AVIATION PIONEER and entrepreneur John K. "Jack" Northrop is best remembered for a family of flying wings culminating in the piston-powered XB-35 and jet-propelled YB-49 bombers. If the technology of the time—and their own design flaws—denied them the promise Northrop had predicted, he lived long enough to learn shortly before his death in 1981 that the company that bore his name was working on one that ultimately succeeded, and brilliantly so: the Advanced Technology Bomber, which became the B-2 Spirit.
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