:51The only high-priority prototypes were those for jet-powered and night fighter designs.
15:57McDonnell were perhaps lucky, therefore, to get backing for their experimental plane.
16:02The company's first design, the XP-67,
16:05a twin-engine, single-seat monoplane that was known as the BAT,
16:09was far from conventional,
16:11and reflected radical choices in configuration.
16:14Two prototypes were ordered in October 1941,
16:18but the first wasn't to fly until January 1944.
16:22The laminar flow airfoil sections were maintained throughout the design,
16:26with the fuselage and nacelles blended into the large wing surface.
16:30This form of long, sweeping curves expanding and contracting
16:35lent the plane a unique appearance
16:37and gave it a very large internal volume
16:39while maintaining a small frontal area.
16:43The shape contained enough space for large fuel tanks,
16:46pressurised cockpit, tricycle undercarriage,
16:48and six 37mm cannon.
16:52The supercharged engines utilised their exhausts for extra thrust,
16:56and the plane employed many experimental or advanced design features.
17:01Unfortunately, the engines provided failed to deliver the expected power,
17:05and the BAT never was pushed to see how fast its shape could actually go.
17:10The laminar flow streamlining of the plane
17:13represents an approach to one of the persisting and intractable problems of aerodynamics,
17:18what is referred to as boundary layer turbulence.
17:21This contributes about 80% of the friction drag created by a plane,
17:25with that friction drag representing approximately half of all drag working against an aircraft.
17:31The boundary layer is the very thin layer of air next to the surface of an aircraft in flight.
17:38When the flow of this air is uniform,
17:40that is when the particles move in parallel and don't intermingle,
17:43the airflow is said to be laminar.
17:45Natural flow of this type is rare.
17:48The boundary layer generally breaks up into a turbulent flow
17:51as it passes over the wing and fuselage,
17:53resulting in a sharp increase in friction drag.
17:56The study of laminar flow control was initiated by a number of researchers around the world during the mid-1930s,
18:04with most of them approaching the problem from the standpoint of streamlining,
18:08believing that a perfect shape could be developed that would ensure clean air around a plane.
18:13As they saw it, the idea was to maintain laminar flow by scientifically shaping aerofoils and related aerodynamic bodies,
18:23and they achieved considerable success in theoretical pursuit of this aim.
18:28However, that success was limited overall in that, with the structures they designed,
18:33it was found that the stability of the natural laminar boundary layer profile
18:37was too low at high speed to withstand even very small disturbance.
18:41A more successful approach has proven to be mechanical intervention,
18:46removing the innermost part of the boundary layer with very small amounts of suction through a porous skin.
18:52This is, however, too expensive and hard to maintain to be much practical use in production aircraft,
18:58and the problem remains.
19:01The XP-67, representing perhaps the most extreme example of streamlining,
19:06did show favourable wind tunnel results through extensive testing.
19:09But ultimately, it was a nice try at something impossible.
19:14It must be added that the bat was not just strange, but in its own way, quite beautiful.
19:19After a generally unsatisfactory performance in testing, due in no small part to the limits of the engines,
19:41the first XP-67 crashed on September the 6th, 1944,
19:46and the second example was cancelled, bringing the career of the bat to a close.
19:56The forward thinking of the blending of fuselage and wings
19:59has been one of the faces of aircraft design that has lived on,
20:03being refined into some of today's production designs.
20:06Perhaps the most famous example is shrouded in secrecy,
20:10the redoubtable SR-71, Kelly Johnson's delta-winged blackbird.
20:21Another plane with blended shapes is the variable geometry B-1,
20:25which has emerged from its off-and-on development
20:27as one of today's most potent military aircraft.
20:31Fast, capable of nap-of-the-earth flight,
20:33and using a battery of inboard computers.
20:36Its sleek lines and advanced avionics combine in a form that is dictated by its mission,
20:42incursion by manned bombers into hostile airspace being so difficult today
20:46that the plane's only hope of success in carrying out a mission
20:50lies in its stealth and electronic countermeasures abilities.
20:57In the realm of fighters, too, the softening of shapes has persisted,
21:06with General Dynamics F-16 being a prime example of modern design.
21:10Here, the most important aspect of the design is that it's deliberately unstable,
21:15having its centre of gravity too far to the rear,
21:18and the plane is kept flyable by the constant ministrations of computers,
21:22the advantage of this arrangement being in augmented manoeuvrability.
21:25Without the computers, the plane would porpoise uncontrollably.
21:30With the computers, it's one of the world's top air superiority weapons.
