Northrop Grumman: Flying Wings, the B-21 Raider and Bethpage Pollution

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Northrop Grumman is the fifth largest contractor to the U.S. federal government, which supplied 87 percent of its 2024 revenue. It joins two very different companies. Grumman, founded in New York in 1929 by Leroy Grumman, built rugged Navy fighters such as the Wildcat, Hellcat and Avenger, later the F-14 Tomcat and the Apollo lunar module, and made aluminum canoes after World War II. Northrop, founded in California in 1939 by Jack Northrop, built the radar-equipped P-61 Black Widow night fighter, but Jack Northrop's passion was the tailless flying wing. His XB-35 and YB-49 were judged unsuccessful because pilots could not stabilize them, yet fly-by-wire computers in the 1980s made the same idea work as the B-2 Spirit. The two merged in 1994 in a $2.1 billion deal and went on to buy Vought, Westinghouse's defense electronics division, TRW, Ryan Aeronautical and Orbital ATK, growing to about 95,000 employees.

Today it is building the B-21 Raider bomber, which first flew in 2023, and modernizing the land-based ICBM force under the Sentinel program. It was prime contractor for the James Webb Space Telescope, winning the 2022 Collier Trophy, and builds Cygnus cargo ships, SLS solid rocket boosters, the HALO module for the lunar Gateway and the Manta Ray underwater drone unveiled for DARPA in 2024. The record also includes 52 Superfund sites. In Bethpage, New York, Grumman dumped cadmium, arsenic, chromium-tainted sludge, solvents and PCBs from 1949 to 1962 at a site that became a community park, closed in 2002, with plumes reaching the groundwater beneath nearby homes. In 2019 a University of Massachusetts Amherst institute named it the largest corporate contributor to U.S. water pollution.

• The Webb telescope's tennis court sized, five-layer sunshield had to unfold in space using about 140 release mechanisms.
• Its APG-83 AESA radar, used in F-16s, can track dozens of targets at once without moving.
• After buying TRW, Northrop Grumman agreed in 2009 to pay $325 million to settle a whistleblower suit over faulty satellite parts TRW had hidden from the Air Force.
• Litton Industries, later acquired by Northrop Grumman, provided parts of Air Force One navigation source code to a Russian company, part of 110 violations that drew a $15 million fine.
• Former executive James G. Roche left the company to become Secretary of the Air Force under George W. Bush.