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THE 456th FIGHTER INTERCEPTOR SQUADRON |
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THE PROTECTORS OF S. A. C. |
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Stealth & The Have Blue Project |
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Stealth
The XST
Click on Picture to enlarge
The Hopeless Diamond "Jesus, if they can do that with a frigging pole, what can they do with their damned model?" Northrop XST program manager upon seeing the Skunk Work's designed pole for the XST "pole-off".
The history of the F-117A Stealth fighter dates back to 1974 when the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) initiated, with U.S. Air Force participation, a program to study and possibly demonstrate the concept of a very low observable military aircraft.
The Air Force had used remotely piloted vehicles (RPV's) in Vietnam and was looking at much smaller, less complex versions to take their place. The RPV's were small and had proven difficult to see on radar. Meanwhile, the Pentagon's scientific consulting group, the Department of Science Board, had completed one of its annual studies for the Air Force; these periodic reports, usually secret, were conducted on the orders of Air Force leaders on topics of interest to them. Reviewing air battles over Vietnam and the Middle East, the board concluded that U.S. aircraft would soon 'have a real challenge getting through air defensives."
The DARPA Study
The study was initiated and led by Ken Perko, who had recently come to DARPA from the RPV System Program Office (SPO) at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base (WPAFB). Perko requested White Papers from five companies - Northrop, McDonnell Douglass, General Dynamics and Grumman. The study asked two questions:
What were the signature thresholds that an air vehicle would have to achieve to be essentially undetectable at an operationally useful range?
What were the capabilities of each company to design and build an aircraft with the necessary signatures?
Fairchild and Grumman did not express any interest in the study. The General Dynamics response emphasized countermeasures and had little substantive technical content regarding signature reduction. Northrop and McDonnell Douglass (MD) responded indicating a good understanding of the problem and some capability to develop a "reduced-signature" air vehicle. McDonnell Douglas was also the first to identify what appeared to be the appropriate RCS thresholds. In late 1974 DARPA awarded Northrop and McDonnell Douglass contracts of approximately $100,000 each to conduct further studies. These initial studies were classified "Confidential", the lowest of three major levels of security classification: Confidential, Secret, and Top Secret. In the spring of 1975, DARPA used McDonnell Douglass's values (confirmed by Hughes radar experts) as the goals for the program, and challenged the two participants to find ways to achieve them.
Project Harvey
Up until now, most sources have stated that this study was code named Harvey, a reference to the invisible rabbit that accompanied Jimmy Stewart in the movie of the same name. However, according to John K. "Jack" Twigg, former HAVE BLUE program manager (who was heavily involved with subsequent low observables programs), nothing related to HAVE BLUE or the F-117A was ever called "Project Harvey." "All activities that led directly to HAVE BLUE were never referred to as Project Harvey," said Twigg. "There was a gentleman in the Pentagon...who had some concepts that he entitled 'Harvey.' His focus was tactics and other means, not 'technical' low observables... The occasional mention of 'Harvey' did provide confusion to some, and may have served as an inadvertent cover story." Adding to the confusion is the fact that both "Harvey" and HAVE BLUE drew support from within the Office of the Director of Defense Research and Engineering at the Pentagon, making the distinction very unclear even to many program participants.
Lockheed's Involvement
Lockheed was not invited to participate in the study because they were not considered to be active in tactical aircraft development at the time. Lockheed had not produced a fighter aircraft in over 10 years. The DARPA study was not highly classified, so it eventually came to the attention of Ben Rich, who took over control of Skunk Works in January 1975.
The following is from Rich's book "Skunk Works":
"In the summer of 1975, Skunk Works in-house expert on Soviet weapons systems, Warren Gilmour, attending a meeting at Wright Field, in Ohio, and came back in a dark mood. He marched into my office and closed the door. "Ben, we are getting the shaft in spades," he declared. "One of my friends in the Tactical Air Command spilled the beans. The Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency has invited Northrop, McDonnell Douglas, and three other companies to compete on building a stealthy airplane. They're getting a million bucks each to come up with a proof of concept design, trying to achieve the lowest radar signatures across all the frequencies. If one works, the winner builds two demonstration airplanes. This is right up our alley and we are being locked out in the cold."
