[00:00:18] Buster (Host): Well, it's our pleasure to have Keith here to talk about the A12 and give you some facts about it. Like he and I were just talking. There's a lot of stories outside, some true, most of them are not. But anyway, he should be able to set you straight. Let me give you a little bit of background about Keith. He's got a B.S. in aerospace engineering from the University of Oklahoma in 1960, an M.S. and Ph.D. Aerospace engineering at the University of Colorado in 1992 to 1966, and then his work history. He was with Martin Company up in Denver on missile ground Systems Design and Analysis, Advanced Programs, missile and space system research. Then he went to work for General Dynamics and Lockheed Martin and Space Systems Project Office from 1967 to 69, and then Advanced Aircraft Project Engineer, Air to air and Air to Surface conceptual design studies, and he was the chief of Advanced Designs. He was the director of a series of studies leading to the A-12 program. Deputy director, Systems Engineering, A-12. Director of Advanced Technologies, Stealth Technologies and then chief engineer of Joint Advanced Strike Fighter, the jazz program leading to the preliminary configuration definition of the Joint Strike Fighter, the F-35. He retired after downselect to two contractors, Lockheed and Boeing, for the F-35 prototype competitions in 1997. After that, he decided to some part time work. After retiring, he worked with Space Launch Corporation, Scaled Composites, which is Burt Rutan's company and others on concept for reusable air breathing first stage vehicle for launch in small satellites. He also worked with Northrop Grumman, the old Westinghouse division on various aircraft related projects. They work part time with General Dynamics and Boeing legal teams on the A-12 termination lawsuit. 91 through early 2014. His current hobby is research on physics and economics of global warming or climate change, or whatever is now being called. He has a super wife, Pam, children Stephanie, Becky and Doug, and a granddaughter, Olivia, which is five, which is that? Please welcome Keith Jackson and his story on the A-12.
[00:02:34] Keith Jackson: Thank you Buster. Can everybody hear me? I when Buster called me up to give this presentation, I said, oh, yeah, I can talk about the A-12. I've talked about it a lot. And then I got to thinking a little bit more, and I noticed that all of my charts, graphs, notes, everything had been confiscated either by security or and by the lawyers when the program was terminated. And the last presentation I gave on this was in August of 1991, which was 22 plus years ago. So with my fading memory, I hope you will hold me to all the facts I give you tonight. But I did have one presentation that I gave at an AA meeting in Los Angeles in 1991, and that was vetted very, very, very carefully by the Navy lawyers. They didn't want me to give it, but the Navy technical people said it was fine. So I did give it. And that's going to be kind of the basis of what I'm going to talk about tonight. Uh, I didn't know exactly what to cover, so I thought I'd try to cover very, very briefly kind of the whole genesis of the airplane. Uh, a little bit about the aftermath of the program. And then if you've got questions, I can try to answer questions as much as I could possibly remember. Um, first I thought I'd just mention a little bit about the early Play 812. History and stealth programs in general.
[00:03:55] Keith Jackson: Uh, we worked at General Dynamics, and in the early 1970s, early to mid 1970s, stealth was was becoming something of interest. Um, unfortunately, we missed out on that. Our Washington office got a solicitation from DARPA for people who were interested in designing a stealth prototype demonstrator airplane. Our Washington office rep had been working with DARPA on missiles, and he thought it went to the missile division, so he sent it to the missile division. They said, that's an airplane. We're not interested in airplanes. And they rejected the offer to go work on it. So we missed out on that early, that early stealth thing. But then in the mid to late 1970s, there were a series of aircraft concept design studies. The first one was done on the air to Surface Technology Integration and evaluation study at the Air Force Flight Dynamics Lab and what they were doing there was for the next generation of air to ground airplanes. They wanted to try to determine what was the what were the new technologies that were really going to make that possible, what was going to help that? Um, we did a series of studies of all kinds of airplanes. We didn't want to try to give the airplanes numbers because nobody could remember the numbers. So we gave them nicknames. One of the nicknames was Sneaky Pete. That was the stealthy airplane. I'll get that back in a minute. Well, I can show it to you.
[00:05:20] Keith Jackson: It that had we had gotten interested in stealth after that first solicitation that we missed. I had been kind of an airplane buff, and I had known that the Germans, right at the end of World War Two, had developed a flying wing, and it looked to me like that would be kind of an ideal thing for stealth. It didn't have vertical tails, all very smooth surfaces and so forth. So we put together a little, uh, one quarter scale model of something that was kind of along the lines of the Horten German design, put it out in our radar range, radar cross-section range that we had out in the backyard at the plant there, and. When we got the data in, we were kind of amazed at how how low a radar cross section we had. I can very well remember in a meeting with Jim Morandi, one of our radar guys, we told him what the radar cross section we've got. We're projecting the full scale. He says, you've got to be smoking opium. There's no way you can make the radar cross-section of an airplane that small. So that encouraged us a little bit. And yeah, we we looked at all these different airplane designs, and one of the ones that did did generate the most interest was the Sneaky Pete design. There were others that we looked at vertical takeoff and landing, uh, variable sweep and so forth. Uh, that study came and went, and then we did a study called 1995 Aircraft Technology.
[00:06:46] Keith Jackson: That was an air to air airplane. Uh, we didn't really look at stealth as being, uh, that critical to air to air. But the Sneaky Pete, as well as some supersonic designs were things that we looked at in their, uh, Air Force got quite interested in it. In fact, there was a group in the Air Force, mostly in the black world, that thought that this kind of an airplane, a subsonic flying wing, would be best for the air to air role. And there were some reasons I can touch on later. We didn't internally think it would probably sell to the Air Force because it didn't have an afterburner and high thrust to weight ratio, but there was a significant controversy on it. I remember, uh, the guys in the Air Force had me go talk to the head of the Tactical Air Command. I think it was Mike Lowe at the time, although I may maybe have the wrong director. And they presented this airplane as a possible, uh, air to air airplane would substitute for the f 22. And I think he said something on the order over my dead body. So it was it was not definitely not an air to air airplane as far as the Air Force was concerned. Uh, we've already looked at that. A little later, the Navy became interested in A-6 replacement. Um, and that was in the early mid 1980s.
