Navy AX and A/F-X projects

[allysonca]

From the collection... came from a friend that worked at GD in Texas. Looks to be 1/40th I think.

 

[XP67_Moonbat]

Damn I want that!

 

[Steve Pace]

It's beginning to look like stealth shaping is really getting to be "old hat." USAF Lt. Gen. David J. "Marshall" McCloud told me in 1990 that a stealth aircraft is based upon 85% shape, 15% other things. He was also a pilot of F-117s. -SP

 

[donnage99]

From the collection... came from a friend that worked at GD in Texas. Looks to be 1/40th I think.

Thanks for sharing. What a beautiful bird. Imagine if we have a fleet of this bird today. Our strategy concerning the china sea would be a lot less headache to deal with.

 

[VTOLicious]

On the AWST article discussing the companies involved and their proposals, it says Northrop joined the General Dynamics and McDonnell Douglas team which was proposing the A-12 based design. Yet on Matej's website these pictures are shown of a different Northrop A-X (or A/F-X) model.
I will presume Northrop was working independently on this, so what led to them teaming up with GD and McDonnell Douglas on their proposal? Personally I find this a very interesting looking design.

It fits ...what a beauty! Looks like the perfect sucessor of F-117 btw ;D

EDIT: This pic appears in "Flying Wings and Radical Things Part 1" @41:30
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWOq0pdXxFU
Tony Chong calls it "balanced based". Balanced between LO and performance.

 

[VTOLicious]

Another configuration is shown @30:15. Tony Chong calls it the "signature driven design".

 

[Sundog]

Both of those are in his book, plus a third. I won't post it here due to copyrights (Buy the book, it's worth every penny!), but the one not shown was the performance driven design. The first pic you posted was the balanced design, between signature and performance. (I see you posted it in the other thread and I think it violates the rules here, but that's for Paul to decide.)

 

[VTOLicious]

Both of those are in his book, plus a third. I won't post it here due to copyrights (Buy the book, it's worth every penny!), but the one not shown was the performance driven design. The first pic you posted was the balanced design, between signature and performance. (I see you posted it in the other thread and I think it violates the rules here, but that's for Paul to decide.)

All pics I posted are from the video and I provided a link to it.

 

[LEG]

Concerning the A/FX, it sounds like the United States Air Force has, or had, a "not invented here" bias against Navy aircraft even though they were in need of a replacement for the F-111, F-15E, and F-117A and had participated in the AX program since its initiation. Was there any effort to save the program as a joint program between the United States Navy and United States Air Force? Or point out the 20% parts commonality between the F-22 Raptor and the Lockheed Martin/Boeing A/FX proposal? Or at the time, did the United States Air Force believe that the air interdiction mission was not as important as other missions or would have preferred the FB-22 to the A/FX? Was an F-16 replacement deemed more urgent?

A/FX was a linear descendant of the ATA-12. It was made into a cubist F-14 because the USN, as they had when forced to join on the F-111B effort (vastly superior to the F-14 in the FADF mission btw.), saw where the USAF was going on ATF and _self sabotaged_ the Avenger II with a myriad of contractor/government stunts which pushed the boundaries of Fraud in the Inducement and Anti Deficiency Act restrictions.

They have done it before, see Coulam on the F-111B and the 'N-1 package' of naval modifications, introduced late enough to make sure that their side of the program failed, the USAF had to spend megabucks to get their interdictor into service after the USN preemptively (before carrier suitability testing) got their variant cancelled and _in so doing_, destroyed the F-X(15)'s nice-to-haves like the Eagle Eye optical adjunct, AIM-92 CLAW, and the developed radar data computer which had to wait until half the jets were built. Essentially rendering the entire F-15A fleet into an FSD hangar queen extension.

The USAF never pulled such a stunt. Even when the ATA was shown to need an Edwards sized field length to make maximum gross weight takeoffs, they stuck by their 600 requirement on the A-12. It was the USMC who put the Kaibosh on the ATA, pulling their requirement for 200 or so jets and automatically taking the 'office party' price from '35 million or we don't buy the thing' (USN Navair Admiral in charge of overall R&D) to what a savvy reporter rand the numbers on and figured would be a minimum 73 million. And /he/ was off (short) by over 80 million.

I myself have often wondered if the A-12 wasn't simply a placeholder (geopolitical bluff) to get the Soviets to bankroll another 'same mission, similar airframe' development effort as part of the giant Reagan era attempt to call on every raise until the other side ran out of chips.

There was simply too much that was DEAD WRONG with the ATA, technically and programmatically, from the beginning. Putting a Navy Captain in charge of a multibillion dollar program and then lying to the contractor on agreed weights (2-4,000lbs over = inability to complete the contract which is not something the Federal Government is allowed to do while acting as an executor for the public exchequer, it's not their money...) while the absence of the COEA/MENS studies makes it impossible to develop a doctrinal model that makes sense.

