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Newsgroups: sci.military
Subject: F-12
Message-ID: <1990Aug23.015015.2788@cbnews.att.com>
Date: 23 Aug 90 01:50:15 GMT
Sender: military@cbnews.att.com (William B. Thacker)
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories
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From: att!utzoo!henry
>From: ntaib@silver.ucs.indiana.edu (Nur Iskandar Taib)
>Does anyone have any information on the F-12 project? What was 
>the performance of this airplane supposed to be? What kind of
>armament was it supposed to have mounted? The project was supposed
>to produce a strategic bomber interceptor, and instead spawned the 
>SR-71.

It's hard to tell how seriously the F-12 was undertaken.  There certainly
was interest, in some quarters, in a new interceptor, but given the obvious
shift of the threat from bombers to ballistic missiles, it was unlikely
even then that real money would be spent on it.  The other plausible
explanation for the F-12 is that it was largely intended to divert attention
from the more secret Blackbirds.  One standard photo shows a YF-12 under
construction at Lockheed, in a modest work area at Lockheed... another
photo that *wasn't* released at the time shows what's on the other side of
the partitions around that area:  the production line for the A-12 (the
original, highly secret, Blackbird built for the CIA).

Performance of the YF-12 was roughly comparable to the other Blackbirds,
circa Mach 3 at circa 75,000 ft.  Armament was four big Hughes missiles
that were descendants of the big Eagle (meant to arm the Navy's Missileer,
cancelled in favor of the F-111B) and precursors of the Phoenix.

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