YF-113G !?!

Message posted by Paul Reinman on April 11, 2000 at 09:05:06 EST:

This from one of the usenet newsgroups....I thought it might be of interest.....

Paul


> > The AF admitted to the use of a stealth aircraft that predates have blue
> called
> > the F-113? Could this have possibly been the Northrup stealth prototype?
> > Have their been any picturse or other info released?
>
> Can you provide a reference for this statement? I'd be interested
> in learning more, but it is likely not true unless it was printed
> in Av Week, and I don't recall seeing it printed there.
>
> -john-
>

The following article was briefly on www.aviationnow.com, but is no longer
available:

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Early USAF Stealth Testbed


by Michael A. Dornheim And David A. Fulghum

Aviation Week & Space Technology

Secrets continue to trickle out of the U.S. Air Force's black world about the
fertile period of the late 1970s when the
U.S. was researching and building its first stealth aircraft capabilities.

The F-117 light bomber was announced to the public in the late 1980s. In the
1990s, the Air Force revealed its work on Have
Blue, two test aircraft that demonstrated the faceted skin used on the F-117,
and Tacit Blue--a smooth-skinned aircraft
shaped like a butter dish and designed to carry a low-probability-of-intercept
radar for ground surveillance. The Have Blue
aircraft were destroyed and buried in Nevada. Tacit Blue is in the Air Force
Museum.

Now Air Force officials have told Aviation Week of yet another aircraft of the
period--the YF-113G. It was flown "over 20
years ago" from the restricted Nevada test ranges north of Las Vegas, said one
official. Nellis AFB is the titular home of
generations of black, captured and purloined aircraft that were actually flown
from the heavily guarded Tonaph and Groom
Lake bases. The YF-113G was "an airframe that came before Have Blue and the
F-117," a second official said. "We used it in
the initial work to examine the stealth edges problem." He added that by the
early 1980s, the YF-113G apparently had
outlived its usefulness and was no longer on the Air Force roll of classified
aircraft programs receiving funding.

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