Winning wars is about DMPIs per day, to XXnm downrange. Not to be a 'Top Gun' mood killer but really it is about statistics of targets serviced and nothing more. Everything that effects that (EA-6B jammers and F/A-18 HARM shooters) is an important variable but only insofar as it ups the number of designated mean points of impact which are hit. If you want cheap, put 4 JASSM-ER on your jet and forego target penetration. You will get more hits and fewer megabuck losses while paying less for a 100-300nm standoff bus platform than you ever would undertaking the same mission with hammer class heavy ordnance as direct delivery.

If your system is so expensive that you are operating as an A-6 equivalent with 10-12 jets on deck and half of them down for LO maintenance at any given moment, EVEN WITH simply silly assigned warloads of X24 internal Mk.82, you are not going to be survivable at radius because your escorts cannot reach 1,000nm like you can and you can only do so (subsonically) once per day.

The USN _did not_ yield deep strike as a Tomahawk can go 900nm in 3hrs and has no RTB requirement. But if you look at the USN problem of sustaining the hulls as the airwings that ride on them, you start to see that a 150 million dollar Avenger II is the same as saying a deckload of ONLY A-12s and nothing else. This killed the ATA, sure and simple. Because it never would have worked without the support sorties and now you have just killed the airwing constellation for TWO reasons: radius+cost.

The USN CFU ended up costing everyone as the F/A-18E (a new build passed off as a redesign that failed almost every KPP metric of a pass/fail OPEVAL, including radius of action) became a 'get it or we lose carrier air' mandate which stole money from the F-22 and C-17 and ASTOVL efforts as well as ongoing upgrade and training/maintenance on the Harrier and Bug (the USMC was essentially a non-air exponent for much of the 90s).

The USAF was quite happy to finish out the 2000-2010 period buying upgraded F-16s (or Agiles) and completing their Raptor buy until they could BEGIN thinking about CALF. But the USN complete trainwreck of the tacair acquisition, dogpiling multiple new starts onto a cluttered production schedule, ruined everything and made the F-22 die so that the Navy and Marines could have a lower quality Sea Stealth. Which their TAMP 2001
agreement promptly chopped up from 600+480 to 400+250 which is ALSO not enough to sustain a deep strike capability. Especially on a weight critical STOVL which will normally operate with 10-12Klbs to allow for external ordnance and hot'n'hi effects on it's thrust reserves, massively increasing drag and taking a nominal 460nm radius down to about 250nm, tops.

This in turn skewered the USAF plan to have a supercruise to 1,000nm change of game in the Raptor while leaving them stuck with the check on the majority of the F-35A purchase which is, functionally, little more than an F-117 replacement, including the utterly moronic choice to go for a deep-not-broad weapons bay (room for the SDLF module) which is designed around the GBU-31 munition with only 10-12nm of standoff. 10-12nm from an SA-20/21 is at least 15nm past WEZ/NEZ on the SAM.

IMO, the USN should never be allowed to touch another tacair program again, ever. Their nasty habit as constant strategy of sabotaging what they cannot control directly makes Dassault and the French look like saints.

 

[LEG]

Contrary to the popular conception, there is no 'WEZ Bubble' condition-http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-DeD3FURlcPw/TYRKd9j_i2I/AAAAAAAAC7A/jA6HFDidIeU/s1600/LIBYA%2BALL%2BLAYERS.jpgIt is a single wedge of a TallKing/Nebo/Vostock type system-http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_0HCJq6B1wZA/SgJm8zs3UjI/AAAAAAAACG0/3YEgIRE6BVk/s400/WEDGESST17.jpg

Are all systems literally going to have a 360-degree engagement zone? Obviously not. But I'm sure you are aware of the fact that radars can rotate? A search radar like BIG BIRD rotates and views a 360-degree area, and will most certainly give you a "bubble". An engagement radar like TOMB STONE will give you a wedge, but the radar is fully capable of rotating to a new axis. It is simpler to show the "bubble", because that's the complete area the missile system or radar could be covering, and in the case of TOMB STONE that's the place you would like to not be.


Plus, making the circles is easier than plotting the azimuth of each radar system and then constructing the wedge. There's also the issue that terrain is not fully accounted for using the "bubble" method, but that's something I think I might actually have figured out how to fix. At any rate I always find this kind of argument hilarious, because is the way it was done (for those basic reasons) when the government was paying me to do it. Or do people really think that charts were annotated with some weird animated live-updating overlay capable of always knowing the exact azimuth of a TOMB STONE?


Also, TALL KING? That one rotates through 360 degrees, you can see one doing it here at the very beginning: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=ZhdIrgjPzSo Pretty sure Vostok does as well based on some shots I've seen of the operator's console. TALL RACK (Nebo-U), however, I'm not sure about. I know the arrays are repositioned frequently, but I'm not sure if they rotate during scan or if they're rotated just to reposition their focus.

Actually, you use sectoring to control for apparent RCS and ARM vulnerability. If you have groundwave or tropobounce (and a LOT of processor power) you can look over the near horizon, well beyond the nominal 12-15nm limit. So it becomes a matter of driving the threat into the weeds where you can use cheaper, gapfiller (Snow Drift, ADADS, Acoustics, even Observer Corps), to grab an alternative signature. But the sectoring is to take 'cuts' between the terrain masks and to specifically look across and even behind the threat ground track using an analogy of a lone lighthouse cuing a sudden flip of the switch on a Christmas Tree.

