US NAVY ATA (Advanced Tactical Aircraft) program: A-12 Avenger II & its rivals

[Desert Watchdog]

I won't add my own opinions here, as they have been addressed. Just adding the video for reference.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xiRdy9mAmM

 

[FighterJock]

What got me about the A-12 after watching the above YouTube video, was that the A-12 was the only stealth aircraft at that time that would have carried air-air missiles (AIM-120 AMRAAMs no less) in seperate internal weapon bays, the B-2 in comparison only relied on it's stealth technology to get through enemy air defences.

 

[Scott Kenny]

What got me about the A-12 after watching the above YouTube video, was that the A-12 was the only stealth aircraft at that time that would have carried air-air missiles (AIM-120 AMRAAMs no less) in seperate internal weapon bays, the B-2 in comparison only relied on it's stealth technology to get through enemy air defences.

Yeah, I thought that was wild. Typical mission load was 2x 2000lb, 2x HARM, and 2x AMRAAMs...

 

[flateric]

...

 

[DWG]

What got me about the A-12 after watching the above YouTube video, was that the A-12 was the only stealth aircraft at that time that would have carried air-air missiles (AIM-120 AMRAAMs no less) in seperate internal weapon bays, the B-2 in comparison only relied on it's stealth technology to get through enemy air defences.

OTOH this was the period when USN was planning to stick BVRAAMs on everything that would fly in order to maximise carrier air defence capability in the Outer Air Battle against Russian regiment or multi-regiment sized attacks. If they were planning to put AIM-152 on A-6F then putting AAMs on the near-contemporary A-12 would have been the obvious thing to do. (See Friedman, Fighters Over The Fleet)

 

[FighterJock]

I would have loved to have seen an A-6F carrying AIM-152s DWG. It was a big missile as I remember.

 

[Scott Kenny]

I would have loved to have seen an A-6F carrying AIM-152s DWG. It was a big missile as I remember.

Long but skinny. one was a ~5" missile with a 7-8" booster, the other was a ~6-7" front section and a 8-9" ramjet section.

 

[FighterJock]

Thanks for that Scott Kenny, I did not know that the AIM-152 came in two variants.

 

[Scott Kenny]

Thanks for that Scott Kenny, I did not know that the AIM-152 came in two variants.

Two contestants, General Dynamics/Westinghouse was the long and skinny, Hughes/Raytheon was the ramjet.

GD/W was SARH with IR terminal homing, H/R was ARH with midcourse updates from the launching plane.

https://www.secretprojects.co.uk/threads/aim-152-aaam-phoenix-replacement-projects.2548/

 

[hesham]

From Naval Aviation News 1990/11.

 

[apparition13]

Quick question, does anyone have the physical dimensions for the Northrop design? Wingspan, length, etc.? I used a measuring tool on one of the images and it looks to be roughly 44 feet long with a 78 foot wingspan, by I'm not that confident it's correct.

 

[Mark Nankivil]

Quick question, does anyone have the physical dimensions for the Northrop design? Wingspan, length, etc.? I used a measuring tool on one of the images and it looks to be roughly 44 feet long with a 78 foot wingspan, by I'm not that confident it's correct.

Pretty sure that is in Tony Chong's book "Flying Wings & Radical Things: Northrop's Secret Aerospace Projects & Concepts 1939-1994".

Crazy - the book was published in 2016, doesn't seem that long ago... Mark

​

 

[Hydroman]

Even though Paul Metz came out with his YF-23 book, everyone notices there is not a lot of info available, no other books, ATF dem/val videos/images, etc, YF/F-23 is still kind of a ghost, not much for public release, really just tidbits. Same for our competing ATA (mini-original B-2 and B-21), hence look at the B-21 configuration but nothing of any substance to our ATA accept two book images of a model. I would assume there have or has been a theater strike platform demonstrator built and flown but it also has to have value to move the program forward.

 

[quellish]

Same for our competing ATA (mini-original B-2 and B-21)

Sadly that relates to the A-12 lawsuits and this was justification for destroying or misplacing many, many records.

 

[Cancerman]

Sadly that relates to the A-12 lawsuits and this was justification for destroying or misplacing many, many records.

The Northrop ATA had a dozen wind tunnel models, Full scale mock up, which I used to see several times a week while working, and a functional full scale cockpit fixture. Somewhere, there is a secure storage of this data, photos, etc. We had a location for guarded secure storage we call "the dead sea scroll" storage. The mock up was disassembled, I doubt it survived as it would take up a fair amount of space. There is lots of photos somewhere, as we documented everything we did. The A12 lawsuit effected the other team, not Northrop. We just declined to bit fixed price, and shut it down. The Navy was insane about the security on that program so they may have dictated the destruction of everything. It would be awesome if NG released so of the Mock up photos, you guys would love it!

