by Orr Kelly
Negotiations with the European countries were going well, and Jones’s dream was coming true. But in January 1972, the U.S. Air Force turned everything topsy turvy when it announced a competition to design a lightweight fighter. Four companies submitted bids and two were selected to build two prototypes each. Northrop received $39 million and General Dynamics received $38 million for work on its YF-16. There was no promise that either plane would ever go into production. Instead, the companies were challenged to try out new ideas in fighter design. But the air force also insisted that the plane be cheap as well as lightweight: no more than $3 million apiece in 1970 dollars, based on an order of 300 planes. At the time, the cost of the navy F-14 and the air force F-15 were soaring toward the $20 million mark.
For Northrop, the air force contract was both a great opportunity and a formidable challenge. Here, suddenly, was the money to build two prototypes so potential customers could see and even fly a real airplane. But the Cobra had been designed as a strike-fighter, not just a lightweight dogfighter. It was bigger than the General Dynamics plane, had two engines rather than one, and carried more weapons. “We had to change all our briefings overnight,” recalls one Northrop executive. “We had the right plane in the wrong competition.”
The first Northrop prototype, now called the YF-17, was rolled out in April 1974 and was being prepared for its first flight in June, when the Pentagon suddenly announced a winner-take-all fly-off between the General Dynamics YF-16 and the YF-17. The prize would be a contract to build hundreds, perhaps thousands, of fighters for the air force and then for American allies overseas. What had been a relatively low-keyed technology demonstration program was converted overnight into the fighter plane deal of the century.
It was while preparations were underway for this competition that Congress ordered the navy to adopt the air force competition winner for carrier use, adding even more to the stakes on the table.
Theoretically, the navy was deeply involved in the testing and selection process. Practically, the navy representatives felt like barely tolerated aliens when they came to meetings with the air force.
Robert H. Thompson, who worked for Houser in OP 05 (the office of the deputy chief of naval operations for air warfare), vividly recalls one meeting he attended:
We were told to get together on requirements with the air force. As usual, they took three navy guys and twenty-five air force guys and that’s balance, and put us in a room. They said, “You guys get together and see how you can merge requirements.” There was a navy admiral and an air force general, and the air force general walked in, looked at all the light-blue suiters and said, “Now, guys,” he says, “if you guys change one number of our requirements, you’re going to Adak.” And he left. So we had two weeks to come up with requirements. What are we going to do for two weeks, guys? They thought that was a good way to work a joint exercise.
Suddenly, things were moving much faster than the navy had expected—and moving in the wrong direction. There were two immediate concerns. First was the fact that neither Northrop nor General Dynamics had experience building carrier aircraft. Second was the explicit congressional order that, if followed literally, would force the navy to buy a plane that would, at best, be barely suitable for carrier operation.
The solution to the first problem was a decision to require General Dynamics and Northrop each to team up with an experienced builder of navy planes.
General Dynamics looked first to McDonnell Douglas and this seemed to offer the prospect of a peaceful, if far from ideal, working relationship. Both companies were St. Louis based and had a similar stolid midwestern style of doing business. Their relationship was so close, in fact, that David Lewis, head of General Dynamics, had, until a short time before, been president of McDonnell Douglas. The McDonnell Douglas firm was the result of a merger in 1967 of the McDonnell and Douglas aircraft companies and both had had a long history of building carrier aircraft. Douglas turned out a series of torpedo planes and bombers during and after World War II, and McDonnell was responsible for the navy’s first carrier-based jet, as well as the F-4 Phantom, the first-line fighter for both the air force and navy for many years. At the time of the merger, however, Douglas had shifted its interest to commercial airliners while McDonnell built fighter planes. That division continues to this day, with the company’s commercial operations largely located in southern California and its military business in the former McDonnell plant in St. Louis.
Northrop first approached LTV, the Texas builder of the A-7 Corsair attack plane used by both the navy and air force. One of its predecessor companies, Chance Vought, had built the famous gull-winged F-4U Corsair during World War II.