The standforward or escort jammer is suddenly hip deep in alligators and all your decoys and loitering ARMs/jammers (MALD/MALD-J) are beyond the point where they can surround sound dogpile the threat and force a strobe through a sidelobe. And then you're screwed. Because this isn't the 1960s where it was one Fan Song or Low Blow per target with 2 missiles. Nor even the 1970s where it was 2-3 missiles per two targets with a Straight Flush or LASHE as CW flood. This is 40-60 shots, all of which can be dumped, via SAGG/GAI, very quickly (Mach 7), on a torpedoes-down-bearing basis of saturating the target volume until someone's seeker cube overlays the threat occupation zone.

Which of course makes the whole F-35 'pack hunter' principle a great way to lose a four ship while simultaneously destroying your 'no target fusion repeats' ISR ability to vacuum the total battlespace for targets.

In fact, it is almost certain, just looking at the awkward, conventional, bulbous and bumpy, shape of the F-35 that 'RAM goodness, baked right in!' is a misnomer for what is almost certainly an active loading system as 'jammer at the skin' ability to cancel through some form of rapid impedance sampling system. As the SOLE justification for why the BAe ASQ-239 has had billions thrown at it for what is essentially a ELS capable (APR-47) RWR without a companion ARM. _Except_ that this system is measuring Doppler and Phase interactions, every couple inches, along the skin, to generate complex cancellation waveforms, without regard to wavelength vs. airframe surface geometries which are too easy to FES model weak points for.

I mean what idiot is going to fix his RAM capabilities to an in-composite ability where he cannot even change coatings or surface panels (short of PDM stripping the airframe) when, 'suddenly', a waveform changes and some complex phase or frequency loading variation of a multi-lobe AESA scan 'charges up' the old scheme until it starts to reemit like any other surface wave backscatterer.

If you have some form of nanocircuitry built in, similar to that tested on the A-10 with the spray-on, electrochromic, system (back in the 90s), whereby /turning off/ the optical countermeasures suite gave you RAM effect, presumably, you can apply selective charge as conditioned power through the system to specifically cancel inbound, longwave, emissions.

This is why the mission data files are so important and so regionally specific.

It is why the various services are not supremely red faced about the relative 'survivability' of a jet operating 400nm past the effective accompaniment radii of EW/SEAD escorts and within 10nm of a target which can probably shoot down the JDAM you drop, never mind the jet which carries it. Given DEAD is likely Mission #1 for the F-35 on the first 5 nights of the war (we have nothing else which will penetrate far enough in an A2AD environment dominated by BASM and ASCM), there is little point in a 'front sector only' (+/- 20` on either side of the nose) when you are going to have to bull your way through MULTIPLE layers of back-track looking radars which blink on and off to deny cruise and lethal decoy shots into their withers.

Everything we know and assume about contemporary stealth is likely 10-20 years out of date now. We're talking the same degree of advancement as from the Windecker Eagle to the F-117.

Contrary to the popular conception, there is no 'WEZ Bubble' condition-http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-DeD3FURlcPw/TYRKd9j_i2I/AAAAAAAAC7A/jA6HFDidIeU/s1600/LIBYA%2BALL%2BLAYERS.jpgIt is a single wedge of a TallKing/Nebo/Vostock type system-http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_0HCJq6B1wZA/SgJm8zs3UjI/AAAAAAAACG0/3YEgIRE6BVk/s400/WEDGESST17.jpg

Are all systems literally going to have a 360-degree engagement zone? Obviously not. But I'm sure you are aware of the fact that radars can rotate? A search radar like BIG BIRD rotates and views a 360-degree area, and will most certainly give you a "bubble". An engagement radar like TOMB STONE will give you a wedge, but the radar is fully capable of rotating to a new axis. It is simpler to show the "bubble", because that's the complete area the missile system or radar could be covering, and in the case of TOMB STONE that's the place you would like to not be.


Plus, making the circles is easier than plotting the azimuth of each radar system and then constructing the wedge. There's also the issue that

Concerning the A/FX, it sounds like the United States Air Force has, or had, a "not invented here" bias against Navy aircraft even though they were in need of a replacement for the F-111, F-15E, and F-117A and had participated in the AX program since its initiation. Was there any effort to save the program as a joint program between the United States Navy and United States Air Force? Or point out the 20% parts commonality between the F-22 Raptor and the Lockheed Martin/Boeing A/FX proposal? Or at the time, did the United States Air Force believe that the air interdiction mission was not as important as other missions or would have preferred the FB-22 to the A/FX? Was an F-16 replacement deemed more urgent?

