This is an edited transcript of an oral history interview of Kenneth Mitzner conducted by Peter Westwick. Topics covered in the interview include: Computers in aircraft design; Secrecy and classification; Relation between theory and experiment; Lofting. Kenneth Mitzner was an electrical engineer at Northrop specializing in the theory of radar scattering as applied to stealth aircraft. Kenneth Mitzner was born in Brooklyn, New York on May 7, 1938. His family moved to Harlem and then to Paterson, NJ, where he attended high school. He entered MIT in 1954 and graduated with a BS in electrical engineering in 1958. He went to Caltech for graduate school on a Hughes fellowship and earned an MS in 1959 and PhD in 1964; he also spent one year in Florence, Italy on a Fulbright. After obtaining his doctorate he took a job at Northrop in its Ventura division, working on radar and sonar scattering, and within a couple years transferred to Northrop’s radar group in Hawthorne, working on the theory of radar scattering and, eventually, stealth aircraft. He worked on Northrop’s entry in the XST competition (which led to the F-117A), on Tacit Blue, and on what became the B-2. He retired from Northrop at age 56. [Object file name], Aerospace Oral History Project, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
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