The Hopeless Diamond
Lockheed built a model of the strange diamond-shaped airplane that resulted from applying Denys Overholser's principles that if you make an airplane entirely out of flat panels, each angled so that none is ever likely to be facing straight toward radar the energy will be reflected away from the radar. Aerodynamicist Dick Cantrell dubbed it the "Hopeless Diamond." (Other names by the skeptical included "The Flying Engagement Ring" and "Rich's Folly") When Overholser presented a sketch of the design to Ben Rich on May 5, 1975, Rich did not quite grasp what had been achieved. Rich kept asking how big the radar return of a full-size aircraft would be-as large as a T-38, a Piper Cub, a condor, an eagle, an owl? Overholser game him an unbelievable answer. "Ben, try as big as an eagle's eyeball." The "Hopeless Diamond" also met a frosty reception from Kelly Johnson, who was still working as a consultant at Skunk Works. Having built graceful aircraft such as the U-2 and SR-71, Johnson was not impressed with the odd design. Many senior engineers nd aerodynamicists at Skunk Works felt the same. They all preferred a disk shape design. However, a disk shaped design was not possible. Johnson thought the RCS of the "Hopeless Diamond" would be larger than that of the D-21. On September 14, 1975 a ten foot wooden model of the "Hopeless Diamond" was tested against the original D-21 mockup. The "Hopeless Diamond" had a radar return one-one thousandth of that of the D-21. "They decided that I wasn't the village idiot, so I became a genius instead," Overholser said.
The Pole Off
During the summer of 1975, Ken Perko of DARPA and Bill Elsner of the Air Force worked on a plan to fly one of the two competing aircraft. So in September Northrop and Lockheed's Skunk Works (McDonnell Douglas had fallen out of the competition.) were asked to design a small prototype aircraft and build a full scale model for a "pole-off" at the RCS range at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico, with the winner going on to flight testing. By now, the projects name had become the Experimental Survivable Test-bed, or XST.
The Lockheed XST Entry
Lockheed had designed a notched trailing edge for its XST to replace the original Hopeless diamond shape. This allowed the team to sharpen the sweep angles on the rear of the aircraft and meet the DARPA rear-quadrant requirement of 45 degrees on either side of the tail.
Overholser's design philosophy forbade curves, even in the airfoil, because their reflectivity could not be modeled or predicted. The XST's airfoil section, which was a series of six straight lines rather than a smooth surface, appalled aerodynamicists because it seemed clear that the airflow over the wing would separate at its first meeting with the junction of two flat surfaces, creating turbulent airflow and drag.
But Alan Brown (who joined the Lockheed team in August of 1975) had worked on Lockheed's supersonic transport design and knew that a delta wing as sharply swept as the XST's, with a sharp leading edge, "really flies on the vortex generated from the leading edge, and conventional two-dimensional aerodynamics don't apply at all."
The Northrop XST Entry
Irv Waaland, a Northrop designer knew that Northrop had a problem. Northrop's analysts had concluded that it was most important to reduce its vehicle's RCS from the nose and tail and the nose-on RCS-the view an adversary had in the critical head-on engagements-was more important than the rear aspect. It's XST design was a diamond with more sweep on the leading edges than the trailing edges. From the rear, it had low RCS as long as the radar was no more than 35 degrees off the tail.
But the DARPA requirement treated RCS by quadrants: The rear quadrant extended to 45 degrees on either side of the tail, thereby including the parts of the airframe where the Northrop design's RCS spiked. Waaland could not solve the problem by increasing the sweep angle of the trailing edges, the aircraft would become uncontrollable.