Contrary to the popular conception, there is no 'WEZ Bubble' condition-http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-DeD3FURlcPw/TYRKd9j_i2I/AAAAAAAAC7A/jA6HFDidIeU/s1600/LIBYA%2BALL%2BLAYERS.jpgIt is a single wedge of a TallKing/Nebo/Vostock type system-http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_0HCJq6B1wZA/SgJm8zs3UjI/AAAAAAAACG0/3YEgIRE6BVk/s400/WEDGESST17.jpg

Are all systems literally going to have a 360-degree engagement zone? Obviously not. But I'm sure you are aware of the fact that radars can rotate? A search radar like BIG BIRD rotates and views a 360-degree area, and will most certainly give you a "bubble". An engagement radar like TOMB STONE will give you a wedge, but the radar is fully capable of rotating to a new axis. It is simpler to show the "bubble", because that's the complete area the missile system or radar could be covering, and in the case of TOMB STONE that's the place you would like to not be.


Plus, making the circles is easier than plotting the azimuth of each radar system and then constructing the wedge. There's also the issue that terrain is not fully accounted for using the "bubble" method, but that's something I think I might actually have figured out how to fix. At any rate I always find this kind of argument hilarious, because is the way it was done (for those basic reasons) when the government was paying me to do it. Or do people really think that charts were annotated with some weird animated live-updating overlay capable of always knowing the exact azimuth of a TOMB STONE?


Also, TALL KING? That one rotates through 360 degrees, you can see one doing it here at the very beginning: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=ZhdIrgjPzSo Pretty sure Vostok does as well based on some shots I've seen of the operator's console. TALL RACK (Nebo-U), however, I'm not sure about. I know the arrays are repositioned frequently, but I'm not sure if they rotate during scan or if they're rotated just to reposition their focus.

Actually, you use sectoring to control for apparent RCS and ARM vulnerability. If you have groundwave or tropobounce (and a LOT of processor power) you can look over the near horizon, well beyond the nominal 12-15nm limit. So it becomes a matter of driving the threat into the weeds where you can use cheaper, gapfiller (Snow Drift, ADADS, Acoustics, even Observer Corps), to grab an alternative signature. But the sectoring is to take 'cuts' between the terrain masks and to specifically look across and even behind the threat ground track using an analogy of a lone lighthouse cuing a sudden flip of the switch on a Christmas Tree.

The standforward or escort jammer is suddenly hip deep in alligators and all your decoys and loitering ARMs/jammers (MALD/MALD-J) are beyond the point where they can surround sound dogpile the threat and force a strobe through a sidelobe. And then you're screwed. Because this isn't the 1960s where it was one Fan Song or Low Blow per target with 2 missiles. Nor even the 1970s where it was 2-3 missiles per two targets with a Straight Flush or LASHE as CW flood. This is 40-60 shots, all of which can be dumped, via SAGG/GAI, very quickly (Mach 7), on a torpedoes-down-bearing basis of saturating the target volume until someone's seeker cube overlays the threat occupation zone.

Which of course makes the whole F-35 'pack hunter' principle a great way to lose a four ship while simultaneously destroying your 'no target fusion repeats' ISR ability to vacuum the total battlespace for targets. Don't believe this is dangerous? Just look at the S-350 Vityez with it's essentially 'dumb launch box, smart network node' approach to putting a 9M96 TEL under every rock.

In fact, it is almost certain, just looking at the awkward, conventional, bulbous and bumpy, shape of the F-35 that 'RAM goodness, baked right in!' is a misnomer for what is almost certainly an active loading system as 'jammer at the skin' ability to cancel through some form of rapid impedance sampling system. As the SOLE justification for why the BAe ASQ-239 has had billions thrown at it for what is essentially a ELS capable (APR-47) RWR without a companion ARM. _Except_ that this system is measuring Doppler and Phase interactions, every couple inches, along the skin, to generate complex cancellation waveforms, without regard to wavelength vs. airframe surface geometries which are too easy to FES model weak points for.

I mean what idiot is going to fix his RAM capabilities to an in-composite ability where he cannot even change coatings or surface panels (short of PDM stripping the airframe) when, 'suddenly', a waveform changes and some complex phase or frequency loading variation of a multi-lobe AESA scan 'charges up' the old scheme until it starts to reemit like any other surface wave backscatterer.

If you have some form of nanocircuitry built in, similar to that tested on the A-10 with the spray-on, electrochromic, system (back in the 90s), whereby /turning off/ the optical countermeasures suite gave you RAM effect, presumably, you can apply selective charge as conditioned power through the system to specifically cancel inbound, longwave, emissions.

This is why the mission data files are so important and so regionally specific.

It is why the various services are not supremely red faced about the relative 'survivability' of a jet operating 400nm past the effective accompaniment radii of EW/SEAD escorts and within 10nm of a target which can probably shoot down the JDAM you drop, never mind the jet which carries it. Given DEAD is likely Mission #1 for the F-35 on the first 5 nights of the war (we have nothing else which will penetrate far enough in an A2AD environment dominated by BASM and ASCM), there is little point in a 'front sector only' (+/- 20` on either side of the nose) when you are going to have to bull your way through MULTIPLE layers of back-track looking radars which blink on and off to deny cruise and lethal decoy shots into their withers.

