YF-23 wind tunnel model

"Drakkon- Most Glorious and Upright Person of Genius" (rex-imperator) 05/23/2016 at 18:41 • Filed to: F-23

2

13

Do I was in the St Louis ‘burb of Bellefontaine Neighbors today and there is a public park in the corner of a shopping center. I notice a model airplane on a 15 foot pole.

I recognize it as an F-23 Advance Tactical Fighter. The plaque says it was dedicated to the community in 2001 by Boeing (McDonnell Douglas) and the model had 14000 hours of work into it. Cool unexpected find.

Plus a find later in the day.

ttyymmnn > Drakkon- Most Glorious and Upright Person of Genius 05/23/2016 at 19:16

0

Not exactly the YF-23, but probably one of the shapes they studied along the way. It actually looks a bit more like the “MiG-31" from Firefox , which was a much better book than it was a movie.

Drakkon- Most Glorious and Upright Person of Genius > ttyymmnn 05/23/2016 at 19:24

1

Remember that Lockheed, Boeing, General Dynamics, Northrup and McDonnell all started with their own ideas. I think this is the MD idea that never made it past the first phase of competition. After the AF announced which two fighters would get built, Lockheed partnered with GD and Boeing and Northrup partnered with MD.

If you look, the Boeing and GD proposals are also called ‘YF-23.’

The early Northrup models did not have rhombus shaped wings and the final F-23 did so I think that is an MD design that flowed through.

This is model is a dead branch in the tree of fighters.

RallyWrench > ttyymmnn 05/23/2016 at 19:31

1

Reminds me of the “F19,” from when everyone thought future stealth aircraft would be amorphous sci-fi spaceship blobs. Funny that cars of the period started to turn into blobs too.

facw > Drakkon- Most Glorious and Upright Person of Genius 05/23/2016 at 19:36

0

That’s a good deal different than what the YF-23 ended up being, but sadly I couldn’t find anything showing the evolution of the YF-23 design.

I did find this image, showing initial (1981) designs for a new air-to-air fighter that would eventually lead into the AFT program:

It’s interesting to see the variation, but it’s hard to tell if these were ever more than “draw something cool for our proposal”. Very little stealth emphasis, but a broad range of possible designs. Northrop was obviously going for something along the lines of the F-5/F-20/F-17 (though the middle one also looks like an extremely squished YF-23), and a scaled up version of Grumman’s X-29 (or perhaps more accurately, the X-29 is scaled down) design is immediately identifiable. Beyond that you have something that looks roughly SR-71 based from Lockheed (very different from even the early F-22 concepts), and a “Euro canard” style planes. Plus whatever is going on with McDonnell’s weird straight-winged fighter.

ttyymmnn > RallyWrench 05/23/2016 at 20:32

0

Testors got a little bit closer with their concept, pretty clearly based on the SR-71. I remember that the Air Force got pretty upset by these models, though I’m not sure why. Maybe they were trying to throw off the Russkies by making them think that the modelers were getting close.

RallyWrench > ttyymmnn 05/23/2016 at 20:38

1

Yep, I think I might have built that one at one point. Between that and the Aurora, I remember reading a lot of speculation in Popular Science and other magazines about those aircraft. I remember seeing what I later learned was an F117 fly over at dusk one night in the mid 80's, before it was public. I was 6 or 7, and lost my damn mind because I was sure I had seen the Aurora.

ttyymmnn > RallyWrench 05/23/2016 at 20:42

0

I also think the fact that the guesses were so wrong is a good sign that Lockheed’s secrecy worked.

Drakkon- Most Glorious and Upright Person of Genius > ttyymmnn 05/23/2016 at 22:06

1

I saw a show on Discovery about SR-71. In the early 1960s, the American double agents in Moscow found drawings that showed the Soviets knew the shape of the Even if they were sure what it was.

The crew at Area51 had always been careful to bring the plane indoors before the Soviet’s satellite passed overhead. It took a few weeks, but the Americans deduced the soviet’s satellite was equipped with infrared. Even though we had move the plane inside, the cool spot remained where the shadow had been on the concrete.

So the ground crew at started dreaming up all kinds of wacky shapes and making cardboard cutouts and placing them outside for a few hours prior to the satellite passing overhead.

I love subterfuge

WRXerFish - WRX-Wing pilot > Drakkon- Most Glorious and Upright Person of Genius 05/23/2016 at 23:18

0

That Z you posted reminded me of a car I saw in Saint Louis. On Lindbergh near Olive. A Juke NISMO RS.

Drakkon- Most Glorious and Upright Person of Genius > WRXerFish - WRX-Wing pilot 05/23/2016 at 23:27

0

Must have been the same car. That was in overland this morning

Brian McKay > Drakkon- Most Glorious and Upright Person of Genius 05/27/2016 at 01:32

1

That’s not “an F-23 Advance Tactical Fighter.” That’s not even a model of “an F-23 Advance Tactical Fighter.”No “F-23 Advance Tactical Fighter” exists. And as someone else wrote, that isn’t a representation of a YF-23. So I don’t know how you can “recognize it as an F-23 Advance Tactical Fighter.”

That plaque, with too many unnecessary capital letters, does not say that “the model had 14,000 hours of work into it.” The horribly-composed plaque alleges that Boeing employees worked 14,000 hours (583 days) to manufacture and test future defenses.

Sundog > Drakkon- Most Glorious and Upright Person of Genius 10/19/2016 at 01:04

0

That’s the Naval variant of the Northrop-McDonnell Douglas submission, but the canards are missing. It’s their NATF (Naval ATF) design.

Commentator > Brian McKay 02/17/2017 at 20:22

1

Actually, what it is is a wind tunnel model of the Northrop/McDonnell Douglas proposal for the naval model of the F-23. The ATF program originally envisioned an “Advanced Tactical fighter”, and a variant for navy use, the “Naval Advanced Tactical Fighter”, or NATF.   As it turned out, neither the F-22 or F-23 designs could be modified into a carrier capable fighter, so their proposals were for totally different airframes that would be built on separate production lines. The -22 and -23 designations were retained to maintain the image that the naval versions were just “variants”.

One thing that is not apparent on the F-23 NATF model is that the design was a canard. Somewhere along the line the canards got removed from this model, but on a blowup you can see the attachments where they were.