Jet Fighter Race Heats Up for Lockheed, Northrop
The $45-billion competition between Lockheed and Northrop to build the Air Force’s Advanced Tactical Fighter is heating up as the divergent strategies of the two firms begin to emerge.
Northrop has put major emphasis on being the first to get a prototype jet fighter into the air, tentatively in early 1990, according to aircraft industry sources and securities analysts. Lockheed, meanwhile, has focused on having the largest possible number of test flights and on the reliability of its prototype ATF.
The Air Force plans to buy 750 ATFs, a two-engine combat jet being developed to defeat modern Soviet fighters into the next century.
“The talk in the industry is that Northrop is trying to fly one month before Lockheed,” said Albert Piccirillo, an aerospace consultant at Planning Research Corp. and the former Air Force program manager for the ATF. “It would be nice to think that one airplane will be a clear-cut winner, but it could be a very close competition. If everything were perfectly equal, these little things can become tie-breakers.”
Sherman N. Mullin, Lockheed program director for the ATF, discounted the importance of achieving the first flight, based on his own intensive studies of past fighter competitions.
“There is a legend,” he said about the supposed advantage of the first flight. “I don’t think it is critical. The thing that counts is not who flies first but who flies best.”
Mullin said he has heard about the Northrop strategy. “Northrop propagates it,” he said. “You can hear it all over town. It’s hard not to hear it.”
Northrop’s ATF program officials, as in the past, declined to comment on any aspect of the program, citing its secrecy.
Northrop and Lockheed have frozen the aerodynamic designs of their prototype jets and are starting to hand-build two aircraft each that will demonstrate such capabilities as sustained supersonic flight, talking cockpit instruments and stealth technology that cloaks the aircraft from detection by enemy radar.
The details about the aircraft designs are highly classified, but Lockheed recently unveiled a $26-million development center in Burbank that will build aircraft parts out of new, lightweight thermoplastic composites.
Lockheed is prime contractor on an ATF team with Boeing and General Dynamics. Northrop is teamed with McDonnell Douglas in its effort.
The arrangement gives Lockheed the benefit of General Dynamics’ experience in heated rivalries with Northrop. General Dynamics competed bitterly with Northrop in the 1970s when the Northrop YF-17 lost out to the General Dynamics YF-16.
A second competition, which pitted the Northrop F-20 against the General Dynamics F-16, again resulted in a Northrop defeat in 1986. That left Northrop with an astounding $1.2-billion investment that yielded not a single dollar in sales.
“The General Dynamics YF-16 flew several months before the YF-17,” Mullin said. “One point of view some people have is that the reason that General Dynamics won was because they flew first. There is another view--that I believe--that they won because General Dynamics outperformed the Northrop airplane by a big, big, big margin.”
Even though the F-16 clearly outperformed the YF-17, Northrop still was somewhat shortchanged in the competition because the test schedule was abbreviated and left Northrop scrambling at the end, recalled Robert Ettinger, who was an Air Force test pilot in the program and today is a vice president at the Torrance-based aerospace firm Eidetics.
Public Relations Boost
“First flight is a psychological advantage for your people,” Ettinger said. “It gives your engineering and manufacturing people a goal to go after. And it gives you more time to discover and correct problems.”
In addition, it can be a big public relations boost, something that Northrop has put emphasis on in past programs, such as the F-20. Northrop may have set a strategy to fly first because it is ahead of Lockheed in its development effort, some experts say.
At the time that the ATF contractors were selected in October, 1986, Northrop had a secret full-scale mock-up of its ATF design, complete with such detailed features as concealed weapons bays fitted with mock missiles and even a cockpit, with a canopy, that a person could sit in. Lockheed did not have such a mock-up at the time contracts were awarded, though its teammate Boeing did, according to industry sources.
The advantage of a mock-up is that Northrop may have been ready to begin its detailed design of the aircraft sooner than Lockheed.
On the other hand, some industry executives speculate that Northrop may be having more difficulty financing the ATF development. Both teams are working under $691-million contracts, but their own investments could equal the contract amount. Not only does Northrop have one fewer member on its team to help with expenses, but the Air Force is withholding about $136 million in contract payments for problems on Northrop’s MX missile work.
In any case, Mullin said the timing of the first flight will be determined in large measure by when the new ATF jet engines are ready. General Electric and Pratt & Whitney are competitively developing revolutionary engines that will help the aircraft steer by directing the angle of thrust. The Air Force will test both engines in both the Lockheed and Northrop prototypes.
“We are both going to get engines from the same two engine companies, and nobody is going to fly without an engine,” Mullin said.
