When North American Aviation produced the film “The North American Story” during the 1950s, their new F-100 Super Sabre fighter bomber had only been in service for a short time. The film features several variants of North American’s finest, including FJ Fury fighter bombers, F-86 Sabre fighters, BT-9 trainers, O-47 observation aircraft, XB-21 Dragon bombers, T-6/SNJ/Harvard trainers, B-25 Mitchell medium bombers, P-51 Mustang fighter bombers, B-45 Tornado bombers, AJ-1 Savage carrier-borne strategic bombers, T-28 Trojan trainers, and F-100 Super Sabre fighter-bombers. The film, uploaded to YouTube by PeriscopeFilm, stars all of the most memorable North American designs of the 1940s and 1950s.
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North American would go on to develop the X-15 and continue to refine the F-100 Super Sabre. One of the company’s most ambitious projects, the XB-70 Valkyrie supersonic bomber, would end in disaster but the company would also work on the Apollo Command Module and Service Module, the second stage of the Saturn V rocket, the Space Shuttle orbiter and as Rockwell would develop the B-1 Lancer. North American Aviation eventually became part of North American Rockwell, which in turn became Rockwell International, and is part of Boeing today.
