On Thu, 01 Jan 2004 23:03:59 -0800, Mary Shafer
wrote:

On Fri, 02 Jan 2004 01:25:34 GMT, Scott Ferrin
wrote:

Lockheed is pretty much the stealth expert. Boeing has very little
experience building an operational stealth anything. As far as
construction techiques go about the only significant thing they
learned was that plastic wings won't work. Anything else they learned
such as things to speed up manufacturing are hardly enough to cover
the cost of developement.

Northrop has a bit of experience, too, which includes the sage advice
to leave off canards if stealth is a goal.

Mary


Yeah. I was pretty much talking about just Boeing and Lockheed
though. There was a thread several years ago that kicked around the
idea that all of the published ATF ideas had canards to throw
everybody off. When it came down to it, none of the ATF proposals had
canards. Same with JSF. But it's interesting that pretty much al of
the aircraft that got their start back then all had canards. Gripen,
Typhoon, Rafale, Mig 1.42, Lavi. Anyway I'd always thought that was
an interesting observation. And yeah I remember reading about the
Northrop guy, when asked where the best location for the canard was
replied "on somebody else's aircraft". :-)