Northrop, Lockheed Get Big AF Jet Pacts : Will Design High-Tech Tactical Fighter; General Dynamics Wins out over F-20
The Air Force awarded prime contracts on Friday to Northrop Corp. and Lockheed Corp. to develop a new generation of jet fighter, a program potentially worth $45 billion in future business and thousands of Southern California jobs over the next two decades.
But at the same time, the Air Force decided not to buy Northrop’s F-20, which the aerospace firm has spent $1 billion of its own funds to develop, and instead chose a modified version of the General Dynamics F-16 for continental air defense.
Northrop said it will lay off 2,000 workers at its Hawthorne aircraft division by the end of next year, mostly as a result of the decision against the F-20, and will reassess the future of the aircraft. Aerospace industry analysts said they expect the program to be terminated.
On balance, despite the dramatic near-term disappointment for Northrop on the F-20, the Air Force decision to award both ATF contracts to Los Angeles-area contractors will provide a powerful boost to the aircraft industry here.
‘A Major Event’
“From the Southern California viewpoint, this is a major event,” said Sherman Mullin, Lockheed vice president and ATF program director. “This means we will be developing engineering and manufacturing capabilities that will be superior to anything else in the world.”
Lockheed said its ATF employment will grow to 1,000 from 300 during 1987. Northrop said it will add 1,000 ATF jobs by the end of 1987 but, with the F-20 layoffs, it will still be under current employment levels.
“Obviously, this is a bittersweet day for Northrop,” Thomas V. Jones, the company’s chairman and chief executive, said. “We are pleased and proud that the Air Force selected Northrop . . . for the Advanced Tactical Fighter weapon system.”
Two Prototypes Each
Under the ATF contract that the Air Force awarded Friday, both Northrop and Lockheed will receive $691 million over the next five years to build two prototypes each of their proposed fighter aircraft.
At the end of the five-year development period, the Air Force will conduct a fly-off between the two aircraft to assess their capabilities. If all goes according to plan and if Congress appropriates funds for the program, one of the two firms would be selected for full-scale development and production.
The full development and testing of the ATF will cost $9.6 billion. The Air Force plans to buy 750 of the planes at a cost of $35 million each. The program plan calls for a production rate of 72 aircraft a year, carrying production to the year 2005 and later modification work possibly a decade beyond that.
Lockheed will split its ATF work equally with a team composed of Boeing and General Dynamics. Northrop is teamed with McDonnell Douglas.
If Lockheed wins the eventual ATF production program, it will assemble the plane at its Palmdale hangar and very likely will expand those facilities, Lockheed’s Mullin said. Northrop also would assemble the ATF in Palmdale.
The arrangement leaves out Rockwell International, which had pinned great hope on winning an ATF contract to keep its El Segundo-based North American Aircraft unit going after the B-1 bomber program expires. Grumman, based in Long Island, N.Y., also lost out.
Northrop and Lockheed have emerged in recent years as the two leaders in stealth aircraft technology, a capability to avoid detection by radar that has brought each company important fighter and bomber aircraft programs that are being conducted in secrecy.
‘Gray World’
The ATF program will be conducted in semi-secrecy, a so-called “gray world,” Air Force Secretary Edward C. Aldridge Jr. said here Friday. That means, for example, that the design of the aircraft will be held secret until it becomes operational, which is scheduled to be in the mid-1990s.
The ATF is intended to be capable of controlling potential air battles with the Soviets, who have fielded two new fighter jets called the MIG-29 Fulcrum and the SU-27 Flanker and are planning two additional new-technology jets, Aldridge said in announcing the contract awards during a news conference at the Hyatt at Los Angeles International Airport.
“Not only must we build an ATF with the capability to cope with the ever-evolving threat, we must also do so at a cost that allows us to buy the number of ATFs that we will ultimately need,” Aldridge said.
Most Expensive Fighter
With its cost of $35 million each, the ATF would be the most expensive fighter plane ever deployed. It will be able to cruise supersonically at 1.5 times the speed of sound and is expected to have double the combat range, be able to fly twice as many combat missions in a given period of time and have triple the engine reliability of the current F-15 Air Force fighter.
In describing Lockheed’s winning design, Mullin said the jet fighter will carry a single pilot, be powered by two engines and carry all of its air-to-air missiles internally. Northrop, meanwhile, said it could not provide any details of its aircraft because of security requirements.
General Dynamics won the air-defense fighter competition by submitting a proposal to convert 270 of its F-16A model aircraft now in the Air Force inventory to a configuration for continental air defense.
Cheaper Than New F-20s
The cost of that conversion is put at $633 million, vastly cheaper than the purchase of a fleet of new F-20s. But Northrop spokesman Les Daly said the comparison of the two planes was “like comparing a new car to an old car. You can always get a better price on a used car than a new car.”
Sen. Pete Wilson (R-Calif.), a proponent of the F-20, also questioned whether the Air Force, by accepting a proposal for used aircraft, conformed to the spirit of the congressional legislation that mandated the competition.
“I am disappointed about the award to General Dynamics,” Wilson said. “The F-20 has done good work for the taxpayer by knocking down the price of the F-16, although the company still has yet to be compensated.”
The 270 F-16 fighters, once they are converted, will be transferred to 11 Air National Guard bases around the nation and replace F-4 and F-106 fighters currently assigned to the Guard units.
Won’t Hike Purchase Rate
The Air Force will not increase its rate of purchase of current versions of the F-16, known as the F-16D, to replace the older aircraft it takes out of its inventory.
“We were under no illusions that we would get more airplanes as a result of this competition,” said Lt. Gen. Bernard P. Randolph, deputy Air Force chief of staff for research, development and acquisition. “Let’s say we would have picked the F-20, then we were going to get fewer other aircraft.”
The Air Force had previously intended to assign the F-16A fighters to the Guard but now they will be moved over at least several years early, he said.
Low-Cost Fighter
Northrop’s F-20 was conceived as a relatively low-cost fighter plane, mainly for sale to foreign governments, but most foreign air forces have selected the F-16 or other fighters offered by new European competitors.
Northrop said the loss will cause it to “reassess the international outlook for the F-20 program.”
“Right now,” Jones, the Northrop chairman, said, “I can say, frankly, it doesn’t look favorable.”
Since Northrop has written off the $1 billion in F-20 cost as it was incurred over the last half-dozen years, the company will not suffer any immediate financial damage. In fact, Wall Street analysts have had little enthusiasm for any potential profit that Northrop could expect from the F-20 because it would have been faced with tens of millions of dollars in tooling costs for production of the F-20.
“The F-20 has been a remarkable program from the beginning,” Jones said. “It has introduced competition to the fighter field. It has certainly helped to reduce the cost to the Air Force 1868963951the imagination of the American people.”
