Chad Irby wrote:

In article ,
Stephen Harding wrote:

The "best" plane will be best due to reasons having little or nothing
to do with how well it flies!

That might not even come into play. Look at the F-20 Tigershark. Very
nice plane, flew as well as just about anything in the air at the time,
and had *big* advantages in maintenance (as low as one-third the cost of
the F-16 to support). In some fields (interception and scramble
flights), it was better than anything (from the time the pilot hit
"start" to 30,000 feet was about 2.5 minutes).

Well, not exactly. The F-20 was nice, when competing against the
Foreign Military Sales competitors--the F-16/79, an upgraded A-7 and
something else that I can't currently recall. It was a bit behind the
power curve in T/W compared to the F-16 and really couldn't do the
"big iron" job for distance. It certainly wasn't offering CCIP bombing
to the standard already well established by the F-16.

The time to scramble was a neat ad campaign resulting from the fast
alignment feature of the ring laser gyro INS, but once scrambled, the
radar certainly didn't compete with the F-15 and the lack of AIM-7F
(and AIM-120) capability meant it was quick to the fight but without
credible weapons.

And, the cockpit ergonomics were decidely sub-standard. I only offer
this opinion as a former Northrop worker with a couple of hundred
hours in the F-20 cockpit of the dome, although not always with F-20
flight parameters as the operating model.


Ed Rasimus
Fighter Pilot (ret)
***"When Thunder Rolled:
*** An F-105 Pilot Over N. Vietnam"
*** from Smithsonian Books
ISBN: 1588341038