21:43The X-3, with its arrowhead lines, showed another approach to high-speed wings,
21:49limiting them to the stubby squared fins that were to reappear on the F-104 starfighter.
21:55In 1950, another American fighter that drew upon German wartime research made its first flight,
22:11the Vought F-7U Cutlass, a carrier fighter for the United States Navy
22:16that started another of the design genealogies we can trace to the current day.
22:20The Cutlass was an extreme design for its time,
22:24a tailless single-seater with two after-burning turbojets
22:28and twin rudders midway out on the 38-degree swept-back wings trailing edge.
22:33The wings had an aspect ratio of 3 to 1 and leading-edge slots.
22:38This layout offered advantages for a carrier-based aircraft,
22:42for it offered a high rate of climb and top speed,
22:44combined with compactness when the plane's squared wings were folded.
22:53290 Cutlasses were built,
22:55and they proved to be an extremely strong aircraft with great performance.
22:59But they suffered a high attrition from accidents,
23:02and their time on the inventory was to be cut short.
23:05They stayed in service only three years after production stopped in 1955.
23:09However, looking at several of today's fighters,
23:13we can see echoes of the F-7U's shape.
23:17Here, the designers had done away with the conventional tail of an aircraft,
23:21and its attendant drag and turbulent vortices.
23:25The predictable elements of an aeroplane must therefore be seen as options,
23:30dictated to by the nature of the task at hand.
23:33Planes with no tail offer advantages for some functions,
23:36and the Cutlass, like today's F-14, was an excellent carrier-based fighter.
23:59At the same time as the Cutlass was going out of service,
24:02NASA and the Air Force both began series of tests on another lineage.
24:07This time, not only was the tail missing, so were the wings.
24:11The functional specifications for this aircraft were completely new.
24:15It was to be a flyable orbiter,
24:17a spacecraft that could be flown back to a landing
24:19after surviving hypersonic speeds and extreme heat in re-entry.
24:24The descriptive normally applied to these shapes is lifting bodies.
24:28They do, in fact, have a wing-like aerofoil cross-section,
24:32but it's the whole fuselage.
24:35The shapes avoid having any flat planes to present to friction in re-entry,
24:39with their softened belly lines and nose.
24:42They were designed to present minimal drag in their long, semi-powered glides.
24:47It was planned that they would have their own rocket motors
24:50to allow them to manoeuvre in the Earth's atmosphere
24:53and land in a fairly conventional way.
24:57The lifting bodies arose out of research conducted by NASA,
25:00which was picked up on by the Air Force
25:02in considering a project for reusable spacecraft
25:05that must be seen as the grandfather of today's space shuttle.
25:09NASA's HL-10 and M2F-2 were both constructed by Northrop
25:13and both had fairly checkered careers.
25:16They proved to be extremely tricky things to fly.
25:19They were tested and flown successfully,
25:22though, of course, they never achieved the grander aims of their designers.
25:26In the main, because the technology of that era,
25:28and indeed still today's technology,
25:31could not provide the materials or the avionics
25:33to allow such a plane to be successfully built.
25:35The lifting bodies were essentially constructed
25:55to carry out experiments that would supply a database
25:58for the development of related materials and dynamics.
26:02At the time, two schools of thought were emerging
26:04from the chaos of the early days of space research.
26:08One, concerned with ballistic re-entry,
26:10argued that an object re-entering from space
26:12should be allowed to plunge into the atmosphere directly.
26:16The counter-idea was that the re-entering body
26:19be shaped to allow a somewhat slower,
26:21controlled atmospheric penetration
26:23with return to a landing under conventional aerodynamic control.
26:27The two schools were poles apart.
26:30A lifting re-entry vehicle would be significantly more advanced
26:34and technologically far more demanding.
26:37It would, of course, also be far more useful.
26:40But not only would it have to withstand the stresses of being launched,
26:44but it would have to perform in four different regimes of flight.
26:47Space, hypersonic trans-atmospheric,
26:51trans-sonic inside the atmosphere,
26:52and subsonic prior to landing.
26:56However, the complexity of the task was not as daunting
26:59as the potential rewards were alluring.
27:02A large number of different configurations
27:05for a trans-atmospheric vehicle
27:07had been proposed during the course of the early space program,
27:10but few suggested viable solutions
27:13to the extraordinary problems of re-entry.
27:17The research had led in 1958 to NASA's M2 configuration,
27:22a half cone with a rounded nose.
