Self-indulgent post of the, uh……….hour………

Since all my posts are self-indulgent!  But this one extra so!

Who hear here (good grief!) besides maybe Raul and Colleen has heard of the YF-23?  It was an aircraft designed and built in the waning days of US aerospace dominance in the late 1980s for the USAF Advanced Tactical Fighter competition.  The ATF competition was designed to result in an air superiority fighter so incredibly capable it would literally assure doiminance against other aircraft, and possess at least a good rate of survivability againt increasingly lethal ground based air defenses (surface to air missile networks, primarily).  The design and competition process began in 1981 and culminated in a 1990 flyoff competition between the Northrop YF-23 and the Lockheed YF-22.  For a number of reasons that are difficult to fathom, the YF-22 won (mostly because it was thought to be cheaper), in spite of the fact that nearly everyone thought the YF-23 the far superior aircraft in all areas except high alpha and general pitch maneuverability (the plane could radically change up and down direction in flight quickly).  Other than that, the YF-23 was reputed by many to be much faster in supercruise, more “stealthy” in all aspects, and to have better roll and longitudinal maneuverability (for the turning fight). 

I was a weird kid, almost as weird as I am now.  I followed the Air Force and US military aerospace in general extremely closely.  Many of my friends were similar.  We grew up in the Reagan defense boom that we thought (hoped) would last forever.  It did not.  The ATF competition was sort of the dawning of the age of defense austerity that has been ongoing for the last 20+ years, and looks to get much worse.  In the early 90s, the USAF expected to buy 750 F-22s, but has wound up being able to purchase only 187 to replace about 700 F-15s.  Fantastic aircraft like the YF-23 got left by the wayside as more and more dollars went to entitlements and wealth transfers.  If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, both the Russians and Chinese apparently believe the F-23 was the way to go.

The reason for this rant is I found an awesome website dedicated to the YF-23 yesterday, and I just had to afflict you with it. 

When I was 18 and the YF-23 was rolled out, I thought it was the most incredible looking aircraft I had ever seen, and more or less still feel that way.  It has an odd shape that makes the aircraft look completely different depending on how it is viewed:

Here’s a nice video from back in the day:

Since numbers do matter and the youngest F-15C/Ds in the service are at least 23 years old, it might be time to buy some new F-15SEs:

The demonstrater has flown.