The talks between McDonnell Douglas and General Dynamics soon collapsed because of General Dynamics’ insistence on the dominant role in the partnership, and both General Dynamics and Northrop focused their attention on LTV.
For normally astute executives, some of the officials involved in these negotiations made some remarkably bad business judgments.
At Dallas-based LTV, officials studied the competing planes and then made two assumptions. The first was that the air force would choose the General Dynamics plane on its merits. The other was that, given the climate in Congress and the Pentagon, the navy would be forced to take the same plane chosen by the air force.
LTV decided on 27 September to team with General Dynamics, even though Northrop had offered extremely favorable terms. The next day, Paul Thayer, chairman of the board of LTV, called Tom Jones and told him of the company’s decision.
The arrangement LTV made with General Dynamics was a heavily lopsided deal. If both the air force and navy picked the YF-16, General Dynamics would be prime contractor for the air force and LTV would be prime for the navy. If the air force rejected the YF-16 but the navy chose it, General Dynamics would be the prime contractor and LTV the subcontractor. But if the air force chose the YF-16 and the navy didn’t, LTV would have no part in the deal. LTV at the time was building the A-7 attack plane—a derivative of the navy’s F-8 fighter—for both the navy and the air force. But once production of the A-7 stopped, the company would be out of the combat aircraft business.
Northrop turned to McDonnell Douglas and the two worked out a more even-handed arrangement. If the team won the air force competition, Northrop would be the lead contractor and do the majority of the work. If they won the navy contract, McDonnell Douglas would be the lead and do the majority of the work. It never occurred to the people at Northrop that their plane could lose the air force fly-off and that they might end up as a junior partner to McDonnell Douglas.
Flight tests of the competing planes would normally have taken a couple of years. But the air force, eager to get into production, condensed the fly-off into about three months at the end of 1974. Results came to the air force’s Aero Systems Command at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio. Reports from the pilots were ecstatic.
Both planes were close to being a fighter pilot’s dream, although the YF-16 probably came a little closer. The General Dynamics plane, with its single engine, was smaller than the YF-17 and thus a little bit harder to see. It had an innovative control system in which electronic pulses from the cockpit moved the controls. The pilot’s seat was cocked back at an angle to permit him to experience as much as nine times the force of gravity (nine Gs)—and remain conscious.
With its twin engines, the Northrop plane was bigger than its competition, but many pilots like the security that two engines give them. Where the YF-17 stood out was in its ability to fly very slowly—as slow as thirty-seven miles an hour—with its nose pointing almost straight upward without falling off into a spin. In a dogfight, planes slow dramatically as they burn off energy in tight turns. The pilot who can continue to control his plane at very slow speeds is likely to win. Northrop engineers had worked very hard to make this a virtually stall-proof plane, hoping finally to eliminate the deadly threat of a spin, which had killed so many pilots over the years.
One pilot likened two YF-17s, circling each other in that way, to two cobras waiting for the chance to strike.
The navy was, theoretically, involved in evaluating the two planes. Practically, it was an all-air force show.
Kent Lee represented the navy on the board making the choice between the two contenders, and he went to Wright-Patterson on the day the decision was to be made.
“I thought the board picked the wrong airplane,” Lee says. “I really didn’t have a vote. They had their minds made up.”
Even though the navy was far from ready to make a decision on its plane, the secretary of defense gave the air force permission to go ahead with its announcement. On 13 January 1975, it chose the General Dynamics YF-16.
The reaction in Tom Jones’s office in Century City and at the Northrop plant in nearby Hawthorne was one of anger and incredulity. Jones’s dream had turned into a nightmare.
Particularly galling to the Northrop people was the speed with which the air force and General Dynamics exploited the work Northrop had already put into courting the smaller NATO nations. As soon as it had picked the YF-16, the air force moved immediately to work out a deal in which Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Belgium would share in production of the F-16s, and buy 650 of them for their air forces at a cost of $2.1 billion. Northrop had thought the Europeans would have a vote, but the choice they made was between a French plane and the YF-16, not between the two American planes. Northrop not only lost the air force contract, but it also lost the customers it had so zealously courted.
