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I worked on this program for about 2 years,and the level of confusion endemic to most new projects was through the roof with this one. So much money was spent, but nothing to show for it. When the program was canceled, it was really no big surprise to any of us. After that debacle,I never worked another military contract and retired from the airline industry in 2015. I'm glad that's all over...😀🖖✈️🎸
At about 11:00, the F-117 was built of flat surfaces because the computers at that time did NOT have the computing capacity to calculate the reflection of curved surfaces! When the B-2 was developed the computers had evolved so that they had the needed computing power to calculate the reflection of curved surfaces. This can be found in any book on stealth aircraft, it is common knowledge.
I knew several of the guys who were on the A-12 Fleet Introduction Team. They told me that they felt McDonald-Douglas had low balled their bid to build the A-12 planning to get the Navy to spend much more to save it after the program was in to deep to fail. Chenny called their bluff.
Classification can been handy. I worked in Grumman's ECM Lab which required a Top Secret or better clearance. We were working on the EA6B one Christmas and decided to have an unsanctioned Christmas Party in the Lab. Makes it easy to control the guest list.
I had to stop after the first 20 minutes as that was enough to realize the couple of guys being interviewed were at best lacking knowledge or worse being intentionally misleading. A truly idiotic example is the one guy's "evidence" of how overrated the F-22' stealth is by supposedly witnessing a within VISUAL range dogfight encounter where an F-5 won. Hopefully anyone with two brain cells understands why that proves nothing about the F-22's stealth.
James P Stevenson was a friend of Pierre Sprey and a huge opponent of the F-22 and apparently high-tech weapons in general. google "Pouncing on the bird of prey" and you find an article in the 2008 Air & space Forces Magazine. You can also google James Stevenson Pierre Sprey
i just think it’s because the documentary is also outdated especially due to the fact that the f35 proves their whole point about needing specialized aircraft wrong
Right, they sound like they have no idea what they're talking about ‼️🤦🏾♂️💯, which makes me wonder if they actually worked on this particular project/program like they claim they did ‼️🤷🏾♂️💯...
The decision of Cheney to get rid of the F-14 program was a bad one... That plane was far superior in many ways to the F-18's ... More range, far more weapons and defensive counter-measures equipment carrying capabilities, esoecially with a dedicated RIO aboard the plane than the single pilot F-18's... Cheney was not a fan of Grumman products, probably because they (the Grumman Corporation) did not have as many personal perks for him, as their competitors had... The Lockheed upper level engineer Kelly Johnson knew about the basics of stealth technology back in the early development of the SR-71's in the late 1950's , and he knew that other factors were involved to dodge enemy missile threats , like speed, altitude , countermeasures and manuvreability... Because of those things, not a single SR-71 was shot-down from any of the numerous high-risk missions that they were assigned to... From what I have heard about the F-117's - the speed and manuvreability were NOT rheir strong points, which could have made them quite vulnerable to enemy missiles and gunfire from other aircraft and ground based defense systems.
I was an A6-E BN at the time. The info we got was that the A-12 was to replace the A6 as the Medium Bomber. Instead they stuck the Navy with the F18 hotrod with a much less capable all weather bombing package and a token bomb load. Yep, they treated us like the Marines in the great old Cold War days.
The A-12 was cancelled in January 1991 when Dick Cheney was Secretary of defense! It was the time of the first Gulf War. John Boyd was Cheney's adviser at the time. John Boyd and his "acolytes" hated vehemently everything they even suspected of high tech. Personally I think it was on Boyd's advise that Cheney cancelled the A-12.
Oh Snap !! You Had to go there !! LoLoL 👋😁✌️ That's a Dang Good Question. I Guess the Government got the Citizens Way of Thinking, Build Now Pay Later Which is Why the Government is in Debt ? ( To Whom ? It's Citizens ? ) It's All F'd Up !! USAF is Retiring F-15 Block Whatever's Never Built Enough F-22. Going with the Single Engine F-35. Oh ! and the USN !!,,,Damned Idiots !! Who The Heck is Running What and Doin it Where ??? Budgetary 🖕🖕😁👌 Up Your,,,,Wait ! What was the Question Again ???!! LoLoL 🤪🙃🫨
My biological father got permission to use the TSSAM nose on his design proposal. Due to the stealth characteristics and use it for reconnaissance purposes. Growing up in the Above Top Secret Government Black Programs gave us a great life. I even got to sit in the B-52 nickname GhostBuster. There's only been one picture on the net of it. It has a Pac Man Ghost on the side. During the competition drawing. My biological father used Casper the friendly ghost. Was told later that Casper has a Trade Mark and would be hard to get permission to use it.