[00:07:59] Keith Jackson: Secretary of the Navy John Lehman was an a-6b. He flew in the reserves, flew in the right seat of an A-6. He wanted an A-6 upgrade initially. Uh, but a lot of the people that had been briefed into the stealth technology felt like that the Navy really needed a stealth airplane. After a long series of internal meetings and discussions, they did decide that they wanted a stealth airplane. And after we had been working with a bunch of people in the Navy and the Air Force, uh, they decided that there were only two companies that were really qualified for the stealth part of it. One was General Dynamics, and one was, quote, a West Coast company, which we didn't know who it was at the time. It did turn out to be Northrop because of their work on the B-2, which was highly classified, and we really didn't know anything about it at that time. So, any rate, layman decided that he wanted to team two companies up on each team. He wanted a stealth technology company, which was General Dynamics in our case, and he wanted a carrier suitability company. So he told us to team with Mac Air. And Northrop teamed with Grumman, the internally the Navy and secretary. Layman sold the what became the A-12 as a baby B-2. They said B-2s out there, there's been a lot of development work. It's going to be really easy to develop this airplane, so we don't need to do a prototype or anything like that.
[00:09:31] Keith Jackson: We just need to go in directly into an FSD design at that stage. So we did a a study and they did some radar cross section tests and did downselect, and we won the contest. Uh, several people told me it was really kind of a hands down win on our part. Uh, so that was encouraging. Now this when we start right here on the Navy airplane, uh, by the time we got to the program, it was the A-12 was was supposed to, um. Oops. And supposed to replace the F-111 and the A-6, uh, F-111 and the air to ground attack role and the A-6, of course, the Navy carrier. Suitable airplane. The three of you of the airplane, uh, most of you have probably seen it, uh, 1300 and 17 square foot wing area, two GE, f 412 engines, which were kind of an uprated, uprated version of the F 404 that was used in the F-18. Um, pretty good sized airplane, uh, 70 foot wingspan. Just show you a few things. The oops, I keep punching the wrong buttons here. Uh, radars, radar antenna here and and here. Uh, electro optical antenna, air search tracks that they're, uh, flush mounted antennas all over the airplane. Uh, leading edge devices for high lift on a Navy landing. Uh, we got yaw control with a spoiler and an 11 on the trailing edge.
[00:11:13] Keith Jackson: Um, did a lot of of wind tunnel tests, a lot of simulator work on it, and we're sure it would fly fine. And, of course, the B-2 proved that it could fly. Uh, the thing that really got us into it was aircraft survivability. Of course, we were doing this in the 1970s. And the in particular threat missiles were increasing a bunch, typically up until about the 1970 mid 70s. If a fighter particularly saw a missile coming in time, he could outmaneuver it, but the new missiles coming out were had enough turn capability in a in a short enough time constant that they could basically outmaneuver any airplane, that a pilot turn, any pilot could survive. He just couldn't take enough G's to outmaneuver the missiles. Uh monopulse. Seekers made them a lot more resistant to jamming or a lot more vulnerable, uh, less less vulnerable to jamming. And also, the missiles were good at hitting airplanes up to Mach three and over. They were effective at all aspects. They had look down, shoot down capability. So the missiles were getting pretty tough to defeat. Uh, the so a lot of the classical performance parameters looked like that. They were not really going to be enough to to justify a new airplane, uh, particularly in terms of a lot of the classical performance parameters like speed and so forth. Another issue that was was coming to the fore, and it's probably even more relevant today is cost growth.
[00:12:45] Keith Jackson: The historical cost for military aircraft just almost doubled or tripled each generation. As we try to get more and more performance, more speed, more altitude, higher dynamic pressures and so forth. And so the technology explosion meant that we could put more performance into an airplane. If we tried to get it all, then we could pay for. So we really need to look at what we could leave out in an airplane to make it, to make it affordable. So it was a real trade off and basically setting requirements. How fast do you need to have it, how much payload, what kind of range, and so forth. Uh, we did a bunch of studies. This was one that was actually for payload, but there were a lot of others in terms of if we've got a fixed amount of money for the whole fleet of airplanes, and then we want to get the most performance out of the fleet, not just the individual airplane. Uh, and you could see that, as you say, for example, increase the payload along this axis is you've got more and more payload. The airplane got heavier and bigger. Obviously, uh, the individual aircraft effectiveness as your payload increased got better. You get more targets killed per sortie. Talk about that a little bit more later. But for a fixed budget you couldn't buy as many airplanes. And we found typically as we went through that you got a pretty well defined peak.
[00:14:13] Keith Jackson: So there was a best sized airplane, a best performance airplane. And you could go through a lot of the design variables and get this same kind of thing. How much stealth did you need? How much speed did you need? What kind of takeoff and landing performance did you need looked at and pretty much of a total force structure Context and in terms of low observables. When we first got into it, we found that, gosh, we can get the radar cross-section down a lot further than we ever thought we could. And that's going to be pretty neat. We could take those radar cross-section reductions and a lot of the radars that were out there, we could basically beat them. You know, they couldn't detect the airplane. And so we got pretty enthusiastic about it for a while. And then we started doing some reactive threat studies. They said, well, that sounds good right now, but what if the threats make the radars more powerful? Or they go to air search track sets or they get better Awacs or whatever? And we discovered that in the long run, no aircraft could be invisible. You're always going to get detected at some point in time, given the threat developments that went along with your airplane. And so we got a little less enthusiastic about it. As time went on and then as we got further into it, we discovered that low observables had a lot of very favorable interactions with other technologies as far as the design of the airplane and the tactics the airplane could use.