 

[quellish]

The Navy was insane about the security on that program so they may have dictated the destruction of everything.

Everything the Navy was involved with / controlled was either destroyed or “misplaced” . That includes material produced by Northrop under Navy control or produced with Navy funds.

I’ve asked for these records, several agencies were able to produce basically the same response - it’s gone

 

[Colonial-Marine]

Everything the Navy was involved with / controlled was either destroyed or “misplaced” . That includes material produced by Northrop under Navy control or produced with Navy funds.

I’ve asked for these records, several agencies were able to produce basically the same response - it’s gone

How or why is this even possible when these weren't black projects? Is this also why we've never seen several of the designs by the different teams working on the following A-X and A/F-X program?

Everything I've read about modern NAVAIR procurement really makes me think Kelly Johnson was onto something with that "Starve before doing business with the damned Navy" rule sometimes attributed to him.

 

[quellish]

How or why is this even possible when these weren't black projects?

ATA was a special access program. After the program was terminated there was a big multi year lawsuit. The government did not want to make discovery of documents too easy for the opposing party.

 

[Hydroman]

The Northrop ATA had a dozen wind tunnel models, Full scale mock up, which I used to see several times a week while working, and a functional full scale cockpit fixture. Somewhere, there is a secure storage of this data, photos, etc. We had a location for guarded secure storage we call "the dead sea scroll" storage. The mock up was disassembled, I doubt it survived as it would take up a fair amount of space. There is lots of photos somewhere, as we documented everything we did. The A12 lawsuit effected the other team, not Northrop. We just declined to bit fixed price, and shut it down. The Navy was insane about the security on that program so they may have dictated the destruction of everything. It would be awesome if NG released so of the Mock up photos, you guys would love it!

I remember when the ATA full-scale mock-up at Pico was chopped up, pieces no bigger than around 16 to 18", I forget how many large trash containers it filled. I was a shame too, it was a real nice mock-up, definitely museum material, I remember the Blue and Gold room across from B-2 FCHIL fondly. Again, the NG basic wing design has evolved many times for sure, you agree?

 

[Cancerman]

I remember when the ATA full-scale mock-up at Pico was chopped up, pieces no bigger than around 16 to 18", I forget how many large trash containers it filled. I was a shame too, it was a real nice mock-up, definitely museum material, I remember the Blue and Gold room across from B-2 FCHIL fondly. Again, the NG basic wing design has evolved many times for sure, you agree?

The containers filled the hallway down the rear loading ramp. I didn't think it was cut up that small but it was so long ago. I've slept since then. Yes, between the crank-arrow and others, along with airfoil shapes and the RCS technology, things have improved quite a bit. Computer modeling and software has cut development effort and range time quite a bit. They don't have to build near as many RCS models and do the small surface changes near as much. I think it (ATA) was chopped up at customers requirement and NG was more than happy to rid itself of the program, even though they came back to us to help save the A12. They also came back to us to design and test Arrowhead, and others for them, which they never of course bought.

 

[flateric]

Grumman ATA A-12 promo

 

[flateric]

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[flateric]

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[flateric]

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[Justo Miranda]

Old drawing

 

[Dew]

'Avenger II Slideshow' from www.generalstaff.org

 

[FighterJock]

Excellent find Dew and highly interesting too.

 

[BDF]

Even though Paul Metz came out with his YF-23 book, everyone notices there is not a lot of info available, no other books, ATF dem/val videos/images, etc, YF/F-23 is still kind of a ghost, not much for public release, really just tidbits. Same for our competing ATA (mini-original B-2 and B-21), hence look at the B-21 configuration but nothing of any substance to our ATA accept two book images of a model. I would assume there have or has been a theater strike platform demonstrator built and flown but it also has to have value to move the program forward.

When Metz and Sandberg gave their presentation to the Western Museum of Flight, Metz made a statement to the crowd, which had lots of former Northrop employees from what I gather, that a lot of the information left about the F-23 is contained within the folks present and that lot of it was destroyed after they lost to Lockheed. Sad to hear that we will never know more about these proposals other than what we already do.

 

[Colonial-Marine]

When Metz and Sandberg gave their presentation to the Western Museum of Flight, Metz made a statement to the crowd, which had lots of former Northrop employees from what I gather, that a lot of the information left about the F-23 is contained within the folks present and that lot of it was destroyed after they lost to Lockheed. Sad to hear that we will never know more about these proposals other than what we already do.