Everything we know and assume about contemporary stealth is likely 10-20 years out of date now. We're talking the same degree of advancement as from the Windecker Eagle to the F-117.

 

[LEG]

Concerning the A/FX, it sounds like the United States Air Force has, or had, a "not invented here" bias against Navy aircraft even though they were in need of a replacement for the F-111, F-15E, and F-117A and had participated in the AX program since its initiation. Was there any effort to save the program as a joint program between the United States Navy and United States Air Force? Or point out the 20% parts commonality between the F-22 Raptor and the Lockheed Martin/Boeing A/FX proposal? Or at the time, did the United States Air Force believe that the air interdiction mission was not as important as other missions or would have preferred the FB-22 to the A/FX? Was an F-16 replacement deemed more urgent?

1. I don't believe the USN did or does know as much about LO as the USAF does.
They certainly didn't during the A-12 program when their approach created massive problems in both resonant dipole and optical scattering areas due to a mis-apprehension that RAM, layered on like the latest layer of linoleum in a 30 year old apartment, could solve for every issue. It doesn't. It never did. It is useful solely as surface coating to help blend discontiguous material junctures and as a deep channel 'circuit' to spread the impedance load around the airframe periphery. The USN broke both of those rules with the straight TE which scattered traveling waves as Rayleigh all across the front sector and with the nose which was so bad with multi-surface junctures around the inlets that they had to affix a bra to it like on a high end sports car. They showed similar errors in judgment with the design of the buried engines and in particular with the exhaust scheme which didn't provide for the active cooling as materials adjustment which LM was doing almost two generations earlier in the F-117. It was, bluntly, a _very bad_ idea to put a lower hemisphere exhaust on a VLO penetrator intended to operate in the heart of the trashfire because the USN flatly refused to believe that stealth could work, out of the clutter. Their experience with the A-6 drove part of this but it was still something which they should have known more of before they dared to set RFP specs for an airframe which was weight critical. Since the Navy was also going the cheap route and insisted the contractors break standing rules (after 1988) for a Fixed Price program by buying in on a spec'd airframe that it was essentially purchasd for 73 million instead of the 130 that even GDM originally requested, it became -essential- for them to kick down compartment doors into the ATB and 117 efforts and the USAF essentially said: "No, I'm bigger." the USN forced the companies to work both the weight reduction and the signatures issue while already in over their head from Concept Formulation onwards with freeby services. This is what put the program out of cost and it was obvious to everyone, including Elberfeld, from the outset, largely because men like Ben Rich were _telling them_ that they were not going to get away with cheap skating.

At the time, USN as an institution did not realize how low the signatures could go for a number of reasons. USN actually had run a number of their own LO programs previously, which may have lead them to false assumptions about the lowest practical signatures - and how to get there.


That said, what you are describing above is what happens when you take a design that has demonstrated some degree of LO success at medium and high altitude, and then shove it into the weeds out of negligence. GD did not understand *why* that design had some success, and why it would not work at low level.

And then there was TEAL DAWN. Same time period, different customer, different part of GD, may as well have come from a different planet.

DARPA programs should be universally accessible to all service chiefs in the relevant investigatory project field branches and all relevant (major) industrial partners to any resulting production program. That's how you get from experimental to rapid prototyping stages, outside the conventional procurement system, without a lot of wheel reinvention.

Similarly, I don't know when LOCLOEXCOM came online but if James McDonnell had needed help in the 1980s, as an ATF partner whose financial stability was critical to the upcoming YF-23 prototyping fabrication phase, all's he would have had to do was hop the fence, have a quiet word with Tom Jones and the two of them could have gone to DSARC or JRMB or whoever was running the financial milestone funding releases for ATA and there would have 'been a reckoning' as it's never what you know but who.

It would have been no skin of Northrop's nose to share B-2 data at that point.

Even in a black-UA program, you just don't screw over your industrial base with false promises as premises and everyone knows that the blue suits are the fair haired kids on the technologies block, not the squids.

What the Elberfeld and Navair were doing was flatly illegal relative to COEA/MENS and the need for oversight on even a SAR effort and this plus the fact that they were doing this against the DFARs _already in place before FSD_ meant that nobody would have been called to carpet on a Cry Uncle moment with Weinberger if need be. You don't make friends within the five walled asylum this way but you do protect your corporate financia status and I flatly do not believe that GDMDD were ignorant of their sole contractor status, even during the ATA BAFO/BARFO period and certainly thereafter as Northrop was busy on the ATB and LM were doing ATF and hadn't even bid. So if even one of the A-12 contractors says 'See'ya!' and can prove that default (on LO technologies contractual tortes) was the driver, they have the USN over a barrel. To the point where it basically comes down to whether the USN wants to have a seat at the stealth table or are going to cancel the ATA and take their chips elsewhere (better CMs and particularly aeroballistics would have been a game changer, in 1985).

In this, the USN is a worse enemy than the Russians WRT sibling envy of anything USAF. They wanted a fancy stealth _fighter_ too. And the ATA was never going to be that. Kill the A-6F, terminate F-14D(R) reman and then throw barrelfulls of monkey wrenches into the ATA finances and baddabing, you kill the strike bomber and roll right on into F-18E and A/FX.

