Northrop’s Flying Wing from WWII

The flying wing design is mostly associated with US bomber aircraft employing stealth technology, Lockheed F-117 Nighthawk and Northrop B-2 Spirit, designed in the 1980s. However, flying wing concepts looking quite similar to these emerged decades earlier. Back then flying wing design proposals were driven not so much by aspiration to make an aircraft invisible to radars — that technology was not such a big threat yet — as by considerations related to aerodynamics.