Military Aircraft What If Question

[GaryRR]

Many of you I am sure know the history of the F-22 and YF-23 competition. My what if? poses the idea that both outstanding aircraft could have won the competition if the US Navy would have offered a bid to Northrop to refit the Black Widow to carrier capable standards. They would have had an excellent stealth platform years ahead of the F-35 and saved tons of money especially if DoD would have been able to work out parts and engine commonality between the contractors. And over time, the YF-23 airframe could have been developed into full fighter/bomber capability and block upgrades to give it all the tech the F-35 currently employs. What do you all think?

[AKar]

They would have had an excellent stealth platform years ahead of the F-35 and saved tons of money especially if DoD[...]

At that point, interrupt with "No, they wouldn't."

In all seriousness, while YF-23 is to me one of the most interesting designs publicly known to have flown, we must consider that it was a direct competitor of to-be F-22, and thus was created against similar program goals of having an air superiority fighter as an end result. If USN had found enough interest to further develop the type, the resulting F-22/F-23 pair would likely have ended up following very similar paths the F-16/F-18 pair did, both having roughly similar overall capabilities as excellent multi-role platforms - but with the F-22 and F-23 being very expensive, specialized stealth air superiority platforms, instead of developing into multi-role platforms.

The program that eventually lead to the Joint Strike Fighter, and further to the F-35, was launched in the early nineties - way before the first production F-22 even flew. It appears to have been a clear decision to diverge the design from the F-22's (and would-have-been F-23's) from early on. Personally I tend to think that reasons why the F-22 never made a true multi-role platform would have applied to the F-23 as well, on-going development of what was then known as JSF being one of them.

-Esa