Tech base wise, you don't walk into a dark room full of snakes without a really good flashlight and a solid fireplace poker. Mac McDonnell may have gotten most of his technical solutions from the Great Book of Aerodynamics For Dummies (F-4) but he knew how to hold a program to spec and on budget. John may not have been as good but the MDD board was.

And they were not outside the LO loop.

Having said this, what I am interested in is Teal Parrot and 'Fuzzyballs'. Because, IMO, that's the only way the JSF works and it would have likely applied to the AX and certainly the A/FX.

 

[AeroFranz]

LEG, very interesting discussion...but sometimes i struggle to follow because of some of the more arcane acronyms you're using. Can you spell out when first using the really obscure ones? I'm enjoying the very informative posts!

 

[shivering]

Thanks for all the info, LEG. Truly interesting.

 

[hesham]

Thanks for all the info, LEG. Truly interesting.

Nice Info,thank you LEG.

 

[flateric]

Navy Strike Aircraft

 

[Silencer1]

Navy Strike Aircraft

Thanks for link for Matt Mrdeza' web-page!
There were some cool aircraft-related pages on it - including work for Northrop advanced designs.
"Switchblade" was completely new for me.

 

[Bill S]

"McAir Vought AXInlet 1993" Does somebody recognize this configuration? B-2 like air intakes on the top and the swept wing.

Look like this:

I found this slide in some old Vought material, it at least gives a little hint of the design.

 

[flateric]

Oh, how cool is that! Thanks!

 

[Ingraman]

Lockheed A/F-X from the (sadly) "lost" Flight archive

 

[Ingraman]

Does anybody remember the origin of the famous image GD/McAir/Northrop(?) A/F-X proposal? Thank You Very Much!!

 

[Sundog]

Does anybody remember the origin of the famous image GD/McAir/Northrop(?) A/F-X proposal? Thank You Very Much!!

I don't think Northrop had anything to do with that design. That is just a development of the A-12 with a slightly higher aspect ratio.

 

[Ingraman]

I was just wondering if it was an official artwork or a nice fanart, maybe based on a description from an article or a book.

 

[flateric]

Does anybody remember the origin of the famous image GD/McAir/Northrop(?) A/F-X proposal? Thank You Very Much!!

AX - General Dynamics & McDonnell Douglas

 

[Ingraman]

Thank You!
Wow, " This page was last updated on 05 May 2002 "! Maybe infos and imagecome from the infamous book:
The $5 Billion Misunderstanding: The Collapse of the Navy's A-12 Stealth Bomber Program. James Perry Stevenson. Naval Institute Press, 2001

From the Internet Archive:
General Dynamics and McDonnell Douglas (GD/McAir) agreed to offer the government a modified A-12 for their A-X submittal. The roles and responsibilities of the two contractors remained basically the same as in the A-12 program when it was terminated, with a few exceptions. The major exception is that General Dynamics would have been responsible for final assembly and fly-out.
McDonnell Douglas's New Aircraft Product Division (NAPD) was responsible for the A-X work on both the GD/McAir proposal and on the McDonnell Douglas/Vought proposal.
James Sinnett, NAPD President, stated that the A-12 knowledge possessed by McAir and GD engineers would go a long way in providing a competitive advantage on their A-12 derivative submittal. Sinnet said that he expected fewer problems in terms of weight growth on the A-12 derivative than on the original A-12. "There has been an enormous influx of knowledge on deep-depth composite structure that makes us a little bit smarter then we were five or six years ago." The internal rearrangement of the design may also lend itself to a more efficient use of structural concepts than were employed in the A-12, he said.

 

[flateric]

Lockheed says NATF meets nearly all AX requirements

Source: Defense Daily
Publication Date: 09-SEP-91
(Las Vegas) The Lockheed-Boeing-General Dynamics team's naval version of the Advanced Tactical
Fighter (NATF) currently meets 95 percent of the Navy's requirements for the future AX bomber,
Lockheed officials said last week.
"The NATF was developed with significant air-to-ground capability, and while I can't go into
numbers, I'd have to say it was significant and in fact, the way the NATF sits today it can meet 95
percent of the AX specification requirements," one Lockheed official said during the 34th annual
TailHook Association Convention last week. A request for proposals (RFP) was released to
contractors by the Navy during a classified briefing over a week ago outlining requirements for the
AX (Defense Daily, August 29). The service plans to procure 234 AX aircraft to enter the carrier
airwing fleet by 2010, according to the RFP.
The Lockheed official said that, "there were a lot of compromises in the YF-22 prototype design to
accommodate a Navy airplane, but we worked very, very hard on that."
"We have a Navy version that has a swing ring that was never built ... that is carrier-suitable and
also has a capability to get into the higher speed mode of the outer air stealth ... for the
strike/fighter design," the official said. He added that while the NATF was designed with both
strike and fighter capabilities in mind, "we feel very strongly that if the Navy chooses to go the
strike/fighter route in the AX, the type of airplane we would build on paper, or NATF, would be
competitive."
Lockheed officials also said that the aircraft can meet the service requirement of carrying weapons
both internally and externally. The Navy "could hang a bunch of bombs on it and still maintain the
stealth ... but we have an internal stealthy capability and then an external capability that can get
you a significant total amount of weapons," one company official said.
The Navy canceled its participation in the Air Force-led effort to develop an advanced tactical
fighter last year. In late April, the Air Force selected the team of Lockheed-General Dynamics-
Boeing to develop its YF-22 ATF prototype aircraft. The Lockheed team intends to offer a version of
the YF-22 as the basis of its bid on the AX.
A total of five industry teams or individual firms will be selected to enter AX Concept Exploration
Definition studies, which are estimated to be worth $20 million a piece. In addition to the
Lockheed proposal, three teams have announced they will compete for the development of the AX.
Lockheed will offer a new design with teammates Boeing and Grumman. General Dynamics and
McDonnell Douglas will submit a version of the now-defunct A-12. McDonnell Douglas and LTV will
team to offer a new design.

