Warbird Information Exchange

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/aircraft/fb-22.htm and http://defense-update.com/20050128_strike-bombers.html

This program was canceled http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_X-44_MANTA but seem what was learned
is being reworked for a different task. I hope the Manta design elements take a greater emphasis over the delta wing of the FB-22 concept drawing.

Did you look at the date of the story you linked?

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Wow, talk about digging up history. The FB-22 was one of the many "changes" tried by the USAF to save the program when it continued to run into problems and the buy was reduced so much that just the F-22A purchase wouldn't be enough to fully replace the F-15C fleet (which it hasn't and won't) as originally planned. As a last ditch try, they just renamed the F-22A the F/A-22A (and actually almost put it in the inventory as that) before smarter heads prevailed and pointed out that the aircraft had always had a secondary precision A/G role since that's what the GBU-39/40 had been designed for back in the late 1990's and that the "F/A" was another political maneuver.

Then again, I've never been a fan of the F-22 because it wasn't the better aircraft overall, it just had the one "neato-cool" feature that the Air Force just "had to have" - thrust vectoring. Never mind the YF-23 outflew and out-manevuered the F-22 in every engagement even without thrust vectoring and when they added the pseudo-vectoring capability it really whipped up on it...

Oh well, such is the way it goes and why the DoD can't purchase anything anymore. It continues to prove it doesn't matter what the rules are, they'll do whatever they want and everyone looses in the end.

A couple things:

- The Raptor is a phenomenally capable aircraft, and absolutely wipes the floor with anything else in the air today, operational or not. I've fought it personally, gave it nearly everything I could in the F-15E, and it wasn't even close.

- There are lots of significant capabilities the airplane has that are not known to the public. Many of those capabilities played a role in the ATF decision. It is not as simple as you've made it out to be (ergo, the AF "just had to have thrust vectoring") by any stretch of the imagination.

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As tough as F-22 development and production has been, the F-23 was seen as a riskier project. This was due to both technical reasons and perceptions about the bidders' comparitive abilities to execute/manage the programs.

I'm not sure how the F-23 could have been riskier as it relied on much more proven technology and borrowed systems from other aircraft (including the F-15E and B-2) and the manufacturing team was Northrop and McDonnell Douglas, who by all rights, had a much better production history with military projects that Boeing (which hadn't built a new military project since the B-52) and Lockheed (who's last 4 projects had been cancelled or run fantastically over budget), so where was the "risk" really? Remember, the F-22 was before General Dynamics was taken over by Lockheed and General Dynamics (at the time of the ATF program) was a minor partner in the YF-22 submission, but even then, it's only recent success was the F-16.

Randy, I'm sure there are a lot of "whiz-bang" stuff the F-22 can do that isn't public, but considering that both airframes could accept 90% of the same equipment and the providers of that equipment were in large part 3rd parties (i.e. they worked for both competitors), there is no reason the F-23 couldn't have incorporated or did incorporate those features.

Nope completely missed the date. Seems i linked into an old part of the web.
Just wanted to share a development project i think was kinda spiffy if a little miss guided.
i just didn't see a need for the design and wanted a bit of feed back from WIX.

I understand that Northrop was having a devil of a time with the B-2 program at the time and Lockheed had recently pulled off the very successful F-117 project. That was the <perceived> management side of the risk.

On the production side, the F-23 had a very complicated titanium bulkhead which was seen as a major risk. The unresolved question was whether Northrop could really mass produce such a large, complicated part? In addition, the F-23 prototypes used very fragile/high maintenance ceramic tiles to shield the engine heat. It was understood that something much better would have to be invented/developed on the production version.

Regardless of which aircraft was awarded the contract, the "fans" of the other aircraft would have found fault with the decision.

Northrop may have had issues producing it, but McDonnell Douglas was always (per the partnership) the primary production facility for the YF-23 and borrowed a lot of its parts from other MacDac projects like the landing gear, ejection seat, and MFD's which were all off the F/A-18 and F-15 (how ironic that the F/A-18 ended up contributing so much as a MacDac product to the design that was conceived by Northrop being that the F/A-18 was originally a Northrop project). While the Titanium bulkhead was probably "complex" don't forget that the F-15 and F-15E have a lot of titanium structure and MacDac is who pioneered titanium stir welding and machining titanium, so if anyone was to do it, it would've been MacDac. Either way, Congress (who made the final decision) said in the decision that the issue wasn't whether Northrop and MacDac could build it or not, they actually said in testimony, they thought they had too many contracts overall and that it was "unfair" to give them more.

On both sides of the equation (YF-22 or YF-23) there were a lot of inconsistencies in the selection process and judging. Things that would show up again in subsequent bidding and selection processes that ended up with the whole KC-X and CSAR-X fiascos.

Congress didn't select the winner of the competition. The DOD did. The issues I mentioned were <apparently> counted against the F-23 in the decision making process, right or wrong.

Congress did follow through with funding after the DOD made the selection.

I absolutely agree with you with regard to how much flexibility the DOD has given itself to evaluate bids on recent contracts. Whether the decisions are right or wrong, not having and sticking to a very well defined, objective set of criteria opens up the whole process to criticism.

What is "Mac Dac"?

I've never heard McDonnell Douglas referred to that way. Always "Mac-D" or MacAir.

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Randy,

I've heard "Mac-D", MacAir, MDD, and "Ma D" (although that is more referring to Douglas than MDD), but I also have 2 books that use "MacDac" in writing (one on the F-15, and one on the DC-10) and several interviews from employees back during the 1980's and 1990's using the same reference. It may be more of a Long Beach thing though than a Saint Louis thing.

Actually, the DoD reccomended the YF-22 be the winner. Congress then "approved" the selection and appropriated funding. In the appropriation hearings, the issue of contracts was brought up by the Senate Appropriations Committee as a factor, not the DoD. There were several articles in Flight Journal and Popular Mechanics during this time about the "disconnect" between the DoD and Congress with the appropriations as it was one of the first times Congress was questioning the DoD's selection criteria and scoring. There was evidence in the DoD selection that the YF-23 was actually the "better" fit for the original RFP, but the USAF was very much sitting on thrust vectoring as a major reason for selecting the YF-22 (at least in the public hearings) and the committee was concerned with who had more contracts (irregardless of production capability, the concern seemed to be more of "too many eggs in one basket" thing for them).

Either way, the loss of ATF ended up with a major change in the aerospace landscape with MacDonnell Douglas and General Dynamics being bought up by Boeing and Lockheed respectively (GD more of a "side-show" acquisition since it wasn't involved with the MDD/Northrop YF-23) and the exit of Northrop as primary builder of new manned systems, instead focusing on its RPV, Space, and Avionics/Mission Systems programs.

That's something I didn't consider, good point.

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The funny thing Randy, is that unlike Boeing, McDonnell Douglas really did seem to have two different companies under one name. Long Beach being Douglas and St. Louis being MacDonnell. There are a lot of things I've read and heard over the years that makes me think that there really was a full disconnect between both locations and that even though the C-17s were being built in Long Beach, those guys had basically nothing to do with military production and most would've been surprised to find out that their company actually built military aircraft (beside maybe the C-17). At least at Boeing, most of the guys are fully aware of the military side and what they do, even though they are/were in Wichita and St. Louis.