There was also the feeling that there was something suspicious about air force motives in picking the YF-16. One theory was that the engine in the YF-16 had tipped the scales. The General Dynamics plane was powered by the same engine already in use in the air force’s F-15. Choosing a new plane with the same engine would increase the number of engines to be purchased and thus hold down the cost. It would also simplify maintenance and reduce the number of spare parts in the inventory. But there may have been something more sinister involved. The engine in the F-15, made by Pratt & Whitney, was running into severe technical and cost problems. Buying more of those engines would make more money available to help solve those problems. “They wanted us to use the Pratt & Whitney engine,” says one top Northrop official. “They wanted to solve their engine problem by magnifying it.”
Years later, after the emotions of the moment had faded away, however, Thomas Burger, who was involved in the YF-17 program and later became Northrop’s program manager for the F/A-18, said: “I don’t think there was anything peculiar about the decision. The F-16 clearly won that competition, in fair retrospect. The F-16 was a good airplane. We had trouble admitting it, but it really was. It was a hot rod. It had better acceleration, better turning. It was a pretty clear-cut winner.”
If the F-16 was a winner for the air force, however, it was not at all what the navy needed or wanted. While the admirals were sharply divided on what kind of plane they did need, they had no trouble agreeing on what they didn’t need. None of them wanted a little, lightweight fighter, and they didn’t want to have to try to make a plane designed for the air force suitable for carrier operations. And yet there was that order from Congress to adapt the air force choice for carrier use, and there was heavy pressure from the air force and Pentagon officials for the navy to make its decision and “get with the program.”
The navy pulled together a team to evaluate both planes in terms of their suitability for carrier operations. The source selection evaluation board was made up of six civilians and seventeen captains. Reviewing their work was an advisory council, headed by Lee, made up of seven admirals, a marine general and two civilians. Both boards were backed up by more than 500 experts, representing the distilled wisdom of the navy’s half-century of experience operating aircraft on carriers at sea.
G. W. (“Corky”) Lenox, then a captain, was on the engineering staff at NAVAIR and was assigned to help out in the technical evaluation of the planes. Later, Lenox was to be the program manager guiding the F/A-18 through the critical development phase. Lenox recalls the instructions the team got from Lee:
He told us: “You let me worry about the politics. You guys are the evaluation board. You do the best job you can to get a thorough evaluation of the designs submitted and you pick what’s best for the navy. Don’t worry about politics. But you damn well better be able to defend to the ultimate degree your analysis and your recommendations because whichever way it goes there’s going to be controversy and Monday morning quarter-backing.”
After a quick look at the two airplanes, the team gave Lee a negative assessment: neither one looked very good as a navy plane. Representatives of both contractor teams were brought in for separate day-long sessions within a week of the air force announcement and told what they would have to do to make their planes suitable for carrier operations.
The navy naturally looked to LTV and McDonnell Douglas, the two companies with long experience in building carrier planes, to take the lead. General Dynamics, with the big air force contract in its pocket, was content to let LTV adapt its plane for carrier use. But the sudden reversal of roles in which Northrop was reduced to playing the part of the junior partner to McDonnell Douglas made for some difficult days.
“We had a hard time getting started,” recalls R. D. (“Bob”) Dighton, chief operations analyst for McDonnell Douglas. “Northrop was saying, ‘What happened?’ There were hard feelings. Northrop had an entirely different culture. They are entrepreneurial, take gambles. They have a lean, mean staff. They don’t have time to do all the detail our tradition has been. We didn’t know anybody in their company.”
Of course Sanford N. (“Sandy”) McDonnell, the board chairman, knew Tom Jones. But, says Dighton, “it’s hard to work engineering at that level.”
