Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!att!cbnews!military
Newsgroups: sci.military
Subject: Re: F-19 vs. F-117
Message-ID: <1990Jul23.203255.7681@cbnews.att.com>
Date: 23 Jul 90 20:32:55 GMT
Sender: military@cbnews.att.com (William B. Thacker)
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories
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From: att!utzoo!henry
>From: geraldp@mentor.com (Gerald Page)
>I've heard a lot about the F-117 being the first "stealth fighter", but 
>not much at all about the F-19.  I've read several military-type novels 
>about it...

Almost certainly the stealth fighter was originally going to be the F-19.
We know the s.f. has been around for quite a while, and there's also been
a noticeable gap in the designations right there:  F-18, okay, F-20, okay,
but nobody's ever heard of an F-19.  Almost everyone concluded that the
F-19 was the s.f.  Furthermore, "F-117" theoretically is an improper
designation, as there were no F-112 through F-116 and the numbering got
restarted at the low end two decades ago anyway.

The best account I've heard of how the "F-117" designation got started
is that the various Soviet fighters in US inventory are informally known
by such numbers, so as to avoid announcing their nature in radio traffic,
and for a while there was a deliberate attempt to obscure the s.f. by
encouraging confusion between it and the Soviet fighters.  (For example,
there was a crash a few years ago, the details of which were kept highly
secret, which was reported at various times as an s.f. crash and a MiG
crash.)  Why the USAF ended up sanctifying that designation is anyone's
guess.  There is a lot of politics in those designations sometimes, as
witness the "F/A-18" (the rules say that multirole combat aircraft are
just plain "F").

                                         Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
                                          henry@zoo.toronto.edu   utzoo!henry