And Northrop had an internal issue to deal with. "The level of security on the observables was higher than it was on the airplane," says Waaland, "and not too many of the airplane people were cleared into the [details of the low-RCS design theory]. It was a great source of frustration, because there was no ability to make compromises." This put Northrop at a disadvantage, because the program was all about compromise: to minimize RCS while attempting to preserve acceptable aerodynamics. the normally reserved Waaland recalls epic shouting matches in which he would question John Cashen (a Northrop electromagnetic expert) about some aspect of the mysterious electromagnetic. "You know just enough to be dangerous," was Cashen's usual retort.
By now a change had crept into the program. Alan Brown traces it to the first Lockheed and Northrop 1/3 scale tests at McDonnell Douglass' Gray Butte RCS range in California's Mojave Desert in the December of 1975. (Lockheed tested the D-21 vs. "Hopeless Diamond" here because it did not have a range of it's own at the time.) The RCS numbers were not merely half of those of a conventional aircraft, but a hundred or a thousand times smaller, enough to make most radars useless. "People realized we had a tiger by the tail" says Brown.
Throughout most of the testing, the competing contractor teams and their models were kept in isolation from each other, Temporary quarters were set up so that each team would have access to the range but could be kept apart from the other team. However, after most of the tesing was completed, each team was allowed to drive out on the range to view the other's model mounted on top of the 40 foot pylon.
Technical performance, risk, cost, and schedule of the two competitors were very close. Therefore, choosing the winning team for PHASE II was somewhat subjective (and since then has been argued with). Technically, Lockheed's entry had a slight edge (based on the required quadrants). Overall, Northrop's XST was possibly stealthier than the Lockheed entry, but this conclusion is based on factors that weren't part of the DARPA requirements. Although both companies had developed special materials and construction techniques, the perception was that the Skunk Works had more experience with the use of these techniques on actual aircraft. The Skunk Works also had a proven record of accomplishing advanced, high risk projects quickly under high security. These factors provided confidence that the Skunk Works could execute the XST program successfully. In April 1976 Lockheed was announced the winner of the PHASE I compaction.
In To The Black
The XST project was upgraded to top secret in early 1977, and when Lockheed won the contract for the construction of two 60-percent scale flyable test aircraft (April 1976), it became an unacknowledged Special Access program. Only those with a need to know would be told that the project existed. The designation XST was replaced with the code name Have Blue, the project was transferred over to Air Force System Command, and the project office moved from Washington to a secure "vault" at Wright-Patterson AFB. The name Have Blue seems to have no specific meaning, probably having been chosen at random from an approved list of secret project names. The airplane would fly from Area 51, the secret flight-test base at the edge of Groom Dry Lake, Nevada. Built for the U-2 and expanded for the A-12 program, Area 51 was home to a secret squadron of Soviet-built aircraft and officially did not even exist. No one knew that Have Blue existed.
The Northrop Team
DARPA recognized that the Northrop XST team was an important nucleus of expertise and urged the team to stay together. Shortly afterward, DARPA initiated design studies for a Battlefield Surveillance Aircraft, Experimental (BSAX). The BSAX study led to the recently acknowledged (1996) Tacit Blue program for a very low observable battlefield surveillance aircraft. The 135 Tacit Blue flights from February 1982 to 1985 provided valuable data for Northrop's entry in another pole-off competing with Lockheed for the Advanced Technology Bomber (ATB). Northrop won that competition by a slim margin and went on the produce the ATB, now known as the B-2 "Spirit" Stealth Bomber.
Sources:
"The Invisible Men"
Bill Sweetman
Air and Space Magazine/Smithsonian
May 1997, pp.18-27"Technology in the Lives of an Aircraft Designer"
by Irv T Waaland, Vice President, Chief Designer
Northrop Corp. Advanced Technology & Design Center,
Pico Rivera, CA.
"1991 Wright Brothers Lecture
AIAA Aircraft Design & Operations Meeting"
23 September 1991, Baltimore, MDHAVE BLUE And The F-117A: Evolution Of The "Stealth Fighter"
David C. Aronstein and Albert C. Piccirillo
AIAA/ANSER, Arlington, VA 1997"Vehicle" Patent # US5250950 (Have Blue aircraft)
Inventor: Scherrer; Richard , La Canada, CA
Inventor: Overholser; Denys D. , Frazier Park, CA
Inventor: Watson; Kenneth E. , North Hollywood, CA
Applicant: Lockheed Corporation, Calabasas, CA
The Have Blue Prototypes
"I don't care what in hell it looks like, I'll get that ugly son-of-a-bitch to fly!"
