On Wed, 14 Apr 2004 16:45:16 -0700, "Tarver Engineering"
wrote:


"Scott Ferrin" wrote in message
.. .

The thing that makes a decison/system/whatver "pork barrel"
is when it's built mainly because the politicians want it to be so
they keep those jobs and get those votes.

All aviation is politics.

Because you say so?

Aviation is too much money to be anything but politics.


If that were the case the military would never issue requirements
(because it wouldn't matter) and there would be no competitions
(because they wouldn't matter).

That would seem to be the nature of Lockheed unflyable entry in the
competition to build a prototype ATF, none of it mattered.


At that point in the competition (two designs chosen of seven paper
designs) unless the USAF did a lot of inhouse simulation/studies/ etc.
about the only thing they have to go on is the data the manufacturers
submit with their proposals. Did the USAF (the people deciding who
would build the prototypes) know the Lockheed entry as presented
wouldn't fly? Who knows? Obviously Lockheed themselves didn't know
it or maybe they thought they could put a lot of spin on their
presentation. Looking at the two proposals they chose (Lockheed and
Northrop) it's obvious that experience in stealth was a very high
priority. Certainly neither company had any recent experience turning
out a lot of high end fighters. With that in mind the two most
logical choices would have been Lockheed and Northrop- exactly who
they chose. An interesting sidenote is that GD was third and they
also have been associated with stealth from way back (the
A-12/Kingfisher competition). Boeing was fourth with damn near no
stealth experience (in the white world anyway) and the historical king
of fighter producers McD was 5th. To go from supplying the USAF with
their premier fighter for the last forty or so years (F-4/F-15) to
placing FIFTH in the competition to build a new fighter suggests that
though the USAF wanted it all, aerodynamic performance took a distant
second place behind stealth. It might even be that the air force
*did* know Lockheed's entry was questionable aerodynamically but
stealth was important enough to accept it.