27:25Theoretically, such a vehicle would permit reductions in G requirement
27:29from 8 to possibly as low as 1.
27:33Development work had shown that the plane was barely stable in subsonic flight
27:37and repeated modification was undertaken
27:39in arriving at the shape of the M2F2, seen here.
27:44After the modifications,
27:46the shape exhibited an almost conventional airfoil cross-section.
27:51The M2F2 and the HL-10, NASA's two test aircraft,
27:56went through an extended series of glide tests and powered flight tests
27:59with successful firing of their rocket engines
28:02and in-flight controlled manoeuvres.
28:04Although their handling characteristics were not ideal,
28:08they were both flyable
28:09and served successfully as test vehicles.
28:11The NASA tests on their lifting bodies
28:21The NASA tests on their lifting bodies
28:39followed considerable work by scientists and engineers
28:43working within NASA's own facilities,
28:45developing the basic theories of the aircraft
28:47and also constructing and testing a model of the proposition,
28:51the M2F1.
28:53This was fairly rudimentary,
28:55with a fixed undercarriage simply bolted to the bottom
28:57of the plywood and tubular steel body
28:59and had been primarily concerned
29:01with the practical assessment of the lift generated by the shape
29:04and the controllability of such a vehicle.
29:08Originally towed behind a car,
29:10the model had gone on to being tested as a glider
29:12towed behind the NASA C-47.
29:15As can be seen from this sequence,
29:17the M2F1 shape provided a lot of lifting power
29:20as the little aircraft soared above its target take-off.
29:23Earlier, the Air Force had been involved
29:42in the Boeing X-20 Dinosaur Program
29:45and the Martin X-23 tests.
29:48These had also been involved in the same problem,
29:50the design of reusable, controllable re-entry vehicles,
29:54and the X-23 in particular
29:55had been a forerunner of the lifting body configuration.
29:59The Dinosaur, cancelled in 1963,
30:02had never actually progressed beyond the construction of mock-ups.
30:06But a lot of the work done in proving technologies
30:09and materials to be used in the program
30:11was of great value years later
30:13in the development of the Rockwell Space Shuttle.
30:20The fat little X-23s, four of which were built,
30:29were actually launched in 1966 and 67
30:32and pioneered much work in heat shielding and cooling systems
30:36that remains valuable.
30:37The Air Force involvement with the X-23 and the Dinosaur
30:51was directed at study of flight at high speed outside the atmosphere
30:55and complementary studies of the behaviour of lifting bodies
30:58inside the atmosphere in glide and landing tests
31:01similar to those with the NASA craft
31:03were conducted by the X-24 planes.
31:05This was actually the same plane rebuilt.
31:09Originally the X-24A, based on research by the Martin Company,
31:13the plane was rebuilt as the X-24B
31:15with a totally different appearance
31:17to reflect theoretical studies conducted by the Air Force itself.
31:27The X-24 program overall was successful
31:30in demonstrating the theoretical advantages of the lifting body shape
31:33for the role of reusable piloted spacecraft
31:36and further, they demonstrated reliable controllability
31:39beyond that of the earlier NASA models.
31:42Overall, the lifting body tests conducted at Edwards during the 1960s
31:47laid the groundwork and pointed the way
31:49for the development of the first functioning reusable craft,
31:53the Space Shuttle.
31:54However, they also dispelled some of the wilder hopes
31:58in relation to the concept of such space vehicles
32:00and spelled out the painful message about the enormous cost
32:03and the technological challenge involved in such dreams.
32:07In addition, they demonstrated that such craft would be difficult work
32:11for the pilot, demanding extreme care and precision.
32:15The testing program saw many potentially dangerous situations develop
32:19and it was perhaps partially a matter of luck,
32:22as much as skill,
32:23that there were no fatalities during the program.
32:25It's probably true to say that no experimental planes testing
32:30can be thought of as free of danger.
32:32Wherever the scientists and designers push into the realm
32:35of the theoretical or the unknown,
32:37there's always the potential for the unforeseen
32:39to send things seriously astray.
32:42This is probably platitudinous.
32:45Certainly it can be accommodated by Murphy's law
32:47without the need to delve into chaos theory.
32:49Where the lifting bodies incorporated the aerofoil into the fuselage
32:54and did away with the wings,
32:56there's long been another school of design that reversed this
32:59to make the plane all-wing,
33:01doing away with the fuselage and tail.
33:03In this case, though here we're looking at the German Horton flying wing
33:07of the Second World War,
33:08the leading voice and the leading practitioner of the design school
33:12was an American.