Chief Skunk Works aerodynamicist Dick Cantrell.
Click on Picture to enlarge
Development began in April 1976 with the USAF Flight Dynamics Laboratory contract to Lockheed Advanced Development Projects (Skunk Works) for two 60-percent scale flyable test aircraft. The two XST (Experimental Survivable Test-bed) prototypes were produced under the name of Have Blue.
Before the government signed the contract to build the Have Blue aircraft Skunk Works had to have a security plan approved by the USAF. Although Skunk Works had never had security problems in the past, the USAF had dubbed this project "Special Access", and with that came the USAF's way of doing business. The airplane itself had to be stamped SECRET on the inside cockpit door.
Another example is mentioned in Ben Rich's "Skunk Works":
The two Have Blue aircraft were built at Lockheed in only a few months. The first example was intended to evaluate the type's flying characteristics, whereas the second was to evaluate the radar signature. In order to save some time and some money, existing off-the-shelf components were used where feasible. The engines were a pair of standard production non-afterburning General Electric J85s, mounted in enclosures sitting atop the wings. The main landing gear was taken from a Fairchild Republic A-10, and fly-by-wire components were scavenged from an F-16. The instrumentation and the ejector seat were taken from a Northrop F-5.
The Have Blue aircraft had the same general shape as that which would later become familiar with the F-117A, except that the twin rudders were located forward of the exhaust ejectors and were angled inward rather than outward. The inward cant was about 30 degrees.
The leading edge of the semi-delta wing was swept back at 72.5 degrees. The wing featured two inboard trailing edge elevons for pitch and roll control. Four spoilers (two on top of the wing and two on the bottom) were mounted just forward of the elevons. There were no flaps or speed brakes. The wing trailing edge was less deeply notched than that of the F-117A. A single cockpit with an ejector seat was provided. The Have Blue aircraft employed V-type windshields (similar to those of the F-102/F-106). No weapons bay nor any sort of tactical equipment at all was fitted.
The Have Blue aircraft were equipped with fly-by-wire (FBW) flight controls which were adapted from the F-16 system. However, the system had to be modified to handle an aircraft that was unstable about all three axis (the F-16 is unstable only about the pitch axis). The problem of designing a stealthy system for airspeed measurement had not yet been solved, and XST-1 was equipped with a conventional pitot boom until March 1978. The boom was removed after it's 32nd flight. XST-2 never had the conventional pitot boom.
Click on Picture to enlarge
Two prototypes were built at a cost of $37 million for both aircraft. Lockheed workers assembled the two Have Blue aircraft in Burbank in Building 82, one of their big assembly hangers that was the size of three football fields. Reports that state the Have Blue were built in Lockheed's Plant 10 facility housed at the USAF Plant 42 in Palmdale, California are false. According the book "Skunk Works": "The Skunk Works workers were all specialist in specific sections of the airplane: fuselage, tail, wings, control surfaces, and power plant. Each section was built separately then brought together. About 80 people were on this project, and because the Skunk Works was in a rush the airplane was stood on it's tail and assembled vertically. That way, the assemblers could work on the flat, plated structural frame, front and back, asses to elbows."
Neither aircraft ever received an official DOD designation, or did they get a USAF serial number. However, Lockheed did give the aircraft its own manufacturer's serial numbers-1001 and 1002. These numbers are commonly used (Lockheed had a YF-12 that was #1001 as did Northrop have a B-2). These numbers did not mean Plant 10, aircraft numbers 1 and 2.