[00:15:45] Keith Jackson: It was it was it turned out to be a lot more powerful even than we thought at first. And then the key point there was that your survivability is not just not being detected, it's actually surviving an encounter. And it's and there are a whole lot of steps a threat has to go through to, to kill you as you're coming in. Uh, the overall loss probability he's got, if you take, for example, an air interceptor coming after you, he's got he's got to be detected by usually an GCI set. Uh, he's got to be able to vector the threat to you, uh, given detection and so forth and so on, and it's a chain of probabilities. Our first thought was to try to avoid detection, where you wouldn't have any problem, but assuming that you couldn't do that, there are all these other things in the chain. And for example, uh, go back again. Speed could help on, uh, against a lot of these things to, to a greater or lesser extent. Keep punching the wrong button. Um. But a lot of it was not that important. Uh, you could, uh, there were a lot of other aircraft design characteristics that would help some, not help some. Uh, if you took reduced observables, it was helping all the way across the board, except in things like hardening and a few other areas.
[00:17:16] Keith Jackson: And so, uh, putting the low observable technology into the mix, uh, gave us a much more powerful airplane than just the low observables themselves. This is an example. If you take a radar cross section sigma zero and you decide that you've got to penetrate a sand belt, and this was the time when we were still looking at stopping a Russian attack across Eastern Europe, when there were thick Sams all along the border. Um, and if you looked at, at, uh, how many Sams they had, you were getting painted on a typical airplane by, say, three different Sams as you went through, uh, and you looked at how much radar cross section you needed to reduction just to get through it. Random. Any random place. Uh, this is ten decibels. That's a factor of ten. That's a factor of 100. That's a factor of a thousand. That's a factor of 10,000. Uh, you were not going to get you were not going to get there just with stealth alone. But then you look at the situation, if you knew where the Sam sites were, if you had an GCI system or a threat warning system that could tell you where the holes were, then you could get you could get through with a much more reasonable reduction in signature rather than 10,000 reduction. It could be between 10 and 100 reduction in radar cross section.
[00:18:49] Keith Jackson: Um, so to summarize, uh, the low observables were a very powerful contributor to survivability because it impacted so many of the elements of an engagement. Uh, but we had to have other kinds of features only in, with with other things. Sensors were important to see where the threats were. We had to have weapons to kill the guys before they got to us. Countermeasures were still important. And by the way, the low observables really helped countermeasures a bunch because you didn't have to you didn't have to have as big a countermeasure, whether it was a chaff or a flare or whatever. Um, and we needed I'll call you, call it, uh, compatible levels of speed and maneuverability. Situational awareness is one of the most important things. Uh, and it was certainly important in its own right. You need to be able to see the other guy before he saw you. That meant you made it harder for him to see you. And made it easier for you to see him first. Um, multispectral sensors were important. Uh, RF threat warning and surveillance. Accurate surveillance and track capability on the airplane was important. Uh, you want to be passive? Most of the time because he could see your radar. If your radar was turned on all the time. So infrared search and track search. While track set was important. Infrared missile warning missile, the infrared missiles at that. At that time period, were getting most of the air to air losses on both sides.
[00:20:25] Keith Jackson: The first generation all aspect IR missiles were just coming in. I think the Aim nine L they were getting very lethal and very scary. Um, you if your radar you didn't want to have a regular radar, you need to have something that the other guy had a hard time seeing. So low probability of intercept radars were important. And just the old all around vision canopy was also important. And then you needed to be able to fuse all that together. Sensor fusion two man crew helped. Um, F-35, by the way, has taken this, uh, a long ways, and that's an extremely important area. Speed was one of the big issues that we had, and this was probably the most emotional single, uh, subject that we got into. All the fighter pilots had been taught since World War one that speed is life. Uh, and in fact, speed is always better, everything else being equal. The problem we had was for supersonic capability. Everything else couldn't be equal. And in fact, your air signature increased. And in particular, as you got up above Mach one, it increased very rapidly. I remember we did some tests basically in conjunction with some Israeli requests. They were having trouble with Foxbats down along the Suez Canal. They wanted a missile that could shoot a foxbat, and we worked with Pomona. They had they wanted to put an air seeker on a a large Standard missile.
[00:21:50] Keith Jackson: And so we they flew some F-111s down along the east coast at Mach two five to see if they could get a lock on with that relatively small air seeker. And they were locking on that air seeker at close to 100 nautical miles. I mean, it was really eye watering. Just a small air seeker. That airplane flying at Mach two five was really hot, and you could see it a long ways. The problem with the air missiles, too, to is they don't have a radar that you can see. You can't tell when you're being painted by it. Um, so supersonic capability offered, you know, that that kind of a problem. It was more difficult to shape a supersonic airplane for low radar cross-section, particularly from the beam and the RF aspects. Uh, internal volume was a lot more costly because it blew your wave drag up to have a big high cross-sectional area on the airplane. Uh, and, uh, the target acquisition became more difficult just with speed, particularly if you were going after a non pre-briefed ground target. If you were going in at Mach one two on the deck, it was almost impossible to see a non pre-briefed target before you overran it. Uh, and then another thing that we found was that, uh, real supersonic performance was very much dominated by fuel consumption, particularly as you start going supersonic. The Afterburners blew your fuel out the tailpipe in a big hurry.