33:13The Horton brothers' work was based upon the vision of a man
33:16who pursued the dream of the flying wing from very early on,
33:20building his first such aircraft, a Balsam model, in 1923.
33:25He was to doggedly pursue that dream for three decades,
33:28convinced that one day the skies would be filled with flying wings.
33:33Not a wide-eyed visionary,
33:34he was an experienced and successful aviation designer,
33:37Jack Northrup, seen here on the left,
33:40and he had the knowledge and expertise
33:41to see his dream come to fruition
33:43and, in fact, to build a series of planes to prove his case.
33:48However, it was to be a long time
33:50before a flying wing was to go into full production.
33:53In 1940, Northrup built and flew the N1M
33:57as preliminary research to lead up to a large bomber.
34:00It was to be followed by a series of variations
34:03over the next few years.
34:05Next was the N9M,
34:07which was a 60-foot model of the bomber to come.
34:09But Northrup was also concerned to build flying wings
34:12to cover the whole spectrum of military needs,
34:15and new planes appeared at regular intervals.
34:18To an outsider, there must have been a somewhat obsessive quality
34:21about the constant evolution of the types.
34:24With the concept so radical,
34:26there was plenty of tinkering to do
34:27to establish the safest and most controllable configuration
34:30and adopt it for use.
34:33Along the way, there were to be several notable achievements,
34:35including the MX-324,
34:38which was the first rocket-powered aircraft to fly in America.
34:40The wings appeared to fill every niche,
35:10even that of pulse-jet-powered flying bomb.
35:13But the aim was directed at building big flying wing bombers,
35:16and the first of these was the XB-35.
35:19The Air Force had ordered two prototypes in November 1941
35:22and followed this with a contract for 13 test planes.
35:27Wartime plans to build 200
35:29at the Martin Company's Omaha plant were dropped,
35:32but the plane proceeded, slowly but surely, towards completion.
35:35The first flight came on June 25, 1946.
35:40The crew consisted of nine men
35:46and there was accommodation for an additional six relief crewmen.
35:50The relief were necessary because the plane was designed
35:53to be capable of a cruising range of over 10,000 miles.
35:56The first three flying wings were powered by Pratt & Whitney piston engines,
36:07but an order placed on the 1st of June 1945
36:10saw the next two planes completed with Allison J-35 jets as XB-49s,
36:16and by 1947, the first of these had been rolled out ready for testing.
36:20No less than eight of the engines were installed,
36:24fed by intakes in the leading edge.
36:27The effect of these fuel-hungry early jet engines on the plane's range
36:30was catastrophic, bringing it back to an estimated 4,000 miles
36:34if the wing was carrying a reasonable bomb load.
36:37This range penalty did, of course, apply to all the early jet bombers.
36:52The XB-49 first flew on October the 21st, 1947,
36:57and the plane was soon to demonstrate its worth,
36:59averaging over 500 miles per hour on some of its extended test flights.
37:03It's worth noting that the Air Force at the time
37:06was also working with the Convair Company on the B-36,
37:10the massive six-piston-engined post-war strategic bomber
37:13that was to go into full production.
37:16This plane, which was to be the Air Force's strategic backbone
37:19for the next 10 years, was never to approach 500 miles per hour,
37:24even with added jets on later models.
37:27However, in late 1947,
37:29within the range limitations of the thirsty jets,
37:31the XB-49 program was running smoothly,
37:34and the Air Force placed orders for more bombers
37:37and for a reconnaissance version.
37:38The heart of the idea of the wing was that without the drag and turbulence
38:07of the fuselage and tail,
38:09a plane with a given power plant and fuel storage
38:11would be able to carry a comparable load further and faster
38:15than a conventional aircraft of similar specifications.
38:18And this was to prove to be largely true.
38:21The Northrop team were to overcome some very testing problems along the way,
38:25but the XB-49 was refined into a fine flying machine.
38:30Without the normal control surfaces,
38:31some very complex developments had to be made
38:34to give the pilot secure command of the craft.
38:37But measures of can-do and lateral thinking,
38:39coupled with the application of ingenuity
38:41and hard theoretical and practical work,
38:44gave the wing unique and fully functioning systems.
38:47The Air Force retained its doubts
38:49about whether the wing was a stable enough platform for bombing,
38:52and there were problems fitting the large
38:54and unwieldy nuclear weapons of the day into its bomb bay.
38:58But the XB-49 program had, by 1948,
39:01fully verified Jack Northrop's expectations and predictions
39:04and looked set for introduction into the Air Force inventory.
