Graham,
Do you want excerpts from the old “Airmet” broadcasts, or from Shannon Aeradio on a Saturday afternoon when the operators had come on duty from a couple hours of “refreshments”. Real fall about material – especially when you were trying to receive the eastern N American Obs/TAFs!!!
HTH
Resmoroh

At this stage… I am open to all suggestions/ideas. Initially I guess I’m just out to see if there is enough interest in it as a project!

Some interesting comments here – many thanks!

I must keep saying, I never suggested Chadwick ‘copied’ or ‘stole’ from Northrop – I said was he ‘inspired by’. Indeed, if you go back into the Northrop story there is very good evidence that Northrop ‘copied’ his first wing idea – to the point of plagiarism – from Anthony ‘Tony’ Stadlman with whom he worked at Lougheed.

As for Northrop using others research information – quite possible. Pre-war there was Alexander Lippisch and the Horten brothers in Germany, also Soviet designers such as Boris Ivanovich Cheranovsky and of course Frenchman Charles Fauvel. In this period as well you also have to bring in the Westland-Hill Pterodactyl series.

What I have been trying to do, is to construct a time-line of possible events.

Where I am having difficulties with some of the comments here containing the inference that Northrop used ideas from ‘captured German scientists’. In terms of the original post I made I’m talking about the Turbodyne B-35 – itself an offshoot of the B-35 that itself was ‘pre-developed’ from the N9M series of sub-scale models. A Mockup Board from Wright Field arrived at Hawthorn on 5 July 1942 to Inspect a full size wood mock-up of the center section and a portion of the left wing of the B-35, approval was given and manufacture of the XB-35 began at Hawthorne early in 1943.

The Turbodyne engine seems to have been originally conceived by Vladimer Pavlecka chief of research at Northrop in 1940. After assorted models and test examples the first engine ran in a Northrop test cell March 1945. Around the same time plans were made to eventually flight-test this engine in the first XB-35 42-13603.

All of that fits into a time frame 1939-1945 which to me precludes any influence from the inferred suggestion of Northrop Inc using material from ‘captured German scientists’.

Peter Clegg, who was in contact with Margaret Dove, Roy Chadwick’s daughter for many years, assures me that Chadwick visited the US and Canada a number of times during the war and visited Northrop ‘at least once’. During one trip there was a meeting with Dr. Norman F. Ramsey of the Manhattan Project in October 1943 for example. Ramsey seized the chance to show Chadwick some preliminary sketches of both the ‘Thin Man’ gun and the ‘Fat Man’ implosion weapon casings. Chadwick assured Ramsey that the Lancaster could accommodate either bomb and promised whatever support might be needed.

All of this puts Chadwick in the right place at the right timeframe and at this point it appears that both he and Northrop were free from any influence of German wartime scientific research – for captive materiel did not start to cross either the Channel or the Atlantic until April-July 1945.

Accounts I have seen suggest that Chadwick started preliminary design work in the Avro 698 in the winter of 1946/7. That gives him a good twelve months to make use of captured German research data.

The two drawings I put up at the start of this thread proport to be design studies from Northrop Inc for an atomic bomb carrier powered by a pair of Turbodyne (T-37) turbo-props. Other drawings and specifications state proposals for four Allison turbo-prop powered versions and others with a combination of J-40 and T-47 jet engines along with the T-37s.

As you have seen – the drawings show a stub-forward fuselage and a typical Northrop rear tailcone. The difficulty is what is the date of them? I don’t know.

Given the known timeframe of XB/YB-35 build and flight and the horrendous problems they had with the P&W piston engines and the contra-props, my instinct says that these were drawn up post 1946, but they may have been in Northrop’s design study folder much earlier. I guess we will never know!

Northrop Report A-94 dated September 1948 – which is one of the last for the Turbodyne lays out several alternatives…

8 x J-47s
6 x J-40s
2 x XT-37s (turbodynes) + 2 J-40s

There are other references to 2 x XT-37s + 6 x J-47s.

It seems that once airborne the turbojets were to be shut down and the a/c would cruise on Turbodynes alone!

(not helped by not showing the whole wing)

Perhaps this might help!

Both evolved to have vetsiges of fuselages, B-35/49 in the tail, 698/Vulcan forward cockpit area.

That’s what I thought until I started digging. Northrop had problems with the flying wings – they drooped wingtips, played around with the prop-shaft tunnels and did all sorts of other things to increase any semblance of vertical surface area.

At NACA they even added tail surfaces to the B-35 wind-tunnel models _ have picts.

Northrop also did a number of tailess projects that had vertical fins. Look at the XP-56 for example.

The twin-Turbodyne B-35 – which also had six jets installed as well – or the four Allison version for that matter – are the first designs I have seen that do have the Vulcan-style cockpit area and tail cone – all that is really different is the lack of vertical fin and different trailing edges.

I’m aware of the recent Flypast article – I would love to see a timeline of Chadwick’s visit to Northrop in relationship to what is known about the timeframe of his early work on the Vulcan – I’ve just got it in my mind that Northrop shows Chadwick one of the Turbodyne drawings and Chadwick thinks…. ‘That’s a good idea…. but I would dump the turboprops and put a fin on it’!

I’m up for any discussion about this as long as it does not degenerate to throwing insults!

excuse me?