It does seem to be a rather common occurrence that just about everything on the losing designs in these programs is either destroyed or locked in a file cabinet in some warehouse owned by some DoD-specific bureaucratic circle of hell never to see the light of day. Look how long it took for anything on the Northrop NATF design to be revealed to the public. How many years has it been since Sikorsky/Boeing won the LHX contract which would become the RAH-66? Yet nothing about the real configuration of the losing McDonnell Douglas/Bell design was ever revealed. And besides for the lack of stuff on Northrop's ATA, there is a very real lack of official information about most of the designs offered in the following A-X later A/F-X program. There is almost certainly no secret technology at risk here anymore, just bureaucracy doing its thing.

All of this secrecy over options not chosen decades ago, yet meanwhile sheer incompetence and stupid human behavior gets many TB worth of data on ongoing current programs stolen by foreign adversaries.

 

[Hydroman]

It does seem to be a rather common occurrence that just about everything on the losing designs in these programs is either destroyed or locked in a file cabinet in some warehouse owned by some DoD-specific bureaucratic circle of hell never to see the light of day. Look how long it took for anything on the Northrop NATF design to be revealed to the public. How many years has it been since Sikorsky/Boeing won the LHX contract which would become the RAH-66? Yet nothing about the real configuration of the losing McDonnell Douglas/Bell design was ever revealed. And besides for the lack of stuff on Northrop's ATA, there is a very real lack of official information about most of the designs offered in the following A-X later A/F-X program. There is almost certainly no secret technology at risk here anymore, just bureaucracy doing its thing.

All of this secrecy over options not chosen decades ago, yet meanwhile sheer incompetence and stupid human behavior gets many TB worth of data on ongoing current programs stolen by foreign adversaries.

I have a completed NATF-23 display model (I also posted my pics on the forum as well) but the raw resin casting (I had to finish the model itself) was given to me back in 1992 from a model shop friend at Pico. I forget when the first public images came to be for NATF-23. It would be nice if more info was released in general so books could be written involving Have Blue, Tacit Blue, ATA (both GD and Northrop versions) just like what was produced for F-117, B-2, and ATF (YF/F-22, YF/F-23).

 

[BDF]

It does seem to be a rather common occurrence that just about everything on the losing designs in these programs is either destroyed or locked in a file cabinet in some warehouse owned by some DoD-specific bureaucratic circle of hell never to see the light of day. Look how long it took for anything on the Northrop NATF design to be revealed to the public. How many years has it been since Sikorsky/Boeing won the LHX contract which would become the RAH-66? Yet nothing about the real configuration of the losing McDonnell Douglas/Bell design was ever revealed. And besides for the lack of stuff on Northrop's ATA, there is a very real lack of official information about most of the designs offered in the following A-X later A/F-X program. There is almost certainly no secret technology at risk here anymore, just bureaucracy doing its thing.

All of this secrecy over options not chosen decades ago, yet meanwhile sheer incompetence and stupid human behavior gets many TB worth of data on ongoing current programs stolen by foreign adversaries.

If any information remains it likely isn't going to get released mainly because it has to be declassified and or it is proprietary. There is little incentive to declassify things and from what I understand even if you submit a FOIA request you have to know exactly the document you are requesting to get reviewed. So very unlikely we'll ever see much.

 

[overscan (PaulMM)]

I have a completed NATF-23 display model (I also posted my pics on the forum as well) but the raw resin casting (I had to finish the model itself) was given to me back in 1992 from a model shop friend at Pico. I forget when the first public images came to be for NATF-23.

First one I saw was the line drawings of NATF-23 some years before they were posted publicly, but it turned out a wind tunnel model had been on display for years in public mounted on a pole.

 

[quellish]

It does seem to be a rather common occurrence that just about everything on the losing designs in these programs is either destroyed or locked in a file cabinet in some warehouse owned by some DoD-specific bureaucratic circle of hell never to see the light of day. Look how long it took for anything on the Northrop NATF design to be revealed to the public. How many years has it been since Sikorsky/Boeing won the LHX contract which would become the RAH-66? Yet nothing about the real configuration of the losing McDonnell Douglas/Bell design was ever revealed. And besides for the lack of stuff on Northrop's ATA, there is a very real lack of official information about most of the designs offered in the following A-X later A/F-X program.

I can say with some experience that there are some private citizens who have been working to identify and locate these kinds of records. And when they have been requested from the appropriate agencies they have (sometimes) been released.