[00:23:16] Keith Jackson: And in fact, we found, for example, that on most missions, the A-12 could actually have a faster average penetration speed than the supersonic F-18 because the F-18 was would run so low on fuel, he had to cut way back to keep from running out of fuel, and the F-111 could keep the power up and actually have a faster average penetration, subsonic speed, even though it was subsonic. So we came to the conclusion that high subsonic speed was the best compromise, and that was for the air to surface mission. Optimization. Air to air total optimization could be a very different thing. Uh, the second issue was afterburners. Um, all pilots like to have more thrust, and the afterburner gives you a bunch more thrust, and the airplane would be a whole lot more fun to fly with an afterburner. Just like a very powerful car. It's it's kind of a blast to to fly. Um, but we found that infrared signatures, the air missiles at that stage had been causing the great majority of aircraft air combat losses. Um, and we decided that an optimized blend of reduced IR signature and countermeasures, flares and other kinds of countermeasures were the best solution for the afterburner. Uh, we actually came to the conclusion, for various reasons, that putting an afterburner on the airplane would actually decrease degrade the survivability. Uh, particularly because, uh, wrong button again. Uh. The the. It increased the radar cross section in particular, even when the afterburner wasn't in use.
[00:25:05] Keith Jackson: And the main problem there was the very high afterburner temperatures were not compatible with the kind of materials we had, at least at that time, for radar cross section reduction and an afterburner, also had very high IR signatures for an air search track set. Another passive device at night it lit up the sky when you turn the afterburner on. So we decided that we'd leave an afterburner off and we'd try to optimize the maneuverability of the airplane for dry power. One other very interesting thing. They'd been doing some flight tests out in the desert, and a program called Aimval Eval, where they were trying to trade off new missiles and aircraft tactics going against the new all aspect air missiles. I talked to some of the F-16 pilots who had been flying in that. They said the most important rule they had was never turn your afterburner on with a high all aspect of air missiles around. That if you came across a guy that was was armed with an all aspect missile, your best tactic was to chop it to idle power and go down into the ground background to give to give him clutter in the background, but afterburners were a definite no no, particularly when you couldn't tell where all the threats were in a chaotic environment. Because even though you could see a guy and maybe work your afterburner, for one guy, it was the other guy off to your, uh, shoulder that would get you.
[00:26:23] Keith Jackson: So we wanted to optimize maneuverability and drive power. Okay, so overall, then, uh, the rest of the things hardening, uh, make the airplane more survivable and give you the right kind of weapon suite to be able to stand off from intense point to fish defenses and suppress threat defenses. Uh, looking at the other side of the story. Lethality. Uh, lethality was was derived from good intelligence, accurate navigation. Um, appropriate target acquisition sensors. Uh, low probability of intercept radars, for example, and flares. A large payload remained very important for most of history. It took multiple sorties to knock out a target. People would fly over and drop a bunch of bombs, and you had to have a whole squadron to knock out a target. As we were coming up with guided weapons, you could independently target about as many weapons you wanted to in a given area and have them all go in at the same time with GPS guided weapons. So you could look at actually getting multiple kills per target, and it actually made big payloads more important rather than less as you went to guided weapons. Um, internal payloads were best because you could go in and stay stealthy without the radar cross section of your weapons, and you could also go in stealthy suppress the defenses. And then as the defenses got beat down, it was useful to have external weapons.
[00:27:58] Keith Jackson: So you needed both internal and external weapons. Uh, range was extremely important. That's one of the reasons. Payload and range are one of the reasons. The B-52 has been around for 60 years or so. You can put a lot of stuff in it and go a long ways. Carry large payloads. Uh, for the Navy in particular, as the threats were getting worse, they want to stand off further from shore to stand off from the enemy missiles coming in. Uh, a longer range airplane helped them to do that. Um, it reduced the tanker burden. Uh, for example, in the Afghanistan situation, uh, their whole sortie rate was limited by tanker capability and not by the capability of the airplane itself. Uh, and so the A-12 turned out to have quite a long range payload, which we designed into it, and which would basically make the whole fleet a whole, a whole lot more effective for with large, large range, reliability and maintainability were very important, so we worked hard to put that in there. And then for an airplane to be useful for a long time, large internal volumes were very important. Range and endurance important. We need an architecture for the avionics that could grow, and we needed to have growth capability in our power and cooling systems on the airplane so that when new stuff came along, you could put it into the airplane quickly. Uh, talk about specific Navy requirements. Uh, the bring back payload didn't usually worry about that with the old dumb bombs, because if you came back with bombs, you just dropped them in the ocean and landed without the bombs.
[00:29:42] Keith Jackson: But if you got expensive guided weapons on the airplane, you need to bring them back in. The A-12, uh, had more than twice the bring back payload of the current airplanes they had operating in the fleet at that time. A little bit about the specific configuration. We had a simple plan form, no vertical tails, buried engines. The structure was very efficient and in fact some aspects of this got us into a little trouble later. But the the weight of the main bending material in the structure to carry the bending loads in the wing, which were always important, was is determined by the structural span over the, uh, over the thickness. And this had a very low because it had a very thick wing. The B prime over T was low, which made it very efficient structurally. The the plan form gave us an aerodynamic center and the center of gravity that were right close together, which which meant that you weren't limited by, uh, payload location. You basically could put fuel and weapons. Right. Basically, on the on the payload, it had very high volumetric efficiency. Uh, large internal volumes in a low wetted area, uh, meant that, uh, your aerodynamic drag could be kept low. Uh, for a, particularly for a Navy airplane where they've got a very limited amount of space on the deck.
[00:31:17] Keith Jackson: Packaging efficiency was very important. And so, uh, basically the whole airplane, in terms of inside the wing fold, you fold the wings up on the deck. And this was the air. Whoops. This was the, uh, this was the airplane that you had on the deck. Um, big main weapons bays, uh, landing gear bay, uh, outboard missile bay, weapons bays and those weapons, bigger, uh, gear bays. So there really was very little, uh, acreage on the airplane that wasn't actually useful. And as a result, this airplane, which had more internal volume, payload and so forth was actually relatively small in terms of spot factors, actually smaller than the A6 it replaced. Even though it had considerably better range, payload and performance. Uh, in in terms of, uh, platform constraints, this airplane didn't have a horizontal tail or a vertical tail. Uh, we didn't want an airplane that would pitch up. Uh, without without a horizontal tail, it would be likely to kind of go ass over teakettle if you didn't didn't do that right, and you didn't want to have it too stable, uh, because you couldn't get up to the maximum angle of attack that you wanted. So it really had to be kind of a long, uh, this line of sweepback and aspect ratio, uh, where it was stable but not too stable. And so a lot of the planform was picked by from, uh, basic stability.