Click on Picture to enlarge
The first example (1001) was finished in November of 1977. Engine run tests were done on November 4, 1977. To hide the plane, 1001 was parked between two semi-trailers and a camouflage net was draped over them. The tests were done at night, after Burbank airport had closed. The only attention the test attracted was a complaint from a local resident about noise. In order to keep the project away from prying eyes, the Have Blue prototype was shipped out to the Groom Lake Test Facility in Nevada in high secrecy on the morning of November 16, 1977 for the test flights. Groom Lake is located in a particularly remote area of the Nellis test range complex, and is a good location for the testing of secret aircraft. A camouflage paint scheme was applied to make it hard for unwanted observers at Groom Lake to determine the aircraft's shape.
Seventy-two hours before the first test flight, the airplane began to seriously overheat near the tail during engine test runs. The engine was removed, and Bob Murphy and a helper decided to improvise by building a heat shield. They noticed a six-foot steel shop cabinet. "Steel is steel," Murphy said to his assistant. "We'll send Ben Rich the bill for a new cabinet." They began cutting up the cabinet to make the heat shield panels between Have Blue's surface and its engine. It worked perfectly.
The first flight of the Have Blue took place shortly before 7am on December 1, 1977, with veteran Lockheed test pilot William M. "Bill" Park being at the controls. (Park was so highly regarded at Skunk Works that Ben Rich obtained a special exemption from the air force so he could be chief test pilot. As a note: Park was not a test pilot school graduate, nor did he have an advanced engineering degree.) As the plane took to the sky, Kelly Johnson slapped Ben rich on the back and said, "Well, Ben, you got your first airplane." At an early stage, Bill Park was assisted in the flight test program by Lt. Col. Norman Kenneth "Ken" Dyson of the USAF.
Flight test of the Have Blue initially went fairly smoothly, and the fly-by-wire system functioned well. The landing speed was quite high (160 knots), as expected because of the lack of flaps or speed brakes. Have Blue 1001 made 36 sorties from December 1, 1977 through May 4, 1978, all of them for functional checkout, flying qualities, and performance evaluation.
On May 4, 1978, (the 36th flight) Have Blue prototype number 1001 was landing after a routine test flight when it hit the ground excessively hard. Rather than risk skidding off the runway, Park pulled the aircraft back into the air, and went around. As he did, he retracted the landing gear. Park did not know that the right landing gear had been bent by the impact. When he lowered the gear, the T-38 chase pilot, Col. Larry McCain (the base commander) radioed that the right gear was jammed. Park made several attempts (including hard landings) to shake the gear back down again. The fuel supply was running low and there was no time for additional attempts. As Park climbed to 10,000 feet, one of the engines flamed out from fuel starvation. Once the other engine quit Park knew he would only have 2 seconds before the aircraft went out of control. Park radioed "I'm gonna bail out of here unless anyone has any better ideas." Although Park departed the aircraft successfully, he hit his head on the headrest and was knocked unconscious. Unable to control his parachute during descent or landing, he was still unconscious when his limp body hit the desert floor. Park's leg was broken, he suffered a concussion, and his mouth was filled with dirt as the parachute dragged him across the desert in a strong wind. By the time paramedics reached him, his heart had stopped. The paramedics were able to revive him, and he survived, but was forced to retire from flying. The aircraft reportedly came down like a falling leaf, wobbled around, lost control, went inverted, and went straight in. The Have Blue aircraft was destroyed in the crash. The wreckage was secretly buried somewhere on the Nellis test range complex.
Click on Picture to enlarge
Have Blue Have Blue 1002 arrived at Groom Lake shortly after the loss of number 1001. It took to the air for the first time July 20 1978, with Lt. Col. Ken Dyson being at the controls.
Col. John "Jack" Twigg, former HAVE BLUE program manager, wrote that HB1002 completed 52 sorties. There were 10 for functional checkout and performance evaluation, and 42 for low observables testing.
The Have Blue prototype 1002 proved to be essentially undetectable by all airborne radars except the Boeing E-3 AWACS, which could only acquire the aircraft at short ranges. Most ground-based missile tracking radars could detect the Have Blue only after it was well inside the minimum range for the surface-to-air missiles with which they were associated. Neither ground-based radars nor air-to-air missile guidance radars could lock onto the aircraft. It was found that the best tactic to avoid radar detection was to approach the radar site head on, presenting the Have Blue's small nose-on signature.
