Word: northrops
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...bars on Bomber Road outside the sprawling General Dynamics plant in Fort Worth began filling up as soon as the word came down from Washington, and there was plenty to celebrate. After a three-year commercial and political dogfight with a rival design built by the Northrop Corp. of Los Angeles, the company's single-engine YF-16 had finally won a bruising Air Force competition for a new generation of lightweight fighter-interceptors. The new machine is supposed to help the planners fight rising costs in military budgets, but that will not prevent it from yielding a bonanza...
Barring any unforeseen problems, the Air Force's initial $418 million order for 15 preproduction YF-16s will grow into a $4.3 billion purchase of 650 planes at first, and perhaps another 400 planes later on. Although the Navy is looking closely at the Northrop jet, it too may decide to purchase a carrier version of the YF-16. Meanwhile, a consortium of four NATO allies-Belgium, The Netherlands, Norway and Denmark-is approaching a decision on whether to buy 350 of the planes. In the end, orders could total as many as 3,000 planes worth $15 billion...
...Force says it chose the YF-16 over Northrop's twin-engine design because it will cost less ($4.6 million per plane, v. $5 million) and offers "significant" advantages in performance; in 300 hours of testing, the YF-16 prototypes proved to be more agile at the Mach 2 speeds at which the planes were designed to fly. But General Dynamics also showed a shrewd appreciation of Pentagon pride and politics. To power the YF-16, the company chose the same Pratt & Whitney turbofan engines used in the Air Force's costly ($12 million) but cherished new McDonnell...
...Northrop Frye, wreaths racked in rows...
...Stehlin affair." A retired commanding general of the French air force (1960-63) and vice president of the Chamber of Deputies, Paul Stehlin wrote a memorandum to Giscard suggesting that France's Mirage F1/M53 fighter was inferior to two new U.S. jets, General Dynamics' YF-16 and Northrop's YF-17. Most impartial aviation experts agree, but Stehlin made the point during a feverish competition over whether the Mirage or one of the U.S. planes will become the standard fighter for NATO'S forces...