In California: Ogling the F-20 Tigershark

By Gregory Jaynes

Let us say, just for the hell of it, there was this old boy who was not brain damaged so much as he was impetuous and romantic, the sort of fellow who, but for the grace of poor vision and ten thumbs, a trick knee and an unhealthy dependence on bonded bourbon, might have made a fighter pilot. Lately he has been captivated and obsessed by some of the slickest ads in print, the ones depicting the F-20 Tigershark poised on a liquid mirror out in the Mojave Desert. What is it about this bird, he wonders, that has caused it to be acclaimed in the Atlantic, praised by 60 Minutes, touted by ever skeptical Ted Koppel? Not since laying eyes on a '54 T-Bird has the old boy felt such a tingle for a machine. In time, hot, rank desire draws him to Edwards Air Force Base, a copy of Chuck Yeager's autobiography tucked into his kit. He aches to see this needle-nosed supersonic bat in the flesh, touch it. Let us just say that happens.

His prosaic commuter craft drops out of a blue-black sky and taxis down the flight line, past Rockwell International, which is testing the B-1B bomber; past General Dynamics and the F-16; past Fairchild Republic and its T-46 trainers; past the Army, testing Black Hawk helicopters; past McDonnell Douglas, at work on the F-15; and just beyond the Air Force and its antisatellite system; and comes to rest outside the Northrop hangar, wherein the Tigershark resides. Our innocent is not met by a sales rep; rather, Roy Martin, a test pilot, blond and angular and wearing a jumpsuit crosshatched by so many zippered pockets that he could carry a disassembled jeep around in his coveralls, takes the shopper in tow.

Martin--no American test pilot should be allowed to look dissimilar to Roy Martin--unintentionally flatters his charge by asking him whether he was ever a fighter jock. Martin needs this information to guide his presentation. After all, one should never bore the experienced with a nuts-and-bolts primer. The visitor answers negatively, tugs a forelock and asks how fast the F-20 accelerates from zero to 60. (Two and one-half minutes after a cold start, the Tigershark is flying at 38,000 ft., 13 miles from its base, the plane's radar locked in on an intruder 63 miles away.) The nuts-and-bolts primer it will be.

In a conference room, Martin explains that the plane is simplicity itself. "Say there is a penetration ..." "Of what?" "Your airspace." "Oh." "And you want to launch against that guy and find out who it is. The F-20 is tailored so that as soon as you turn the electrical system on, you can hit the air." About here in the pilgrim's education, his mind commences laboring furiously to comprehend the first of hundreds of tight little wads of initials they use in the defense game. In this case it is the INS, or inertial navigation system, whose alignment takes three to ten minutes in planes that fly with conventional navigational rigs, but in the F-20, owing to Honeywell's ring laser gyro, the INS is aligned in 22 seconds flat.

The listener, who had once confused the word amenities with the word accessories in a conversation with a car dealer in Manhattan, only to be scolded, "You want amenities, try Eighth Avenue!" keeps his mouth shut. "Now we're airborne," Martin is saying.

Pilots talk with fluid hands when describing combat missions. Dogfight descriptions are particularly elegant, like T'ai Chi almost. Soon Martin and his rapt one-chair audience are roaring after a blip on their imaginary radarscope. Their radar, in the nose of the F-20, is telling them the speed, altitude and rate of closure to the target. Now if their rules of engagement permit BVR (beyond visual range), they can get within their WDP (weapons delivery parameter) and "hose off an AIM-7" (air intercept missile, named Sparrow), and the radar will guide it to impact. "We shot down a drone with an AIM-7 at 13 miles," Martin says. "A guy can be flying along, he's hit by a missile, and he never saw who shot him. That's a pretty impressive capability."

But only if the rules of engagement permit BVR. They did not in Viet Nam, says Martin, who was there. That was WVR (within visual range), meaning you had to identify the victim before you fired. Under WVR over there, you had to get close enough to fire your heat-seeking missiles, which sought the hottest point, the enemy's exhaust system, meaning you had to get in his aft heat cone and risk a g dogfight (fluid hand descriptions again). The game has long since changed. They lowered the temperature threshold on those missiles so now they go after the whole plane. With the new generation of missiles, aerial combat is hardly what it was. "It used to be important to be the best at dogfighting," Martin says. "Now you have to be the first to identify and fire. Point and shoot, it is called. That's the kind of combat that is evolving."

Slack-jawed now is our would-be ace, spittle pooling behind his lower lip, moved by the esoterica he is hearing to the wild blue yonder of his fantasy--even as his handler moves him from the boardroom to the cockpit of the Tiger-shark. There is only room for one person, and it is quite snug, and there is little lower-back support, our soft American notices.

All around him are gauges and toggle switches, nearly all of them anachronistic and unnecessary, he hears, no more than a backup system to the computers. There is a computer screen at right-shoulder level, another at left shoulder, and at eye level is the HUD (head-up display). The HUD is just a glass display, projected up from the avionics system, enabling the pilot to call up any information he needs at windshield level, if you will, so that he never has to take his eyes off his intended victim. In the HUD is the TD box (target designator), a visual aid that focuses your eyes on the piece of sky that threatens you, and when it is time, the HUD will flash you a word: SHOOT.

About here it occurs to the titillated observer that he is sitting in nothing so much as a deadly Atari game. Long ago, its designers must have anticipated that the next generation of fighter pilots would come from the video arcades. He holds the joystick in his hand. At his index finger is the trigger for two 20-mm cannons in the nose. "That's it for air to air," Martin is saying, moving on to air to ground, "another part of this multirole fighter."

So the aspiring ace sits there--some might say preposterously--in this cavernous hangar in California, in the cockpit of a $13.5 million plane that will do everything but make coleslaw, and listens like a customer, the ejection detonator between his thighs. Northrop Corp. spent nearly $1 billion to develop the F-20, and has been trying for the past two years to persuade Washington to place an order. Unless the F-20 gets Uncle Sam's seal of approval, the bird won't fly with foreign buyers, for whom it was mainly designed in the first place. Northrop will soon get a chance to prove that its long and largely successful p.r. campaign for the F-20 was justified: the Tigershark will go head to head with the F-16, which now dominates the fighter-interceptor market, in a computer-simulated fly-off.

If our hero takes any interest in the commercial side of the matter, it is that the circumstances have him sitting in the only F-20 extant (two other prototypes crashed; a fourth is under construction). Not one has been sold. In his head, he is going "Vrrroom-vrrroom."

"We can carry any air-to-ground weapons you can think of," Martin is saying, ticking off a laundry list. "The mission computer knows the ordnance you've got onboard. It knows bomb ballistics and range. The information comes on the HUD with a symbol--a little diamond over the target, just like an Atari video game. In the CCIP [continuously computed impact point] mode, your job is to put the diamond over the target, hit the pickle button and bombs come off. And we hit. Well, within 30 ft."

Let us leave the old boy here, several happy hours still ahead of him. He will never be able to say he flew the thing, but for the moment, in his mind, he can at least point and shoot with the best, to say nothing of his prowess with the pickle button. --By Gregory Jaynes