[00:32:50] Keith Jackson: Aerodynamic stability reasons. Uh, in terms of aerodynamic efficiency, in terms of just a generic plot, uh, parameter span over a wetted area was, uh, is kind of an efficiency parameter and maximum subsonic lift to drag ratio, lift to drag ratio. Basically, your range, your cruise range is basically, uh, proportional to your maximum lift to drag ratio. Uh, the A-12 was efficient enough, so typical fighters tended to have lift to drag ratios of, say, from maybe eight to 14 or 15. Uh, 812 was up here with the B-52s and the commercial transports. As a matter of fact, it actually turned out to be kind of up at the top of that point. So two advantages, better range. And you can make hard turns without a lot of power. So you, you it was it was good if you got it caught into a turning contest, uh, with an enemy fighter without having a great deal of thrust, so that high lift to drag ratio was important. Okay, that gave you a little bit of an idea about the, uh, about what led to the airplane. Uh, it was going to talk a little bit about about the termination and the legal aftermath. Uh, and by the way, if anybody's got any questions, I'd be happy to try to answer them, if I can. Um, one of the reasons that we got behind on the schedule, a lot of that was weight growth.
[00:34:25] Keith Jackson: Uh, another thing that we had problems with was, uh, composite fabrication, particularly with some of the, the big ribs stuff that we, the factory had never done before. Um, and so those schedule delays in getting weighed out and getting the manufacturing technology caused us to get behind on schedule. Another thing that was extremely important was the collapse of communism. Berlin Wall fell in 1989, which was kind of about the middle of the FSD program. The defense budget started going to a death spiral about that time. The program was designed to be a fixed cost development program, a fixed price development program, which was in effect, a no no, as a matter of fact. Dod had rules against that because development programs were notorious in not being able to accurately predict cost and schedule. But the company felt competent and confident enough that if it did overrun some, that they would have the financial resources between McDonnell Douglas and General Dynamics, that they could absorb it. But then both McDonnell Douglas and General Dynamics saw the outyear defense budgets cratering. And they said, oh, wait a minute. You know, if we get behind now, it's going to be a whole lot harder to make sure that I can fund it without going bankrupt. And so there were at the end of in 1990, there were a lot of discussions between the Navy and the Air Force and the Air Force and DoD about how the program might be restructured to make keep the airplane going.
[00:36:05] Keith Jackson: We had a critical design review in November of 1990, which where the Navy gave thumbs up on the program, and then Cheney terminated it in January of 1991, just a month or so later. Um, the Navy still said they wanted it. Uh, but the Navy then didn't have any money, and they said, well, if it's going to be terminated, I'm going to terminate it for default because I can't afford to pay what I owe the contractors. And that led to a legal fight. And that legal fight lasted 23 plus years. And so it it I think we probably paid I don't know the numbers. Probably $1 billion worth of lawyers fees on both sides. Lawyers loved it. They just as soon keep keep it going forever. And it finally, after bouncing back and forth between the judge and the appeals court on several occasions, it finally got to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court made great noises of disgust that it even gotten that far and sent it back and said, you guys just settle it. And although the government lawyers didn't want to settle it, by that time, the contractor contractors decided they didn't want it hanging over their heads. So they did decide to settle it just this year. And I think the settlement was that the contractors, I think General Dynamics gave the navy a deckhouse on a destroyer, and the McDonnell Douglas gave them a couple of F-18s and called it called it quits.
[00:37:32] Keith Jackson: But so it was basically a tie at the end, which in any honest study, you probably should have been able to determine that in in six months at the outside. But with lawyers, it took you 23 years to get it. To get it settled. So anyhow, I've spent a significant amount of my time on that over the last 20 some odd years. But just just to kind of give you how the the airplane actually was stacking up when it was terminated in terms of schedule. Uh, we had planned initially. Oh, come on, the to to have a first flight about five and a half years after the initial start of the contract, contract exploration phase when the program was terminated. We thought it would probably be about seven years. So we were probably looking at a year and a half slip, uh, the AX, which at that time, the time this chart was put together, the AX was supposed to be a replacement for the A-12. After what we learned, they decided they'd put the schedule out at nine and a half years. Here's B-2 we found. We didn't know this when we went into it either. Had about 11 year schedule from that that point, uh, ATF or the F-22 was around 12 years in terms of development costs. We had a we had a contract to do the FSD program.
[00:39:03] Keith Jackson: I think the as I remember the the ceiling cost, beyond which the contractors had to supply all the money, was about $4.8 billion we had spent or contracted for about 4 billion. Uh, we figured that we could probably get it done for less than 6 billion. The Navy, in their their most pessimistic, uh, estimates were that we could probably get it done for 7.5 billion. Um, it ultimately happened that the Navy got the F-18F, which was supposed to be just a minor modification of the F-16, F-18, CD. They said they could do it for about 3 billion so they could replace it as an interim before they got their next airplane. The as I the last numbers I saw were that the actual F-18F program was just about right there. Just that just that minor airframe change. And they had some avionics developments later on that added to that the axe. They were saying somewhere between 9 and 12 billion, 13 billion. The F-22 at the time I put the chart together was about 13 billion. I think it finally got up to about 20 billion before they were through with it. Uh, B-2 was out here, uh, probably pushing 30 billion. These are in then year dollars. So the actual cost involved with the A-12 program were much less than the other competing airplanes at the time. In terms of technical status determination. We had successfully passed the Critical Design Review in November of 1990.
