Torrance Outfit Takes On Giant in Bid for F-16 Work

Eidetics, a small aerospace company in Torrance, will take on defense giant General Dynamics this week when the two companies brief NATO officials on their proposals to improve the performance of the F-16 fighter.

Although General Dynamics has technical clout, financial power, political connections and is the builder of the plane, Eidetics has received some notable attention from the Air Force for its technical research in jet fighter performance.

“This is the classic case of a little company with no influence and no pull struggling to be heard,” remarked Andrew M. Skow, the former Northrop aircraft designer who founded Eidetics in 1982.

With a staff of only 22 employees, Eidetics has won several small but important Air Force contracts in aerodynamic research. The company has 13 military contracts, granted through the Pentagon’s small business innovation research program.

The majority of Eidetics’ contracts cover basic research, but the company has an ambitious goal of eventually winning a major modification program for an existing fighter plane, most likely for a friendly foreign government that operates U.S. aircraft. And Skow dreams of someday producing a new jet fighter for the Air Force.

The last thing the aerospace industry seems to need is yet another military aircraft producer to add to its excess capacity. But that has done little to thwart the handful of top engineers who run privately held Eidetics out of a leased facility near Torrance Airport.

Crack Technical Staff

In addition to Skow, who played an important role in Northrop’s F-20 jet fighter program, Eidetics has a technical staff that is well recognized in the aerospace industry, including William J. (Pete) Knight, the X-15 pilot who still holds the world speed record for aircraft, and test pilots and aerodynamicists Robert C. Ettinger, John Taylor and Gerald Malcolm.

So far, Eidetics has been growing through its bread-and-butter business of building water tunnels, a basic research tool in aerodynamics. A water tunnel gives a visual representation of the vortices and flows across an airframe by means of ink streams that move through the water.

Although that is a small and successful business, Skow wants more, as is made clear by his goal of winning a major jet fighter modification program--if not on the F-16, then on one of several other aircraft.

The briefing for representatives of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization at a conference sponsored by the Air Force will give Eidetics its biggest opportunity to enlist foreign support for its proposal on the F-16.

“We are going to be outlining specifically what we can do.” Skow said. “This is an opportunity to spend a couple hundred dollars on air fare and brief five potential customers on our program.”

The perky intrusion of tiny Eidetics into the F-16 program--the multibillion-dollar cash cow of General Dynamics’ Fort Worth division--has ruffled some feathers at the big aircraft producer. The two companies got into a dispute over who first used the name “Agile Falcon” to describe their F-16 modification programs. Eidetics has backed off on that issue, but it is pushing its technical proposal hard.

Skow said the F-16 falls short of its inherent design capability to instantly “point” its nose up at sharp angles, an important quality in close-in fighter combat. Eidetics is proposing to eliminate the problem with minor reductions in the size of a wing extension, called a “strake,” which would cost roughly $250,000 per aircraft.

(The technical explanation is that the F-16 is limited to flying at no more than 25.3-degree angles of attack without entering a stall, whereas it should be able to achieve 36 degrees. An angle of attack is a controlled slide in which the aircraft’s nose is pointed up while the aircraft continues in level flight.)

By contrast, General Dynamics is proposing a major redesign for the F-16s it will build in the future. That would involve substantially more changes and greater capability than the Eidetics proposal for retrofitting existing F-16s. General Dynamics’ plan for the F-16 would cost $600 million to develop and would increase the cost of each new aircraft by $1.3 million.

Redesign Too Costly?

Although Skow praises the General Dynamics modification as a good technical approach and is trying to avoid a direct confrontation with the defense industry giant, he said he believes that European governments are not going to be willing to make large new investments in their F-16s.

“The European governments nearly bankrupted their defense budgets on the F-16 in the mid-1970s, and they are not in the mood to do it again so soon with the General Dynamics Agile Falcon,” Skow said.

General Dynamics executives were not available for interviews at the Fort Worth plant, but a spokesman termed Eidetics’ proposals as “something different than what we are talking about.”

Eidetics has won good marks from the Air Force for its work on basic research contracts.

“They are very good in this highly specialized area of stability and control,” said Keith Richey, chief scientist at the Air Force’s Flight Dynamics Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. “I am not favoring them over anybody else, but they are very competent.”

Richey said the Air Force is hoping to achieve an improvement in the ability of jet fighters to maneuver in dogfighting and bring guns and missiles to bear on a target more quickly. “It is like a basketball player moving through the field with quick agile moves around other players,” Richey said.

The F-16 modification proposal is not the only potential program that Skow is pushing. Another involves an upgrade of Northrop’s F-5A and F-5B. Those two early F-5 models do not carry airborne radar, cannot fire the most modern heat-seeking missiles and are less maneuverable than the Soviet MIG-21, Skow said. Eidetics is proposing to provide those capabilities to Turkey, Greece, Spain, South Korea and Taiwan, which operate the aircraft.

Skow has demonstrated a deft hand in cutting costs in such a proposal. For example, he was able to lay his hands on the original wind tunnel model of the Northrop F-5, fully calibrated with sensors, for a virtual song.

“The model was in the lobby of the engineering building at Tri-State University in Indiana,” Skow recalled. “Northrop donated it to them a long time ago, but I knew it was there. I got it by agreeing to trade them for a water tunnel. We saved ourselves a half-million bucks.”