Being honest is a must for everyone if we want responsibilities in life. Telling the truth means that you don't have to worry about how you said something about anything.
During the Serb war the air force was flying generally the same flight pattern at the same time of night with the F117 that if you do the same thing more than twice with a "stealth" air craft and you telegraph what you are going to do the opposition will get a lucky hit.The best "stealth" things before shape would be great materials , spoofing and mixing up your flight ingress, egress. and timing.
The example of a Cessna avoiding Soviet air defense is a bit suspect. One the soviets may have been monitoring the aircraft and didn’t shoot it down to avoid an international incident. Secondly any attack by the US would likely be during heightened tensions in which there would be far more attention paid to
I agree with the guys in this video. The stealth concept isnt really worth the money. You cant build enough of them to over come the numbers of a less capable plane. I would rather have a ane thats good enough and cheap enough to make a ton of them than the best plane on the block but its so expensive that we only have a handful like the f22
Stealth is combination of things. Shape, coatings and tactics. I’m sure the Iraqis from Desert Storm would disagree with the way these men criticize stealth
Speaking of the f-111 the military should have gone on with an advanced f4 phantom and did away with the f111 and still was able to procure the f15 and f16.
If it wasn't, then why did the Navy pass on the YF-23? It's like the Navy wasn't invited to play in that tournament, so they passed on the YF-23, when it was clearly built to Navy specs and was an overall better aircraft not to mention flew better than the YF-22. But since the Navy wasn't invited to the Fly off, they took they're billions and sunk them into that 3 billion dollar bullshit they call F-35 multi-roll bullshit fighter. Northrup/Grumman clearly tee'd that plane up to hit a homerun for them, but because it was an Air Force Fly Off, they just would not take the gimme winning YF-23. It must gall them something fierce, that the YF-23 sits today in the Air Forces Write Patterson Museum in Dayton, while the F-22 flies against a non adversarial roll waiting for China to catch up to it cause Russia is a broke-dick and stuck in its cold-war glories of its space program passed that has long-lost its war to get to the moon. 🤷♂️🤦♂️
I get what your saying but people believe in quantity over quality because of ww2. We didn't win the war because of the atomic bomb. We won becuase the Allies out produced the axis on every front.
Not really, this particular documentary is full of misinformation and straight up lies... I mean, you can do your own research on it and you'll realize just how much they are lying and spreading misinformation in this video/documentary... With that being said, don't believe everything you watch or hear on the Internet, and that's especially the case when it comes to this particular video/documentary ‼️🤦🏽♂️🤷🏽♂️💯...
The failure of the A-12 isn't necessarily in the technology but rather in the impatience to let the technology mature then evolve. I grew up in the 50s and 60s the golden years of aviation R&D. We went from subsonic straight wing planes to mach 3 in those years. These were airplanes designed by people with pencils and sliderules and the education and imagination to make things work.. Kelly Johnson, and Ed Heinemann come to mind and there were many others. We are now stuck, both politically and technically, in the "we can't do that" mode before we seriously try. We expect a golden bullet right off, even if we start off with iron and lead. Yet we see Russia and and Chinese robustly doing what we say we can't do. The big difference, and the failure in the A-12 program, is that we rely too much on technology overreach vs the Russian model of refining existing designs to meet new criteria. We are learning though as is demonstrated by the F-15 evolving into the F-15 EX
I saw the A-12 fly into Miramar naval Air station San Diego the very day the Gulf War started in 1991 it was surrounded by f-14s that were attempting to block views of it the a12 along with the f-14s it landed in formation something I've only seen at airshows. I was close enough to the end of the runway I could actually see the two crewmen in the aircraft.
Video summary: "We wasted many billions of your dollars, in an era when that was a ton of money, and we're here to blow smoke about how bad actual successful programs were and are."
Shine a red light on a red aircraft and you will see a red aircraft. Shine a red light on a green aircraft and a miniscule amount of red light will be reflected.
I wonder if you think that everything is AI these days. These are older interviews, made when AI, as we know it these days, did not even exist. I wonder…If you lose the basic ability to distinguish between reality, and AI at this very basic stage of its evolution, perhaps soon enough people will start questioning if they are themselves AI generated 😬 Jokes aside, your comment is more common than you may think, which I makes me think. I guess you can look the people being interviewed up, and easily realize they are very real, but I also understand that we are all slowly mutating into one minute TikTok driven species, and that is going to be the dominant length of any thought in the future, unless they manage to make it worse, and to bring it down to a few seconds, so even a basic research will becomes too much of an effort. Eventually a feline will have a more complex thought process than humans. Again, I am just joking 😉
@Dronescapes That response tells me a lot, you are very defensive. I didn't say the footage was AI generated I said the video is. You are pumping out hour long videos nonstop none of them are commented so either you are stealing/reuploafing someone else's work or you take footage&information and do a lazy ai edited "documentary". Either way very lazy and low effort, keep barking like a child.