To make things more difficult, McDonnell and Jones are quite different kinds of men. Those in the navy who dealt with them often sensed that they didn’t like or trust each other very much.
McDonnell, a nephew of James Smith McDonnell, the aviation pioneer who founded McDonnell Aircraft Corp. in 1939, appeared to navy men to be a typically staid, moral midwesterner. His speeches often focused on work with boys and the importance of instilling the moral virtues in the nation’s youth. Unlike other aerospace giants, McDonnell Douglas, under McDonnell’s guidance, largely avoided playing politics, either within the navy or in Washington, D.C.
Jones, on the other hand, was the quintessential Washington insider, working the halls of the Pentagon and Capitol Hill and, especially, the White House, to further the interests of his company. In May 1974, Northrop and Jones, who was then the company president, pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of making an illegal contribution of $150,000 to President Nixon’s re-election campaign. Both Jones and the company were fined the maximum of $5,000. During the Watergate investigation, it was revealed that the company had set up a political slush fund years before, in 1961. As much as $1.2 million was sent overseas to be “laundered.” Then at least $472,000 was funneled back to Jones and a company vice president to be used for political contributions.
An insight into the way Jones operated came in court testimony by Herbert Kalmbach, Nixon’s personal lawyer, in November 1974. He told how he had gone to Jones in August 1972, and how Jones had handed him a package of $100 bills—$75,000 worth—to pay for the silence of the men accused in the burglary of the Democratic headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington—the event that set off the scandal culminating in Nixon’s resignation. Kalmbach said he misled Jones into believing the money was for the re-election fund and tearfully described Jones as “a fine man.”
Jones personally repaid Northrop $172,000 of the amount he had improperly distributed to politicians and resigned his post as president. But the company board retained him as chairman and chief executive officer, a tribute to his value to the company. Several years later, when the Democrats were in the White House, an internal Pentagon memo to the secretary of def
ense warned: “As you are probably aware, Northrop seems to have a lot of political clout, particularly in the VP’s office.”
One admiral who worked closely with both men summed up his impressions of Jones and McDonnell: “Jones was an operator, a promoter, a salesman, probably the best promoter, operator, salesman in the aerospace industry. Sandy McDonnell was something of a Boy Scout, a little naive. Jones … you didn’t want to let him out of your sight. He could run circles around Sandy, in and out of the White House, the Pentagon.”
Northrop had, to this point, put almost all its effort into designing and selling a land-based fighter. But the engineers at McDonnell Douglas had given a good deal of thought to developing a dual-role strike-fighter suitable for use on a carrier. What they had in mind didn’t look at all like the YF-17. But everyone knew that there would be enough trouble getting congressional approval for a plane that looked like one of the competitors in the air force fly-off, let alone something that looked like a brand new plane.
As one navy official described the situation: “I think Sandy McDonnell called in his engineers, gave them a picture of the YF-17 and said, ‘I want you to design a carrier-based strike-fighter and I want it to look exactly like this.’ ”
Donald Snyder, a McDonnell Douglas engineer who was involved in design of the plane, says: “The F/A-18 looks like the YF-17, but it is a brand new plane, aerodynamically, structurally, in all ways. It’s a brand new airplane from the ground up and I don’t think that was sufficiently recognized, certainly not by the customer and the Congress and perhaps not by us as well.”
It was obvious that the effort to make either the YF-16 or the YF-17 suitable for taking off from and landing on a carrier would have to begin with a substantial beefing up of the plane’s structure. When a fighter lands on a carrier, it is dropping at the rate of twenty-four feet a second or more, or about fifteen miles an hour. A fighter landing on a runway touches down at less than half that velocity. When a fighter hits the carrier deck, a heavy cable snags its tailhook and jerks it to a stop within 300 feet. To absorb the stress of this kind of controlled crash, the landing gear and the body of the plane have to be much heavier and stronger. The tailhook itself requires special attention. It must work perfectly every time. If it breaks, there is no way to bring the plane aboard a carrier.