[00:40:44] Keith Jackson: We had over 99% of the drawings released. About 88% of the production tools were complete or available. About half the parts for aircraft one and two were were available. Software for aircraft one was complete, and in test we had eight engines running and most of the major subsystems were in test. We had weight growth was about 6,000 pounds at termination, a little less than 6000 I think. Actually, as I remember it was about 5600. The Navy evaluated that the performance would be acceptable with an additional 2,000 pounds of growth, which it looked like we wouldn't. We didn't think we would get even very close to that. And I think at that stage the Navy didn't think that either. So that's why we passed the Critical Design review. In terms of aircraft performance at at when we got the contract signed. Oh. Come on. Uh, yeah. When we got the contract signed, the FSD, if you compared the aircraft performance to either the FSD specification or the Navair estimate of what we would be at the end of FSD, which was a little bit less than the specification design mission radius was almost 20% better than what the spec was. The maximum speed was about 5% better sustained. G was right on what the Navair estimate said it would be specific excess power, uh, was 10% better than what we promised. And the launch single engine rate of climb, recovery, single engine rate of climb and launch, wind over deck were all 5 to 10 knots better than what the specification was.
[00:42:32] Keith Jackson: And in fact, what we'd done was we had some initial conservative conservatism into the design, and we'd had design and improvements in other areas, particularly aerodynamics and, and some of the other propulsion performance areas. So all in all, the airplane actually looked quite good at termination. From a technical standpoint. So that's a very quick overview of of how the airplane got there. And uh, what uh, uh, what happened uh, to, to get it to get the program terminated. I had put this chart together in 1991. It's been over 20 years since then, but I thought it would be worthwhile, uh, kind of summarizing where we actually are now. Uh, the world was was pretty well unsettled at that stage. It still is. Uh, at that time, sophisticated weapons were proliferating, to the Third World as the Soviet Union collapsed. That probably slowed down some, but it's picking up again with the Chinese. Uh, overseas American bases were dwindling, and that has happened and has continued to happen. So in terms of power projection, we're getting more and more reliant on aircraft carriers, surprisingly, uh, and the carriers in the long range tactical aircraft at that time, and I think still now continue to be, uh, best power projection tools. Uh, for example, the A-12, if we had it in Afghanistan, could have spent several hours unrefueled loitering, uh, providing air cover.
[00:44:14] Keith Jackson: F-18s had to have a number of refuelings and could only stay over overhead for a few minutes. Um, so those those carriers and the ability to project power are still important. Uh, I mentioned that the A-6 was still obsolete and still aging. It needed to be replaced. It was replacement not by the AX, but by the F-18F, and now I think the F-35C will finally begin to pretty much match in some respects, but not in others. The performance of the A-12. But that's been over 20 years later and a whole lot more bucks. So at any rate, it was a it was a fun program to work on. I see some familiar faces here. I know a lot of you guys contributed to it. Um, we learned a lot from it. I think we'd had problems with composite manufacturing construction on the A-12. Those problems were pretty well solved by the time we got to the F-35. So that's been a whole lot smoother. Uh, the engines were actually used in the F-18E F and some other, other classified programs and some of the radar technologies used elsewhere and so forth. So the technology has, has been used. That's too, too bad for all of us that worked on it that the airplane didn't go. But it was quite an experience. I personally started working on the design of Sneaky Pete back in 1975, and I just quit working on the legal aspects of it this year, so it's been a long, long time for me.
[00:45:45] Keith Jackson: Have any questions? Um, um, it it it varied in about the early 2000. Uh, the main trial came up in front of the judge. Most of the time I was actually conferring with lawyers, and I would come in and maybe confer, uh, a day or two a month, sometimes before a trial. I would spend quite a bit of time. I spent one full day in front of the judge with lawyers trying to, uh, bait me into saying something stupid, which I guess I didn't get it too stupid because that was the first time the judge says you guys are just fishing. Get out of here. And he that at that time he found for the contractors. Uh, but that was not the last time that we went through that. So. And then since then, I would guess that, uh, it's been tailing off for the last few years. I'd spend maybe, oh, a total of 2 or 3 weeks a year or maybe a little bit more than that. Basically talking to lawyers and giving them background on the history. And when the Navy had a had some objections. Um, I could talk about that. One of the things that that I remember was that the first the first thing that the Navy tried to do to prove that the airplane was to try to prove that the airplane wasn't any good.
[00:47:11] Keith Jackson: They hired some, uh, retired, recently retired engineers from Northrop, from Pratt and Whitney. Uh, a couple of places to prove that the design wouldn't work. One of the Grumman guys, they had a guy from Grumman that said the structure would fail and we got luckily, some of our guys had kept a finite element model and we we gave that to a Boeing engineer who was a consultant, and he found out that the when the Navy guys analyzed the airplane, they had put only a few concentrated loads on the airplane to give the bending and torque loads and all of the areas where they said the structure was no good was where the load introductions were, and it was just a totally bogus. They had some Northrop propulsion guys said our propulsion system wouldn't work. I later found out that, you know, Boeing had had some things that could be considered serious problems. They went to the they went to the trouble of building a large scale model with, with internal engines in it to blow air through the the propulsion system. Turned out it worked just exactly like we predicted it would. Wouldn't just work just fine. So after a while, the Navy and the lawyers decided that that wouldn't work, and they eventually everybody agreed that the airplane was fine. Everybody liked the airplane at the end of the program. So it was not an airplane problem. It was a contract problem that caused the program to fail. Yeah.
[00:48:41] Speaker3: Why was the airplane canceled?