Hal what's his name is boring AF. He seemed to have forgotten the video the was not about him. He added irrelevant personal BS that just was pointless. The entire video jumped ALL over different types of aircraft, did not stick to the airframe in the title which is the one I was looking for.
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I worked on this program for about 2 years,and the level of confusion endemic to most new projects was through the roof with this one.
So much money was spent, but nothing to show for it.
When the program was canceled, it was really no big surprise to any of us. After that debacle,I never worked another military contract and retired from the airline industry in 2015.
I'm glad that's all over...😀🖖✈️🎸
My father ran Grummans flight test starting in 1941 to 1965. Corky taught me to fly.
At about 11:00, the F-117 was built of flat surfaces because the computers at that time did NOT have the computing capacity to calculate the reflection of curved surfaces! When the B-2 was developed the computers had evolved so that they had the needed computing power to calculate the reflection of curved surfaces. This can be found in any book on stealth aircraft, it is common knowledge.
I knew several of the guys who were on the A-12 Fleet Introduction Team. They told me that they felt McDonald-Douglas had low balled their bid to build the A-12 planning to get the Navy to spend much more to save it after the program was in to deep to fail. Chenny called their bluff.
Growing up around Edwards Air Force Base is one of the greatest moments of my life.
Classification can been handy. I worked in Grumman's ECM Lab which required a Top Secret or better clearance. We were working on the EA6B one Christmas and decided to have an unsanctioned Christmas Party in the Lab. Makes it easy to control the guest list.
Tell me all your secrets please sir😂
I had to stop after the first 20 minutes as that was enough to realize the couple of guys being interviewed were at best lacking knowledge or worse being intentionally misleading. A truly idiotic example is the one guy's "evidence" of how overrated the F-22' stealth is by supposedly witnessing a within VISUAL range dogfight encounter where an F-5 won. Hopefully anyone with two brain cells understands why that proves nothing about the F-22's stealth.
James P Stevenson was a friend of Pierre Sprey and a huge opponent of the F-22 and apparently high-tech weapons in general. google "Pouncing on the bird of prey" and you find an article in the 2008 Air & space Forces Magazine.
You can also google James Stevenson Pierre Sprey
i just think it’s because the documentary is also outdated especially due to the fact that the f35 proves their whole point about needing specialized aircraft wrong
They sound like a typical case of "journos" trying to sell their stories / books by exaggerating or sensationalising.
Right, they sound like they have no idea what they're talking about ‼️🤦🏾♂️💯, which makes me wonder if they actually worked on this particular project/program like they claim they did ‼️🤷🏾♂️💯...
The F4 was a successful multi-roll, multi-service Aircraft.
The decision of Cheney to get rid of the F-14 program was a bad one... That plane was far superior in many ways to the F-18's ... More range, far more weapons and defensive counter-measures equipment carrying capabilities, esoecially with a dedicated RIO aboard the plane than the single pilot F-18's... Cheney was not a fan of Grumman products, probably because they (the Grumman Corporation) did not have as many personal perks for him, as their competitors had...
The Lockheed upper level engineer Kelly Johnson knew about the basics of stealth technology back in the early development of the SR-71's in the late 1950's , and he knew that other factors were involved to dodge enemy missile threats , like speed, altitude , countermeasures and manuvreability... Because of those things, not a single SR-71 was shot-down from any of the numerous high-risk missions that they were assigned to...
From what I have heard about the F-117's - the speed and manuvreability were NOT rheir strong points, which could have made them quite vulnerable to enemy missiles and gunfire from other aircraft and ground based defense systems.
I was an A6-E BN at the time. The info we got was that the A-12 was to replace the A6 as the Medium Bomber. Instead they stuck the Navy with the F18 hotrod with a much less capable all weather bombing package and a token bomb load. Yep, they treated us like the Marines in the great old Cold War days.
🛑🛑 The Navy should have developed the Super Stealthy YF23. 💯
Politics ...