Some of these records are in the hands of agencies. Some of them are in private collections / libraries. There is Northrop ATA information in a repository not far from me, but I have not had the opportunity to go look through all of it.

And there is a lot of records at NARA that have not been indexed or cataloged yet. They are just sitting in boxes.

With regards specifically to the A-12 related programs, many records were isolated / collected as relevant to the long running lawsuit. Some may have been destroyed but many do remain and the lawsuit did generate new records (statements, declarations, expert opinions). The government is reluctant to release A-12 related records even today.

There is almost certainly no secret technology at risk here anymore, just bureaucracy doing its thing.

This is certainly true. I have experienced agencies use 10 USC 130 and ITAR to withhold documents that are 50 years old. There is no technology at risk here. Their justifications for "export control" are "because airplanes".

The reality is that these agencies - and AFRL in particular - just do not want to review the records even though they are required to by law. I have seen agencies claim that they took 1 hour to completely review a 500 page document line-by-line. This strains credibility to the point of making a case for fraud.

So there is a lot of "bureaucracy doing its thing".

If any information remains it likely isn't going to get released mainly because it has to be declassified and or it is proprietary. There is little incentive to declassify things and from what I understand even if you submit a FOIA request you have to know exactly the document you are requesting to get reviewed. So very unlikely we'll ever see much.

A lot of information about these programs has been declassified. For example, almost everything about HAVE BLUE was declassified in the early 1990s. But many of the key documents are "unfindable" because the Air Force did not put them in the places they were required to "because security".

And there are many cases where records that are declassified are now being withheld in full for other "reasons" like export control. And I have seen cases where documents that were never classified and have been in the public domain for 40 years are now claimed to be classified (though no records of their classification exist and they never had classification markings).

In one recent instance the Air Force has claimed it can withhold a 35 year old document because of both 10 USC 130 and classification. 10 USC 130 only applies to unclassified technical information. And the Air Force claims it is an original classification authority for this document and it can withhold it as currently and properly classified under executive order. Unfortunately for the Air Force, this contained portions that were classified as RESTRICTED DATA. The Air Force has no classification authority here, only DOE does. And the claims that the Air Force has made about these records and their "review" indicate they improperly handled this classified material. The FOIA denial authorities in this case have exposed themselves to serious consequences. They never actually reviewed the document, if they had they may have noticed that they did not control its classification and it required special handling.

Oops.

It kind of makes you wonder what else they are screwing up.

NGAD leaves the chat

 

[Scott Kenny]

In one recent instance the Air Force has claimed it can withhold a 35 year old document because of both 10 USC 130 and classification. 10 USC 130 only applies to unclassified technical information. And the Air Force claims it is an original classification authority for this document and it can withhold it as currently and properly classified under executive order. Unfortunately for the Air Force, this contained portions that were classified as RESTRICTED DATA. The Air Force has no classification authority here, only DOE does. And the claims that the Air Force has made about these records and their "review" indicate they improperly handled this classified material. The FOIA denial authorities in this case have exposed themselves to serious consequences. They never actually reviewed the document, if they had they may have noticed that they did not control its classification and it required special handling.

Oops.

Have you reported this? I assume that you have a clearance from your professional work, which makes you a mandatory reporter.

 

[quellish]

Have you reported this? I assume that you have a clearance from your professional work, which makes you a mandatory reporter.

I am not a mandatory reporter but it has been reported and escalated.

 

[_Del_]

And there are many cases where records that are declassified are now being withheld in full for other "reasons" like export control.

Can tell you a lot of the 50's work on reentry (and hence hypersonic flows, ionization, etc) which was once unclassified or since declassified is now retroactively being considered un-releaseable presumably because of "other nasty applications" as technology has evolved.
I am not sure if it was an active decision and formally done or just bureaucrats doing bureaucratic things or perhaps instances of both.

Also makes you wonder how much reinventing the wheel is taking place in the high-speed research because no-one knows what has already been demonstrated by whom or where the information is placed to peruse if they did know.

 

[Scott Kenny]

Can tell you a lot of the 50's work on reentry (and hence hypersonic flows, ionization, etc) which was once unclassified or since declassified is now retroactively being considered un-releaseable presumably because of "other nasty applications" as technology has evolved.
I am not sure if it was an active decision and formally done or just bureaucrats doing bureaucratic things or perhaps instances of both.

Also makes you wonder how much reinventing the wheel is taking place in the high-speed research because no-one knows what has already been demonstrated by whom or where the information is placed to peruse if they did know.

The answer is a lot.

I am not a mandatory reporter but it has been reported and escalated.

Thank you!