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In the midst of the study, in 1953, Jones got a call from a onetime Stanford classmate, Bill Ballhouse, then Northrop's deputy chief engineer (and now its executive vice president). Ballhouse wanted to recruit him for Northrop. "I don't want to be a key on somebody's typewriter," Jones answered. "I want to work on basic problems." Ballhouse replied that Northrop had a very basic problem—it was on the road to ruin. "You know," Jones replied, "this is beginning to sound very interesting." Seven months later, against the advice of most of his friends in the industry, he joined faltering Northrop on the condition that, regardless of his title, he was to have a voice in the company's management.
Nipped by the Snark. Like many another airframe company, Northrop had been started on a shoestring by a self-schooled plane designer, and was in danger of ending on one. A veteran of Douglas and Lockheed, John Knudsen Northrop had designed the Lockheed Vega used by Wiley Post and Amelia Earhart, and in 1939 he set up his own company. World War II made it big—the Northrop-designed P-61 Black Widow gained fame as the first genuine night fighter, and Northrop rolled them out in droves. Peacetime threatened to kill the company.
In one budget-whacking day in 1949, the Air Force cut off $90 million worth of Northrop orders. By the time Tom Jones came on the scene, Northrop had only two projects of size, both precariously experimental: the F89 fighter and the winged Snark, the nation's first intercontinental missile, which was exploding so regularly that birdmen joked wryly about "the Snark-infested waters off Cape Canaveral." Time and again, Air Force procurement officers threatened to cancel the Snark if it failed just once more, and to scrap the F89 if it turned up just one more bug.
Premature Palsy. What Northrop was suffering from was a premature case of the palsy soon to afflict all airframe companies in the age of aerospace. Fast disappearing were the World War II days of mass production of aircraft with relatively little emphasis on quality control. In the swiftest industrial sequence in history, the U.S. was shifting from piston-engine planes to jets, from jets to missiles, and on beyond to the incredibly precise devices required for space exploration. Between 1953 and 1961, Pentagon purchases of manned aircraft plummeted from 9,000 to 1,500 per year, while Government spending on missiles, rockets and related research soared 600%, from $1 billion to $7 billion.
The shiftover called for many skills alien to the old airframe makers. Each successive generation of planes relied more heavily on electronics—a science pioneered by such ground-based giants as A.T. & T., General Electric Co. and RCA. And with the advent of missiles, where guidance and propulsion are more important than the "tin can," the planemakers found themselves losing more and more defense dollars to previously ground-bound companies that did not know a vertical stabilizer from a hole in the wall but were expert in automatic control systems or chemical fuels.