 

[Scott Kenny]

Pardon the resurrection of this thread.

Since the A/FX was supposed to replace the F-111 and arguably the FB-111, is it really possible that the weapons bays were sized around AGM-86 ALCMs? 22 feet long? Or are we all agreed that was a typo for AGM-84E SLAMs, 15ft long?

 

[flateric]

"it was a typo" where?

 

[Scott Kenny]

"it was a typo" where?

Don't want to go back through 6 pages of posts to find it, said something about the weapons bays being sized for "AGM-86E Standoff Attack Missiles".

AGM-86 is the ALCM
AGM-84E is the SLAM, the Standoff Land Attack Missile.

 

[Scott Kenny]

How much bigger are the A/F-X bays compared to F-22? Width and lenghtwise they look about the same to me?

From flight global:

"Weapons-bay length was set by the dimensions of the AGM-86E stand-off land-attack missile, while width was determined by those of the GBU-24 laser-guided bomb. Air-to-air missiles would have been housed in F-22-style side bays."

Nevermind, went back and dug it out on Page 3 of the thread.

 

[TomS]

How much bigger are the A/F-X bays compared to F-22? Width and lenghtwise they look about the same to me?

From flight global:

"Weapons-bay length was set by the dimensions of the AGM-86E stand-off land-attack missile, while width was determined by those of the GBU-24 laser-guided bomb. Air-to-air missiles would have been housed in F-22-style side bays."

Nevermind, went back and dug it out on Page 3 of the thread.

Yes, as noted at the time, this is almost certainly a typo for AGM-84E SLAM. The Navy never adopted any version of AGM-86, and I don't think the -86E version even existed when AFX was being considered.

For an F-111 replacement, the bay didn't need to be longer than 14-15 feet to house SRAM or TSSAM/JASSM (or B61s).

 

[Scott Kenny]

How much bigger are the A/F-X bays compared to F-22? Width and lenghtwise they look about the same to me?

From flight global:

"Weapons-bay length was set by the dimensions of the AGM-86E stand-off land-attack missile, while width was determined by those of the GBU-24 laser-guided bomb. Air-to-air missiles would have been housed in F-22-style side bays."

Nevermind, went back and dug it out on Page 3 of the thread.

Yes, as noted at the time, this is almost certainly a typo for AGM-84E SLAM. The Navy never adopted any version of AGM-86, and I don't think the -86E version even existed when AFX was being considered.

For an F-111 replacement, the bay didn't need to be longer than 14-15 feet to house SRAM or TSSAM/JASSM (or B61s).

It didn't really make sense, but I've seen stranger things listed in a specifications requirement before...

 

[Hydroman]

On the AWST article discussing the companies involved and their proposals, it says Northrop joined the General Dynamics and McDonnell Douglas team which was proposing the A-12 based design. Yet on Matej's website these pictures are shown of a different Northrop A-X (or A/F-X) model.
I will presume Northrop was working independently on this, so what led to them teaming up with GD and McDonnell Douglas on their proposal? Personally I find this a very interesting looking design.

It fits ...what a beauty! Looks like the perfect sucessor of F-117 btw ;D

EDIT: This pic appears in "Flying Wings and Radical Things Part 1" @41:30

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWOq0pdXxFU

Tony Chong calls it "balanced based". Balanced between LO and performance.

Got to see some low-speed wind tunnel testing of this configuration at Pico Rivera in the day. This was a very nice design, had some YF-23 aspects incorporated. Does look like an evolved F-117. This another example of a UFO (UnFunded Opportunity).

 

[Cancerman]

Got to see some low-speed wind tunnel testing of this configuration at Pico Rivera in the day. This was a very nice design, had some YF-23 aspects incorporated. Does look like an evolved F-117. This another example of a UFO (UnFunded Opportunity).

