Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!att!cbnews!military
From: tshaffer@ads.com (Tom Shaffer)
Newsgroups: sci.military
Subject: Re: Northrop F-20...
Message-ID: <6707@cbnews.ATT.COM>
Date: 19 May 89 01:41:24 GMT
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From: tshaffer@ads.com (Tom Shaffer)

I worked on the F-20 in the Avionic Integration
Laboratory (1983 - 86).  It was an incredible plane.  
The interesting part was that it was completely
funded by the Northrop Corp. (no gov't $$$s).  They spent
close to a billion dollars of their own money developing and
building it.  If my memory serves me right, the program was
started at the request of the gov't (then President Carter).  Its 
primary/first customer was supposed to be Taiwan.  Due to a
new treaty with China, during the Reagan era, the U.S. promised 
not to sell arms to Taiwan - the F-20's #1 customer just got axed.
The Air Force didn't want it because they had the F-16 and
General Dynamics was lobbying like crazy to keep the F-20
out of their market.  When it came to foreign sales, the US
had started exporting the F-15, and though the F-20 was a
great plane, who wants an F-20 when they can get a F-15?
For the countries that could not get the F-15, they were 
skeptical about buying a plane that wasn't in the US inventory.  
At the same time, General Dynamics slashed the price for the
F-16 by ~30%.  This caused a uproar in Congress about being
overcharged for all the planes aready purchased, but the
uproar died down and nothing came of it - GD later raised
the price back up.  During this period, the pressure was 
very intense on the Air Force to buy the F-20.  They decided 
to have a fly-off between the F-20 and the F-16 to settle 
the matter once and for all.  The Air Force (i.e. General
Dynamics) was sure the F-16 was a better plane.  Well, the 
Air Force conducted their fly-off, and guess what they did-
you guessed it, they decided to make the results classified!
I don't recall for sure, but I believe no official results were ever
released.  I think the failure to sell the F-20 was a very sad point in
the history of defense procurement.  No company in
history went so far out on a limb ($1 billion), investing
its own money to build a DOD product.  It would have been
nice to see a new trend start, where companies invested some of 
their own money in starting up and developing products.  
You can bet no company will ever make the same mistake Northrop made. 
Lesson- only spend the gov'ts money, don't ever risk any of your
own.  On the positive side, I think the work done on the
F-20 put the company in a good position to win other
contracts.  I could go on for days about all the "crap" that
went down, but ...

As another interesting side issue, does anyone have the full
story on the demise of the flying wing (XB-35 or YB49) in
the 50s?  As I recall, it was another unfortunate altercation 
between Northrop and General Dynamics where Northrop lost -
again.

				-- Tom Shaffer --