The A-12 was cancelled in January 1991 when Dick Cheney was Secretary of defense! It was the time of the first Gulf War. John Boyd was Cheney's adviser at the time. John Boyd and his "acolytes" hated vehemently everything they even suspected of high tech. Personally I think it was on Boyd's advise that Cheney cancelled the A-12.
Both, some people say, are traitors. History knows this.
Cheney had some good ideas, he tried his best to cancel the V22.
The A12 sure made alot of money disappear.
Why is it that now, if something is way over budget, they go ahead with it anyway?
Because politicians are IDIOTS.
Sunk cost fallacy?
Oh Snap !! You Had to go there !! LoLoL 👋😁✌️ That's a Dang Good Question. I Guess the Government got the Citizens Way of Thinking, Build Now Pay Later Which is Why the Government is in Debt ? ( To Whom ? It's Citizens ? ) It's All F'd Up !! USAF is Retiring F-15 Block Whatever's Never Built Enough F-22. Going with the Single Engine F-35. Oh ! and the USN !!,,,Damned Idiots !! Who The Heck is Running What and Doin it Where ??? Budgetary 🖕🖕😁👌 Up Your,,,,Wait ! What was the Question Again ???!! LoLoL 🤪🙃🫨
@@LeroyJenkinsIII
Yeah, that crossed my mind as well!
Because the taxpayers are nice enough to pay for it
My biological father got permission to use the TSSAM nose on his design proposal. Due to the stealth characteristics and use it for reconnaissance purposes.
Growing up in the Above Top Secret Government Black Programs gave us a great life.
I even got to sit in the B-52 nickname GhostBuster. There's only been one picture on the net of it. It has a Pac Man Ghost on the side.
During the competition drawing. My biological father used Casper the friendly ghost. Was told later that Casper has a Trade Mark and would be hard to get permission to use it.
Teamwork makes the dream work.
Such a down to earth and simple philosophy.
I had no idea that the navy had a stealth aircraft carrier!
🤣🤣🤣🤣
They've thought of building a submarine aircraft carrier.
What about the REGULUS firing USN submarines??????
The Flying Dorito! Thing was impossible to control, with the technology available at the time - simple.
Odd 117 was a flying computer and was before it ???
Talk about flying a brick !!!
If the visible aircraft was just a model, and not a flyable plane, did anyone think to ask, "Where did all the money go for this aircraft?"
"Omg. Thats funny. I know funny and thats funny."
Being honest is a must for everyone if we want responsibilities in life.
Telling the truth means that you don't have to worry about how you said something about anything.
During the Serb war the air force was flying generally the same flight pattern at the same time of night with the F117 that if you do the same thing more than twice with a "stealth" air craft and you telegraph what you are going to do the opposition will get a lucky hit.The best "stealth" things before shape would be great materials , spoofing and mixing up your flight ingress, egress. and timing.
I saw the Avenger 2 fly at night over my hometown.
F-117 retired? Except they keep flying!
When hear about Secret Aircraft i wonder, was this one on the many UFOs seen in the last 50 years
And their still your tax dollars at work ...
The example of a Cessna avoiding Soviet air defense is a bit suspect. One the soviets may have been monitoring the aircraft and didn’t shoot it down to avoid an international incident. Secondly any attack by the US would likely be during heightened tensions in which there would be far more attention paid to
I agree with the guys in this video. The stealth concept isnt really worth the money. You cant build enough of them to over come the numbers of a less capable plane. I would rather have a ane thats good enough and cheap enough to make a ton of them than the best plane on the block but its so expensive that we only have a handful like the f22
Was it one of these that was spotted with 2 fighters and a tanker ???
Don't remember where it was spotted but the drawing was all over the place...
These 2 guys are very misinformed or downright lying. Their knowledge of the F-117, F-22 among others is simply not accurate.
110%. Either that, or this is old footage which has aged horribly.
Republicans
I agree 💯percent. These guys are .mil industrial complex treasonists.
They sound like a typical case of "journos" trying to sell their stories / books by exaggerating or sensationalising.
Expand
35% overweight, 80+% over budget and we knew in FW it wouldn't work. Big layoff at Fort Worth
STL too.
I hope these two area still alive and watching the f35 prove them wrong about everything
The F-35 had and still has its share of problems, including the astronomical cost.
@@DronescapesHaving to replace the engine being one of the major issues.
not any more secret-nice animations🥶🥶
Stealth is combination of things. Shape, coatings and tactics. I’m sure the Iraqis from Desert Storm would disagree with the way these men criticize stealth
Speaking of the f-111 the military should have gone on with an advanced f4 phantom and did away with the f111 and still was able to procure the f15 and f16.
No mention of the F-22 crash while testing.