39:11However, in April 1949,
39:14the contracts were cancelled and the planes were scrapped,
39:17taking with them Northrop's dream of a world
39:19where the sky was filled with economical, efficient flying wings.
39:23Now, a preview of the flying wing transport of tomorrow.
39:27The midsection provides ample room for 80 passengers.
39:33Spaciousness keynotes the luxurious main lounge,
39:36extending 53 feet inside the wing.
39:39And future air travellers will really see something.
39:43Through the plexiglass windows of the front wing edge,
39:45passengers have an unimpaired view of the earth,
39:48unrolling thousands of feet below.
39:50Coast-to-coast flights in four hours may not be too far away.
39:54The dorsal tip of the plane provides an excellent vantage point
39:57to see the world go by.
40:00Snug as bugs in their magic carpet,
40:02air travellers can look down on mere earthlings
40:05as the double quartet of mighty turbojets
40:07whistle them through space.
40:10The sleek Air Leviathan carries more cargo farther,
40:14faster, and with less fuel than any comparable plane.
40:17And the bar will raise the spirits of those
40:21who don't feel high enough in the stratosphere.
40:24The flying wing has the stability of a fine club.
40:28The public quickly accepts all the miracles that science provides.
40:32Even skyliners like this will become commonplace.
40:35But the giant flying wing is more than a super-streamlined airplane.
40:39It is the fulfilment of scientific vision
40:41and symbolises the practical dreams of science
40:45for our world of tomorrow.
40:47When the flying wing reappeared,
40:50it was not to be as a luxury liner of the skies,
40:52but as something altogether more advanced and dangerous.
40:55The stealth bomber, the B-2, built by Northrop's company,
41:00took to the air in 1989 after a long and secretive gestation,
41:05using developments of the controls of the XB-49
41:07and owing a lot to the work done
41:09during that plane's construction and flight testing.
41:13Jack Northrop, old and infirm,
41:15had been one of very few people not directly involved in the programme
41:19to be told anything about it.
41:21And he died knowing that his vision of the flying wing
41:23was to be fulfilled in this strange and menacing new shape.
41:28Who knows?
41:29The future may yet see flying wings abounding on the world's airways.
41:33But for the moment, this is the only flying wing in production.
41:37It is also one of the most astonishing triumphs of today's technology.
41:49This is the only flying wing in production.
42:19This is the only flying wing in production.
42:49This is the only flying wing in CAD biennichen.
42:51This is the only flying wing wing in-办- Neighbets,
42:53which is the only flying wing item now who is facing a aliens this week.
42:57That is a flying wing wing inero.
42:58This is the retransmissed orì ‘Ñ‰ed fighting guy,
42:58that is the only flying wing wing with�ed personnel.
43:00This is the only flying wing in the green deck of america.
43:02The five hundred rods of the Pacific is of the Pacificì™”ance.
43:04So the currentawanodes that tinha conservativeboroughwillÄ°
43:07ademarnya129 set of the world's airsy from BI ear,
43:10This is the only flying salmon voy to order for rapture.
43:16The X-20
43:46The X-2029 go back to work done over 50 years ago.
43:50This plane, built by the Grumman Corporation and first flown in December 1984,
43:55is in part designed to evaluate the assertions of research
43:58which was first presented in a scientific paper in 1935.
44:03The true value of that paper on swept wings in relation to forward swept wings
44:07has been impossible to test in the interim
44:09because of the inadequacies of the available technology.
44:12It was not until the development of advanced composites during the 1970s
44:17that there existed materials strong enough.
44:20Research and development is, like rust, constant.
44:24The creation of new materials, new avionics, new radars goes on,
44:28sometimes coincidental to potential applications to aircraft design.
44:32But with different new tools and materials,
44:35the designer can do different things,
44:37to current shapes, old shapes or new shapes.
44:39Some of the plans for large hypersonic passenger craft submitted to the X-30 project
44:44look suspiciously like very, very large versions of the 1960 lifting bodies.
44:50Some look like Flash Gordon artwork,
44:52and some simply look like nothing that's ever been thought out loud previously.
44:57Behind all of them, there's a fair certainty
44:58that they would be able to be built and do the job.
45:01If we accept that each new design generation looks strange when it's introduced,
45:06then the next generation could strike us as downright weird.
45:10Don't hold your breath, perhaps, but keep looking to the skies.
45:14There will, we can assume, be more strange planes to come.
45:17The X-30
45:29The X-30
45:30The X-30
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