As it so happens, within arm's reach of where I'm sitting I have what is probably the book you refer to: Gary R. Pape, John M. Campbell, "Northrop Flying Wings: A History of Jack Northrop's Visionary Aircraft", Shiffer, 1995 It's a large-format book on glossy paper with tons of illusrations; it covers the prototypes as well as the bombers, and in great detail. Highly recommended. Yes, a famous story in the aviation world. Somebody had a lot of class. The book has a picture of Jack with the B-2 design team. {Hope I got the attribution right here: I didn't get the intermediate messages, so I'm picking this out of a later reply.} Umm, not quite. See pp. 160-161; they did deliberately stall a YB-49 as part of the flight test program; it was pretty benign unless the CG was way aft, in which case it became a handful. The Air Force did lose one during flight testing, it is thought perhaps as the result of a spin; it is further thought that perhaps Northrop's guidance on how to handle spins in this very unusual flying device wasn't given to the test pilots - one of whom was Glen Edwards, who the Edwards AFB is named after. The book isn't clear on why the wings were dropped; it seems to have been a combination of DoD budget limitations, cost over-runs in the wing program, the loss of the two YB-49 prototypes in accidents, etc. Noel