The sr-71 gets all the glory but go look at some of the aircraft that lost competitions. The convair kingfish that lost to the 71 was decades ahead. It lost for a number of reasons, some valid, some not. The f-22 competitor was super interesting as well.
Yeah, the YF-23 wins a lot of cool points on looks alone[1], and it was faster and stealthier than the F-22. Taking the -22 was probably the right choice given that it was lower risk and absurdly better than anything it's likely to encounter in its operational life.
Funny, the way i remember it happening: both YF-22s were lost do to mishaps, the YF-23 was faster, stealthier, and just as maneuverable without the vectored thrust. The AF wanted the -23, but the chairman of the senate armed services committee was from Georgia, where Lockheed promised to build the -22. and the history got rewritten.
Source: Dad was part of the YF-23 program at northrop and lost his gog when the project was shitcanned. yes, still bitter almost 30 years later.
Oh man, growing up I had a book of aeroplanes, with diagrams and stats for hundreds of planes that I would obsess over. But the editors did a very cruel thing which was putting a photo of the YF-23 on the cover, but the plane was not in the book. Drove me nuts!
There are a lot of political and national security concerns involved in that. The Air Force wants to maintain three aviation vendors in the industry as a matter of policy, otherwise Boeing and Lockheed are equally capable of making bombers.
Awarding the JSF to Lockheed two decades earlier had similar connotations. Boeing could maintain its aviation capabilities and expertise on the back of its commercial business. For Lockheed, losing the JSF would have meant the end of its aviation unit which the USAF deemed critical for national security.
The Convair Kingfish never actually existed and the A12 flew higher, farther, cost far less and Convair couldn’t put an aircraft in the air on time or on budget to save their lives.
The kingfish looked like something more modern than an f-117. The f-16xl that lost to the f-15e looked like a modern European design. The boeing jsf was... Ugly, but the grumman one was cool looking. Its kind of a trend, the losers are so much cooler.
You can definitely see the B2 exhaust design in the Y23. It seems the Northrop gets the bombers and Lockheed gets the fighters. Makes sense logistically.
Nothing about modern fighter procurement makes any sense logistically!
It seems the F22 was basically picked on the promise to make as many components in as many separate states as possible, in order to ensure every politician on the hill brought into it.
And the idea of servicing different parts of the F35 in different buying countries is another logistical masterstroke, not! Oh my god, servicing F35 engines in Turkey just when Turkey starts to dance with Russia, what were we thinking?
Right now we're telling Turkey you can't have the F35 because you've just brought the S400 SAMs from Russia, but we've already invested in servicing the F35 engines there...
Turkey already bought F-35s[1], but are being told both that they can't buy anymore, and the servicing of the engines will be moved out of Turkey by 2020 if they insist on buying the S-400 from Russia[2][3].
Also, even if they didn't sell the F-35 to Turkey but still serviced the engines there that would make logical sense. The reason the US is paranoid about the S-400 is because they think radar data about the F-35 and other NATO aircraft will be fed back to Russia[4]. That concern obviously doesn't apply to a stand-alone F-35 engine sitting on the ground.
From my reading, I don't think any of the F35s had been delivered, but some Turkish pilots had started training in the US in '18. That is now stopped.
Over 900 parts in the F35 were made by Turkish companies, and they have to now be re-sourced.
Now, I don't think the F35 operators want F35 engines sitting around in a country now receiving Russian military advisers. The idea that the engine isn't classified is crazy.
Russia has similar engines at their disposal as in the F35. The F22 engines however are extremely classified because of their ability to supercruise without afterburners.
The parts we keep secret are the stealth coatings which we do domestically and the sensor fusion which is mostly software based
I believe Turkey owns those F-35s operating in the US, they're used for training. On that Wikipedia page you can see there's dozens of F-35s in the US owned by foreign air forces.
Can they just fly them out of the US at this point? No idea, but it's interesting to see what'll happen with that.
Just because Russia has S-400 advisors in Turkey doesn't mean they get to walk around wherever they want, including wherever the F-35's engines are serviced.
The concern was specifically that they'd have access to detailed radar data on the F-35, which they'd have access to in their roles as advisors for the S-400 missile system.