Click on Picture to enlarge
Have Blue It was found that the application of the RAM was rather tricky, and that ground crews had to be careful to seal all joints thoroughly before each flight. RAM came in linoleum-like sheets which was cut to shape and bonded to the skin to cover large areas. Doors and access panels had to be carefully checked and adjusted for a tight fit between flights and all gaps had to be filled in with conductive tape and then covered over with RAM. Paint-type RAM was available, but it had to be built up by hand, coat by coat. Even the gaps around the canopy and the fuel-filler door had to be filled with paint-type RAM before each flight. Ground crews had to even make sure that all surface screws were completely tight, since even one loose screw for an access panel could make the aircraft show up like a "barn door coming over the horizon" during radar signature tests. Reports say that there were problems inherent with a prototype aircraft-such as a section of RAM lining the inside of an air intake being sucked into an engine, causing it to immediately loose power.
Click on Picture to enlarge
Have Blue number 1002 was lost in July 11, 1979. During its 52nd flight, with Lt. Col. Dyson at the controls, a weld in a hydraulic line cracked, spraying fluid onto the hot section of one of its J85 engines. The fluid ignited and the blaze became uncontrollable. Dyson tried to get back to Groom Lake, but lost hydraulic power and was given permission to bail out. Lt.Col. Dyson ejected, and 1002 plummeted to the ground 35 miles NW of Groom Lake-a total loss. It too was secretly buried somewhere on the Nellis test range complex. According to P. G. Kaminsky (former undersecretary of Defense, acquisition and technology), the program was within "two or three sorties of planned completion" when HB1002 crashed. No further Have Blue aircraft were built, since the general concept had been proven.
Have Blue Specifications
External Dimensions
Wing Span
22 ft 6 in
Length overall
47 ft 3 in
Height overall
7 ft 6.25 in
Wing Area
386 sq ft
Wing Sweep
72.50 degrees
Tail Cant
30 degrees
Tail Sweep
35 degrees
Weights & Loadings
Weight (Empty)
8,950 lbs
Max T-O weight
12,500 lbs
Max Fuel Load
3,500 lbs
Max Payload
None
ENGINES:
Power Plant (#)
GE J85-GE-4A (2)
Power Plant Source
T-2B Buckeye (no modifications made)
Thrust
About 2,950 lbs
Specific Fuel Consumption
About 0.98
Performance
Max speed
.8 Mach (600 mph) @ sea level
Landing Speed
160 knots (296 km/h; 184 mph)
Max Range/Endurance
1 hour
Advanced Tactical Aircraft
ATA "A/B"
By June 1977 a special project office had been established with strong support from Secretary of Defense Harold Brown and Director of Defense Research and Engineering (DDR& E) William J. Perry. The overall goal of the USAF low observables program was to develop the recently demonstrated breakthrough into a set of new capabilities for U.S. armed forces, as rapidly as possible in total secrecy. A hand-picked staff of five officers were briefed into "Have Blue" and "hidden" within AF/RDPJ, Room 5D156, the strategic reconnaissance office at USAF Headquarters in the Pentagon. These officers were Col Dave Williams, Maj Ken Staten, Maj. Joe Ralston, Maj. Bob Swarts, and Maj. Jerry Baber.
The project office studied several potential applications of low observables technology, and a small number of specific programs were soon initiated. The second one of these was a manned strike aircraft. Maj. Ken Staten became the acting program manager for the strike aircraft, which during its conceptual stages bore the very nonspecific label of Advanced Technology Aircraft (ATA). During 1977 DARPA developed two sets of preliminary requirements for ATA. A formal concept definition contract for $11.1 million was awarded to the Skunk Works on October 10, 1977, for a one year study based on the two sets of requirements.
ATA "A"
The ATA "A" proposal was a "small" F-15 sized single-seat , twin engine, attack aircraft, intended to carry a 5000 lb. payload (two 2000 lb weapons plus suspension equipment) a range of 400 n miles.