Yes, at Pico, we had the follow on work on the Navy projects, we had several Low speed and transonic tunnel models undergoing testing. These were "Poverty programs" as we called them. Busy work, keeping people and engineers working waiting for more budget. Most of these were very promising, but the Navy was just SO difficult to work with. They changed their requirements every other day. The L.O. tech really scared them. The A12 Doritos debacle really soured them also. In the end, they went with what was safe, the Super Hornet, and eventually the F35. They constantly fight each other from within. Mainly fighting over funding and which group within the Navy had priority. The ships usually won. There were models that probably never went outside of the Hawthorne low speed 7x10 tunnel. We were trying really hard to get a F111 type medium bomber program. That's when budgets were drying up and the company started to shrink. They were starting to shutter Pico when I left.

 

[Hydroman]

Ah, the Pico days. If you remember, we had our "A-12" version full-scale mock-up across from the B-2 FCHIL in the "Blue and Gold" room, very nice mock-up. After reading my A-12 $5B Misunderstanding book again, the USN seriously botch the program and in the end, the USN admitted our team would have given them a airplane. The USN could not wrap their heads around our LO approach (medium to high you won't die but down on the deck, you better re-check). I never heard the term "Poverty" programs but makes sense, lol. We had few designs which would have made great F-111 replacements, we were ahead of our time for sure.

 

[pedrospe]

Ah, the Pico days. If you remember, we had our "A-12" version full-scale mock-up across from the B-2 FCHIL in the "Blue and Gold" room, very nice mock-up. After reading my A-12 $5B Misunderstanding book again, the USN seriously botch the program and in the end, the USN admitted our team would have given them a airplane. The USN could not wrap their heads around our LO approach (medium to high you won't die but down on the deck, you better re-check). I never heard the term "Poverty" programs but makes sense, lol. We had few designs which would have made great F-111 replacements, we were ahead of our time for sure.

Hello, any pictures or drawings of those F-111 replacements designs??

 

[Hydroman]

No pictures, only the illustrations (and desktop model) of the FB-23 that are public.

 

[stever_sl]

I worked on the MDC/Vought A/F-X, which we called "Clean Sheet A/F-X" to distinguish it from the MDC/Northrop/etc "Son of A-12" that was being worked in other parts of our facilities. I know nothing about "Son of A-12" but I can tell you absolutely that the "Clean Sheet" design would never have been workable. The overhead inlet was its Achilles' heel for reasons I won't go into here, but beyond that it was just so totally mismanaged. Outer wing panel team and inner wing panel team came up with different numbers of spars, and no clear way to merge them at the wing fold ribs so that smooth load paths could be maintained. The airplane was so bulky and draggy that the only way to meet the hard Vmax requirement was by going up as high as it would go, pointing the nose straight down, and lighting the afterburners. Just problem after problem until mercifully the whole program was cancelled. It was genuinely one of the very worst experiences in my 40+ year aerospace career.

 

[Cancerman]

There are wind tunnel model photos somewhere. I was already gone when they started really going after the FB-23 configuration. There were numerous Navy/AF F111 medium bomber test models going at the same time. I remember a mod to the original ATA that moved the inlets and added butterfly tails. Then they sort of merged the YF23 and the ATA stuff. Some neat stuff. There was no real budgets for anything at that point. B-2 had been cut to 21 and they were moving things out of Pico/ASD when I left. I could have stayed but I would have had to go back to Hawthorne or Palmdale, and sell my home in Brea. I was ready for a life change. There is a lot of media that is in the vault the public has never seen. I've seen raw chase plane video of the YF23 that misspells many things disclosed about what we did and tested during Dem/Val . But they chose to release only what they did. I know there are some beautiful photos of the ATA full scale mock up somewhere.

 

[flateric]

The overhead inlet was its Achilles' heel for reasons I won't go into here, but beyond that it was just so totally mismanaged.

https://www.secretprojects.co.uk/threads/navy-ax-and-a-f-x-projects.2150/post-103958

Looks like third contractor was Thule

 

[stever_sl]

https://www.secretprojects.co.uk/threads/navy-ax-and-a-f-x-projects.2150/post-103958

Looks like third contractor was Thule

Not that I recall. McDonnell-Douglas selected the overhead inlet concept, we were told at the time, because the program manager was walking through the area where the configurators were laying out ordinary-looking things with big inlets on the sides of the fuselage, except for one very young person who, for reasons unknown, had sketched them up on top instead. PM thought that would make our airplane immediately stand out visually from a crowded field of competitors and so he decided to make that the centerpiece of our whole design. It was purely MDC's concept and decision to use it. The combined duct was cantilevered out above the fuselage for I believe 6-8 feet, which caused problems with keeping it rigid. There was nowhere to put either a USAF-style refueling receptacle or a USN-and-everybody-else probe, because the fuel spilled on disconnect wouldn't go straight down those inlets and into the engines, where China Lake had already done enough testing on fuel ingestion to warn us that drastic problems were likely to result. Any kind of positive angle of attack involved problems maintaining undisturbed airflow into the inlets. And so on. But rather than backtrack on the executive decision to use the darned things, we stuck with them to the end. So glad to see the program disappear!