I the 1940s, Jack Northrop generated great excitement with his amazing "Flying Wing," which flew like an airplane but didn't look like one, at least not in the traditional sense. It demonstrated that an aircraft did not need a tail or a fuselage to fly. The wing was enough. In fact, Northrop's first true flying wing, the small-scale N-1M, took off on its own during a high-speed taxi test on a dry lake bed in the California desert in July 1940. It hit a rough spot, bounced 10 feet into the air, and flew several hundred feet before the pilot landed it.
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