Jack Northrop founded three companies using his name. The first was the
Avion Corporation in 1928, which was absorbed in 1929 by the
United Aircraft and Transport Corporation as a subsidiary named "Northrop Aircraft Corporation" (and later became part of
Boeing). The parent company moved its operations to
Kansas in 1931, and so Northrop, along with
Donald Douglas, established a "Northrop Corporation" located in
El Segundo, California, which produced several successful designs, including the
Northrop Gamma and
Northrop Delta. However, labor difficulties led to the dissolution of the corporation by Douglas in 1937, and the plant became the El Segundo Division of
Douglas Aircraft. Northrop still sought his own company, and so in 1939 he established the "Northrop Corporation" in nearby
Hawthorne, California, a site located by co-founder
Moye Stephens. The corporation ranked 100th among United States corporations in the value of
World War II military production contracts. It was there that the
P-61 Black Widow night fighter, the
B-35 and
YB-49 experimental
flying wing bombers, the
F-89 Scorpion interceptor, the
SM-62 Snark intercontinental
cruise missile, and the
F-5 Freedom Fighter economical jet fighter (and its derivative, the successful
T-38 Talon trainer) were developed and built. Based on the experimentation with
flying wings the company developed the
B-2 Spirit stealth bomber of the 1990s. In 1994, partly due to the loss of the
Advanced Tactical Fighter contract to
Lockheed Corporation and the removal of their proposal from consideration for the
Joint Strike Fighter competition, the company bought
Grumman to form
Northrop Grumman. ==Aircraft==