[00:48:44] Keith Jackson: It was it was canceled because the, uh, I'll tell you, give you the real reason and I'll give you an excuse. The real reason was because the defense budget was going down. They had three airplanes in development the B-2, the F-22, and the A-12. They couldn't afford them all. And the Navy, somebody in the Navy, I'm not sure who it was, felt that some Navy admiral had lied to him about the status of the A-12 program. He was ticked off. He was also in the process of just going to war in the Gulf. And he and just he just decided right off the bat that he was going. To terminate the A-12 program. He had to do one or the other. He terminated the A-12 program legally. All the federal all the Federal Acquisition Regulations said they couldn't do that. They had a whole list of things that they had to go through to prove that the airplane, there was no better, you know, that there were better options to do the same job. They didn't go through any of that. Our termination letter team decided to terminate the program on Friday evening. The letter had to go out on Monday morning, so they didn't have to put more money into the program at that time. They called a Navy lawyer up to write the termination letter over the weekend. She had no idea what what the problems were. So she got another termination letter that they'd had earlier for the Navy P-2 program, you know, prop driven, turboprop driven, uh, anti-submarine warfare airplane. So a lot of the reasons that they gave for terminating the program that we didn't even have any requirements. I think one of them had to do with propellers. We didn't have a propeller on the airplane. So, I mean, it was just it just was obviously absurd. But that's the way the government works. Yeah.
[00:50:33] Speaker4: Have you ever seen any estimates of the actual cost of the legal battle, and how those numbers compare to what it would have cost to finish some of the first airplanes? I have a statement on, on.
[00:50:44] Keith Jackson: I have not I have not gotten those. I've had some idea from the contractor's side. I tried to make my own guess, and I may be way off on this, but I would guess it's probably around $1 billion worth of lawyers fees. And I think we could have flown the airplane easily for for half that less. A lot less than half that.
[00:51:06] Speaker4: It's a rather rather sad statement on the affairs of things when you consider all the folks that lost their livelihood.
[00:51:15] Keith Jackson: Absolutely. It was. It was a travesty as far as I'm concerned. But I am prejudiced, I'll have to admit.
[00:51:28] Speaker5: Uh, how long would it have taken after termination to produce the first aircraft?
[00:51:34] Keith Jackson: Um, I think it would have taken. There were there were several different estimates. My own guess would have been it would have probably taken a little less than a year. That's kind of where I came from. Yeah.
[00:51:55] Speaker6: Do you have any thoughts on the pictures that are shown up in Aviation Week? Of the delta shaped object that's been flying over Texas.
[00:52:04] Keith Jackson: There, in their intriguing pictures, I tried to measure the planform and it's got about a 45 degree sweep, which is what the A-12 had. It also had a straight trailing edge, which is what the A12 had. I have no idea what it is or what it is. The Air force. Some Air Force spokesman said it was a B-2, and that it was an optical illusion that didn't have the jagged trailing edge. But those pictures look like a straight trailing edge, and the wing sweep didn't look right for a B-2, so I don't know what it is. Yeah.
[00:52:43] Buster (Host): Uh, did.
[00:52:44] Speaker7: You ever get a single airplane to fly? Curious as to what the operational weight would have been for the jet engine.
[00:52:55] Keith Jackson: We did not get an airplane into the air. We were probably about a year or so from first flight. Uh, the the dry thrust of the engines were in the 15 zero zero £0 thrust category with two of them. So, you know, something in the order of 30,000 pounds thrust, as I remember. I can't give you an exact number on it. This this late date. The airplane was in about the the the takeoff gross weight operational would probably 60-70,000 pounds in that category. So it's not a high thrust to weight ratio airplane, particularly with all the all the stores and fuel on board.
[00:53:33] Speaker7: And could it be configured for multiple missions like attack and air to air fighter missions?
[00:53:40] Keith Jackson: Yes, yes it could. Um, in fact, in some respects it made sense as an air to air airplane. Um, particularly from the Navy standpoint, it would carry 12 AMRAAMs full up AMRAAMs. I think the F-22 probably carries four internally. Uh, you may correct me on that. I you know, I can't be exact on that right now, but a lot more air to air missiles because of the large payload they were talking about going to folding fin compact carriage rams and aim nines. It could carry a pot full of those. It had a long loiter time out, quite a ways away from the carrier and in conjunction with, uh, E-2, you know, early warning airplane. You could put a lot of them out there that were hard to see for bombers coming in. And a single airplane with 12 AMRAAMs on it could, could, could do a lot of damage to an incoming attacking force would go that far. Uh, again, very high maneuverability and mill power when you didn't want to turn your afterburner on for fear of IR missiles. Uh, it did. It would not make a good deck launch interceptor because it did not have the high burst speed, but it made a very, very good missileer, which is a concept that actually does make some good sense, I think. Yeah.
[00:55:03] Speaker5: Yes. Back in the day, I remember seeing some pictures of the A-12 configured as a, refueler, a tanker, and it was also configured to replace the E-2. They're the Navy's AWACS.
[00:55:17] Keith Jackson: Uh, yes. Um, yeah. There are a couple of points on that. Those huge weapons bays you could put, and we had designed, uh, fuel tanks we could put in the main weapons bays and it would carry a lot of extra fuel. So it made a really good tanker. Uh, we had designed it so that we could have put a third man in the in the crew station fairly easily, and with the with a large acreage on the leading edge of the wings, you could make a pretty good, uh, early warning aircraft. One of the things I meant to mention the radar was kind of interesting. I always make the the analogy. We had the radars on each each wing leading edge. Those radars could could see from across the for each one of them could, could get through front 30 degrees or so and then they could look out behind your wing line. And if you think about predators, you know, owls or eagles or lions or tigers or cats or dogs or whatever, they've got their eyes looking forward, you know. You know, and the rabbits and the prey animals have all their eyes out to the side, rabbits and squirrels and so forth. The A-12 had both. And with all that acreage on the leading edge, you could get a pretty much light dimming, uh, radar capability in it.
[00:56:43] Speaker8: Have any of the.
[00:56:48] Keith Jackson: Uh, not not many. As a matter of fact, right now, uh, they're shipping truckloads of classified documents out to be burned. Uh, they confiscated everything on the program. There are some things that have been unclassified, mostly the lower classification things, but a lot of it, particularly a lot of the more sensitive technologies, are still classified and probably will remain so. And I couldn't tell you point by point exactly what is classified and what's not. So I tried to stay away from classified stuff tonight.