ATA "B"
The ATA "B" proposal was a larger two seat, four engine, bomber closer in size to the F-111. It would carry a 10,000 lb. payload on a 1000 n mile mission.
Click on Picture to enlarge
By February 1978, the payload for the "B" model was reduced to 7500 lb. Early sizing studies had indicated that the "B" model would need six engines, not just four, to achieve its original range-payload goals. This is because an aircraft's gross weight grows roughly exponentially as a function as its design range. As the design range increases, so does the rate of weight growth. It simply would not be practical to build a large, long range aircraft with the low lift-to-drag ratio (L/D) of Have Blue. Although a higher L/D could have been achieved through various design changes, some Air Force officials and even some designers and managers at Lockheed believed that the Have Blue breakthrough was a result of "Black Magic" rather than science. These individuals strongly resisted any significant departures from the basic Have Blue configuration. As a result, it was necessary to reduce the payload of the "B" model to keep the aircraft's size somewhat reasonable.
Characteristics of ATA "A" and ATA "B" (February 1978)
ATA "A"
ATA "B"
Mission radius
400 n mile
1000 n mile
Payload
5000 lb
7500 lb
TOGW
43,000 lb
90,000 lb
Length
64 ft
76 ft
Wingspan
43 ft
47 ft
Crew
1
2
Number of engines
2
2
Engine type
GE F404
(non-afterburning variant)GE F101
("partially" afterburning)Cost
x
1.5x
???
In June 1977 President Jimmy Carter had canceled the B-1A bomber program. Filling the B-1's role became a critical objective for the USAF during the next several months, and this focused attention on the "B" model of ATA. If the ATA "B" plan was pursued, the engines for research, development, testing, and evaluation would be "cannibalized" from the canceled B-1A program. Although this larger version became a strong favorite with the Strategic Air Command (SAC), Lt. Col Joe Ralston and Lt. Col Ken Staten at RDPJ voiced the realistic, but in some quarters unpopular, view that the "B" model was not technically feasible at the time.
This opinion was based on the risks inherent in scaling the Have Blue concept up to a size as large as the ATA "B". As noted earlier, even though the requirements had been relaxed, the designers knew that the "B" was right at the upper bound of what was realistically possible. (Their conviction was reinforced during a visit to Lockheed's Rye Canyon research facility. Col. Williams, Lt. Col Ralston, and Lt Col Staten each made five takeoff attempts with the ATA "B" on Lockheed's flight simulator. According to Lt. Col Jerry Baber, "Ralston saved it once; all other attempts resulted in the loss of the [simulated] aircraft." All three men were experienced fighter pilots.)
After the payload weight had been reduced to 7500 lb, another difficulty involved insufficient justification for the added cost and risk of the "B". Ralston and Staten recommended deferring the bomber and focusing on the smaller attack aircraft. SAC headquarters did not like this, but Gen David C. Jones, who had become chairmen of the Joint Chief of Staff, backed up Ralston and Staten on the basis that valuable information might be gained from pursuing the lower-risk, less expensive "A" model before attempting to build a larger bomber. This was also the path that would introduce a low observable weapon system into the operational inventory as rapidly as possible, consistent with the overall goals of the USAF low observables program.
In the summer of 1978 USAF officials decided to discontinue the "B" and to take the "A" model Advanced Technology Aircraft into full-scale development. On November 16,1978, Lockheed was awarded a contract for five full scale development (FSD) aircraft under the code name "Senior Trend".
ATB
The ATA "B" later resurfaced as the Advanced Technology Bomber (ATB). Fresh with their Tacit Blue research, Northrop submitted an unsolicited proposal causing yet another pole off competing with Lockheed for the ATB. Northrop won that competition by a slim margin and went on the produce the ATB, now known as the B-2 "Spirit" Stealth Bomber.
Source
HAVE BLUE And The F-117A: Evolution Of The "Stealth Fighter"
David C. Aronstein and Albert C. Piccirillo
AIAA/ANSER, Arlington, VA 1997
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