Northrop YF-23 ATF (Air Force Legends, 220) Paperback – December 7, 2016

High quality, with an extraordinary amount of text and color (!) for a Ginter publication. This volume qualifies as a book instead of the monograph typical of the Air Force Legends series.The author who has intimate 1st hand perspective of the YF-23,starts with a history of stealth aircraft and their impact on the USAF and the contemporary design philosophies of the competing companies. Each phase of the competitions that led to the ATF competition are well illustrated with the competing designs. One can see the precursors of the Rockwell HiMat, Grumman X-29, the McDonnell Douglas A-12 and others as the companies evolved their designs to meet the changing USAF requirements. This alone makes the book worthwhile!The chapters on construction and flight test are also well described along with the skepticism of test flight crew about the performance envelope of the airframe and fire control systems during the flight control and simulation phases of development. (The author was a F-105G pilot.)Significant coverage of the F/B-23 and the proposed naval versions are also provided making this single volume complete for the vast majority of readers. Also, unusually for this series, a bibliography is provided. (Mostly magazine articles and internal USAF documents.)The author also delves briefly in system descriptions while providing lavish amounts of photographs and cutaway drawings of the YF-23, its precursors and proposed derivatives.I believe the Air Force Legends is usually aimed mostly for modelers. This volume caters not just to modelers, but anyone who has an interest in the YF-23.Highly recommended!

At first glance this seems to be a typical Ginter publication. It's an 8-1/2" x 11", square bound card cover with 152 interior pages in the typical Ginter trade dress. But once you open the book you are in another world. The first thing that strikes the reader is the abundance of color. There is hardly a black and white photo to be found. I suspect that this book was commissioned by another publisher and the deal fell through for some reason. The book would not have been out of place in the old Midland Aerofax series.The book is written by YF-23 chief test pilot Paul Metz and his first hand experiences inform the text and captions throughout the book. But this isn't by any stretch of the imagination a "What was it like to fly the YF-23?" type of book. Metz covers the aircraft's historical background, development, flight test, proposals, and eventual preservation. He also provides an excellent description of the aircraft with many up close detailed photographs. But the real treat are the well chosen drawings all of which seem to be official from Northrup. The number of cross sections was truly remarkable.Complaints are few. I wish there had been more discussion of why the YF-22 was chosen over the YF-23 other than merely repeating the official line. If memory serves Lockheed took a different approach in the Dem/Val phase including actual test firing of missiles. Metz was surely aware of this but there is no post mortem of any kind. Did Northrup/McDonnell Douglas drop the ball at some point? Or was Lockheed's proposal that much better? Or was the decision a political one? I worked at GE Aircraft Engines at the time of the ATF decision and losing the engine competition to Pratt & Whitney was a bitter pill for a lot of people to swallow. Metz apparently does not want to delve into this.The book is highly recommended. I hope it does well enough for Ginter to rethink his policy of restricting color to the covers.

I first saw this book on the bookshelf at the Western Museum of Flight several years ago and weighed whether to buy it because it contains some hitherto-unpublished information on early designs for the Advanced Tactical Fighter competition by Northrop and rival companies besides Lockheed and unrealized derivatives of the YF-23, but decided against purchasing this publication on grounds of cost. Having taking a chance to read through this book, I do have to say that Paul Metz (who piloted the YF-23 on its first flight and later went on to become the test pilot of the first pre-production F-22 Raptor) has done an excellent job of describing in detail the YF-23's design, development, flight testing, and technical features as well as the proposed production F-23, proposals for a navalized YF-23 for the NATF program, and the FB-23 regional bomber derivative conceived in the early 2000s, and he begins this monographic work with a discussion of initial proposals by US aircraft manufacturers for the ATF requirement in the early 1980s and pre-ATF design studies for an F-15 successor in the 1970s.With respect to the narrative of the generational evolution of stealth aircraft given on pages 3 to 6 of this book, the classification of the Lockheed and Northrop ATF designs chosen for prototyping in 1986 as being fifth-generation stealth aircraft is only partially true because even though the designs for the F-22 and YF-23 were finalized five years after Northrop won the Advanced Technology Bomber competition, the F-22 and YF-23 flew just a year after the B-2 design that had won the ATB contest began flight tests. Moreover, although Northrop Grumman's tests on an RCS model of the Horten Ho 229 flying wing fighter in 2008 vindicated suggestions that the Ho 229 was capable of evading detection by Allied radar, the use of plywood in the Ho 229's construction was not a stealth trait because the de Havilland Mosquito was detectable to German radar despite being built of plywood like the Ho 229. I was dumbstruck to find out on page 6 that the moniker Advanced Tactical Fighter appeared in official documents from the USAF's Tactical Air Command published in the early 1970s, even though the Air Force waited until 1981 to apply this name to its newly-commenced program for an F-15 successor after learning that the USSR was flight testing the new Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-29 and Sukhoi Su-27 jet fighters designed to take on the F-15 and F-16. When looking back at the evolution of Northrop's ATF design studies, it is important to note that although the ATF requirements primarily focused on supercruise and greater maneuverability when they were first issued and did not include stealth as a requirement until 1983, Northrop was way ahead of other US companies when it came to applying stealth to initial design studies for an F-15 replacement. Having noticed on page 73 the statement by Air Force Secretary Donald Rice justifying the Pentagon's declaration of the YF-22 as the winner of the ATF competition on the grounds that Lockheed and Pratt & Whitney completed the YF-22 and F119 at the promised cost and on schedule, the verbal proof that the F-22 won the ATF contest because Lockheed had built the F-117 under budget and on time is in the pudding given that Northrop's preoccupation with the B-2 and AGM/MGM-137 TSSAM programs led Rice to decide that it would be awkward for the USAF to give Northrop a monopoly on stealth weaponry for the USAF.As a side note, pages 140 to 149 of this book includes images of the Northrop factory model of the YF-23 and YF-23 model kits including those made by Revell and Testors.