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From: ESVENSSON%brage.qz.se@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
Newsgroups: sci.military
Subject: YF-23 rollout
Message-ID: <1990Jul16.030720.5078@cbnews.att.com>
Date: 16 Jul 90 03:07:20 GMT
Sender: military@cbnews.att.com (William B. Thacker)
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories
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From: ESVENSSON%brage.qz.se@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
In the 4-10 July issue of Flight International there were some good pictures
from the YF-23 rollout. That's one strange looking bird!

Actually it's not all that strange. The fins and the tailplanes are merged into
two (tailfins? finplanes?) canted outwards about 45 degrees. The engines are
housed in two big boxy bulges located ontop the airplane between the two
finplanes. The trailing edge of the wing is swept forward and leading edge
backwards, creating a truncated triangle. There's a sort of leading edge root
extension going forward from the wing root all the way to the nose. The
cockpit canopy is large, but seems to be smaller than the F-16, the seat
looking to be placed lower than in the F-16. The head-on photo shows the HUD,
which seems to be much larger than earlier fighters, F-15, F-16 etc.
The aircraft is large, larger than the F-15, I can't remember how much bigger,
though.

The contractor (which one I don't remeber) forgot to edit the drawings shown,
wich included the weapons bays. According to Flight the drawing showed two (2)
Sidewinders and four (4) AIM-120s (btw,has it got a name? the AIM-120 that is).

This seems a bit under-armed to me, since most new aircraft today carry 8
missiles or more. I also wonder about air-ground loads. Will the ATF be able
to take any? Indeed, will there be an ATF at all, with the budget problems and
all?



Erik Svensson
Guided Weapons Division
National Defense Research Establishment
Stockholm, Sweden

net.address: esvensson@brage.qz.se