Why did yf 23 lose

Both aircraft met the requirements so the decision is said to have come down to assessments of the ability of the competing contractors to deliver the aircraft. Northrop was busy with the B-2 and the YF was thought to be more fully developed and more ready to turn into the F Some have claimed that Lockheed made a better sales pitch.

You can hear it from the test pilots themselves:. The rating was actually based on stop lights. Individual requirements e. At the end of the test program, both planes rated green on all requirements. Rice had been given to decide. So the decision had to be made on a non-technical base. He was probably strongly influenced by the fact that. There was never a pilot to fly both planes, intentionally. Good luck finding a reliable source.

Please consider that stealthiness is not a one-dimensional quantity. See here or here — there is no easy decision, even with exact numbers which are classified for the YF I recommend watching the above video, the explanations are pretty clear and the knowledge is first-hand. Officially both aircraft met or exceeded the government requirements set by the ATF program office, but the Lockheed jet won out in the end of the ATF program.

The reasons why are a strange combination of Pentagon politics and little showmanship on the part of Lockheed. Midway through the ATF flyoff, the Navy inexplicably added an additional requirement to the program that they wanted to evaluate the ATF prototypes to create a naval variant as a replacement for the F airplane.

The Navy evaluated both designs and felt the F would have been unsuitable for carrier operations. Many had been pilots who had flown in Vietnam and had to deal with the shortcomings of fighting small, maneuverable MiGs in big, powerful Phantoms with out a gun. The experiences had led to the development of airplanes like the F and F with suberb dogfighting capabilities. Leaders did not want to stray from this winning formula, particularly given just how successful it had been against modern Soviet hardware in Operation Desert Storm and were more skeptical of an aircraft which relied heavily on stealth for defense and attack.

This is not a terribly fair perception; the YF was a very agile airplane, particularly in the transonic and supersonic regimes of flight. But the Air Force was more interested in an advanced F with stealth characteristics, which is what Lockheed perceived and delivered with their proposal.

Finally Lockheed laid in a little showmanship with it proposal which included sorties where their jet launched missiles, giving the fallacious impression that their design was much closer to combat ready than the Northrop proposal. Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group.

The Pentagon does not want to spend its political hay by running against the grain. The thing I like about the Lockheed proposal is that the Air Force has confidence that the contractor team. Giving Lockheed the contract would help ensure both firms were still building aircraft and still well-positioned to compete for other contracts in the future. Today, the F Raptor remains the most capable air superiority fighter on the planet, but it exists only in dwindling numbers.

Would an F have managed to avoid these same cost overruns and an early demise? Alex Hollings is a writer, dad, and Marine veteran who specializes in foreign policy and defense technology analysis. Follow Alex Hollings: Facebook Twitter.

Skip to primary navigation Skip to main content Skip to primary sidebar Skip to footer Search this website. Air Force photo by Tech. Shaun Kerr. A YF in the foreground with a YF in the background. WikiMedia Commons. The F had a uniquely alien design. The Air Force knew that if it was going to ask Congress for money to fund a fighter that no longer had an opponent, the program had better be well managed. Another reason the YF won: marketing.

Lockheed put the YF through a vigorous flight test schedule that really showed off the fighter's dogfighting abilities, including an angle of attack of 60 degrees and sharp 9g turns that pushed the limits of human endurance.

While the YF was likely just as maneuverable as its competitor, Northrop didn't go out of its way to demonstrate that it could. Did the U. Perhaps, but in the long run maybe it doesn't matter much. Both were very good fighters, and the F has had a very good run. Perhaps the F would have been a fiscal disaster, or perhaps Northrop would have done better than Lockheed.

We'll never really know. In the meantime, there really hasn't been a situation where the F has come up short in ways the "F" would have not. In any case, the two companies will likely compete again—this time to build the Raptor's replacement—in the near future. Northrop Grumman shook off some of its old demons to win the contract to build the B Raider future bomber , so it should be a stiff competitor once again.