[00:57:24] Speaker8: What did they do with all the tooling and all were developed yet?
[00:57:29] Keith Jackson: Um, they basically got rid of them, uh, sold them off, uh, junked them. So there's really very not not much left. There are a few parts around, you know, the mockup is out at the museum out there. Uh, but basically, uh, they're all gone. As far as I know. Yeah.
[00:57:56] Speaker9: How many people lost their jobs when that program was terminated? And what happened to that building out there? Is Lockheed using it now?
[00:58:04] Keith Jackson: Uh, Lockheed used it for quite a while. I think that they are. They have now decided the employment is going down enough so they're not using. Now, the last I heard, um, overall, the country, somebody added up about 20,000 people all over the country were laid off that day. I've actually been on airplanes and struck up a conversation with a guy next to me who lived in Florida, and he lost his job that day on the A-12. Little company that worked in Florida. So there were lots of people all over the country that lost their jobs. It was a black day for a lot of us.
[00:58:40] Speaker7: Is it true? True? Is it true? The black hole at General Dynamics? They removed all the Doritos out of the vending machines.
[00:58:50] Keith Jackson: That's probably true. Yeah.
[00:58:55] Speaker4: It's interesting because you were mentioning about the tools and leftover. This thing doesn't work very well. Some of the ribs and stuff that you were mentioning surfaced a few months ago. There was a big old crate of that stuff going to salvage.
[00:59:12] Keith Jackson: Is that right? There was a flap a few years ago where somehow or other, one of the canopies had had for McDonnell Douglas had got sold to a second hand shop. Um, some of those canopies had some very classified treatments on them. Uh, the thing came up for, I think, on eBay or something like that, and a guy that had bought it for something like $50 was trying to sell it on eBay for $20,000, some, some ridiculous amount of money. I can't tell you the exact thing. And there was a big flap about what it was. I think it turned out not to be one of the ones with the secret technology on it, but, uh.
[00:59:53] Speaker4: There were piles of that stuff out in Weatherford at the surplus shops.
[00:59:57] Keith Jackson: Is that right? Yeah. I didn't know that. Yeah.
[01:00:06] Speaker10: I can work this thing. Um, in one of your earlier slides, you had said that a lot of the technology was already known. Did that technology was any of that dependent on transfers from the government from, like, the B-2 program?
[01:00:21] Keith Jackson: Uh, we got basically nothing from the B-2 program. Uh, Northrop had had basically had the B-2 just about in flying shape when this program started. And there was basically no technology, cross fertilization. So when, um, when the the government, the Air Force and the Navy sold to their leaders that it was a no, uh, problem development program, they were thinking in terms of Northrop because everybody thought Northrop would win because they had the B-2. Unfortunately, their design was not nearly as good as ours was. And so we really got very, very little, if any, technology transfer from them. We had done a lot of work ourselves, though, kind of a lot, a lot of it on a shoestring. But we, for example, did win the full scale model test off on the radar cross section as well as better range and payload and that sort of thing.
[01:01:24] Speaker5: Do you have any words to say about the contract we had? It was a 50/50 split. It wasn't a 49, 51. It was a 50/50 split with Mac Air. Yes. Is that a concern?
[01:01:34] Keith Jackson: That was that was one of John Lehmann's bright ideas. What he wanted to do, and they basically dictated this to us. He wanted to have two fully qualified airframe companies teamed up on the development, and then he wanted to split the two companies apart and have us compete with each other on production. And kind of mandated a 50 over 50 split. It turned out, and he did that because he thought it would be cheaper. He'd keep competition in the program. The problem is you can't you can't have one year where you get two thirds of the airplanes. In the next year you only get one third. You got to lay off a lot of your people, and then it's almost impossible to get them put together again later. So what we had done was, was to try to get a factory in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the old Rockwell factory that that we could both basically run and we could basically shift people and stuff back and forth. We basically have different management for the competition. I was a crazy idea, but anyhow, that's what we had. That's what we had to work with.
[01:02:44] Speaker11: What was the production cost per aircraft and about how many aircraft were anticipated to be sold?
[01:02:51] Keith Jackson: Oh, Um, I don't remember the exact number. Uh, uh, I'll give you what was kind of kind of off the top of my head. It was like $35 million. 35 to $40 million, maybe. And I'm probably off on that a little bit. That was in in 1990, uh, 1992 or $1993 somewhere. Somewhere in there.
[01:03:20] Speaker11: And about how many aircraft were anticipated to be sold?
[01:03:24] Keith Jackson: Um, that number changed, and I can't I can't remember exactly where it was at the end of the program. I think at one time it was like 650, and it was split between the Air Force and the Navy. I think that had probably gone down some toward the end of the program, but I can't give you exact numbers at the end of the program.
[01:03:48] Speaker12: Do you have any information on the status of the F have 23 of the.
[01:03:54] Keith Jackson: Of which?
[01:03:57] Speaker12: The F.
[01:04:00] Keith Jackson: Uh, no, I don't know what the status of that is. Uh. Uh, no. No, I don't know. I don't know anything about that. Anybody else got any any questions?
[01:04:21] Speaker5: I take it they never intended to have guns.
[01:04:23] Speaker9: On that thing.
[01:04:25] Keith Jackson: Never intended to have guns on it. It was a missile carrier. We'd actually looked at putting a gun in it. Uh, but the Navy decided they didn't want it.
[01:04:38] Speaker13: They did with the F-4, too.
[01:04:40] Keith Jackson: Yeah, true. Okay. Well, thanks. Thanks for bearing with me.
ico.org.uk
, this presentation from 2014 has been (re-)uploaded to Youtube today.
Northrop Grumman Supersonic Tailless Air Vehicle (STAV) concept
Convair / General Dynamics Advanced Tactical Fighter (1965)