Isn't this the plot for the Stephen Coonts book The Minotaur? Well, this mixed with the competition between the YF-23 and YF-22 at least?
If it wasn't, then why did the Navy pass on the YF-23? It's like the Navy wasn't invited to play in that tournament, so they passed on the YF-23, when it was clearly built to Navy specs and was an overall better aircraft not to mention flew better than the YF-22. But since the Navy wasn't invited to the Fly off, they took they're billions and sunk them into that 3 billion dollar bullshit they call F-35 multi-roll bullshit fighter. Northrup/Grumman clearly tee'd that plane up to hit a homerun for them, but because it was an Air Force Fly Off, they just would not take the gimme winning YF-23. It must gall them something fierce, that the YF-23 sits today in the Air Forces Write Patterson Museum in Dayton, while the F-22 flies against a non adversarial roll waiting for China to catch up to it cause Russia is a broke-dick and stuck in its cold-war glories of its space program passed that has long-lost its war to get to the moon. 🤷♂️🤦♂️
when someone says "theres a strength in quantity/numbers" my brain turns off. you bring your 200000 troops, Ill bring 1 nuke.
I get what your saying but people believe in quantity over quality because of ww2. We didn't win the war because of the atomic bomb. We won becuase the Allies out produced the axis on every front.
Drones in Ukraine have something to say re your comment
@@Ag3nt0fCha0sif Ukraine had proper air superiority they wouldn't need drones
which would require a smaller number of planes than drones.
How about instead one of those large anti ship drones we just use 2000 normal quadcopter drones carrying a hand grenade each to sink a ship?
does rubber coatings like subs work on aircraft?
Great doc. Thank you
Not really, this particular documentary is full of misinformation and straight up lies... I mean, you can do your own research on it and you'll realize just how much they are lying and spreading misinformation in this video/documentary... With that being said, don't believe everything you watch or hear on the Internet, and that's especially the case when it comes to this particular video/documentary ‼️🤦🏽♂️🤷🏽♂️💯...
To think the some of the designs of the NGAD bares a resemblance to the A-12
Reminds me of the Gee-Whiz attitude of the Army's Commanche that was scalped.
the crew should learn before they go out
The failure of the A-12 isn't necessarily in the technology but rather in the impatience to let the technology mature then evolve.
I grew up in the 50s and 60s the golden years of aviation R&D. We went from subsonic straight wing planes to mach 3 in those years. These were airplanes designed by people with pencils and sliderules and the education and imagination to make things work.. Kelly Johnson, and Ed Heinemann come to mind and there were many others.
We are now stuck, both politically and technically, in the "we can't do that" mode before we seriously try. We expect a golden bullet right off, even if we start off with iron and lead. Yet we see Russia and and Chinese robustly doing what we say we can't do.
The big difference, and the failure in the A-12 program, is that we rely too much on technology overreach vs the Russian model of refining existing designs to meet new criteria. We are learning though as is demonstrated by the F-15 evolving into the F-15 EX
I saw the A-12 fly into Miramar naval Air station San Diego the very day the Gulf War started in 1991 it was surrounded by f-14s that were attempting to block views of it the a12 along with the f-14s it landed in formation something I've only seen at airshows. I was close enough to the end of the runway I could actually see the two crewmen in the aircraft.
Just what I thought these guys said it never got past the mock-up stage ???
Guessing it was Stealthy too ???
Looks a whole lot like the Hortons WW2 flying wing ???
Video summary: "We wasted many billions of your dollars, in an era when that was a ton of money, and we're here to blow smoke about how bad actual successful programs were and are."
Fascinating❤
Shine a red light on a red aircraft and you will see a red aircraft. Shine a red light on a green aircraft and a miniscule amount of red light will be reflected.
Was it?
I was looking for someone talking ‘flight’, not shite!
I guess more the Sherman Tank.?
Sort of like the Tiger and King Tiger in WW2.
My cousin is actually the person who cancelled that project. She told me that the project manager lied about fat too many things.
Your cousin is Dick Cheney aka the SecDef with the fecal touch?
My father worked on it
Cool. Any insight you can share?
Looks like they stole the Horten Flying Wing design
True, spesifically the Horten H XVIII, the planned bomber vatiant of the Ho 229
Everyone did!
@@stevenschiff808 I agree with that
Crazy, those contract games that are played. Sadly, now we hand over 100 billion so easily to Ukraine.
You would rather hand over Ukraine?
@@abcdef-qk6jfyeah. I don’t care about Ukraine when our own citizens are starving and freezing to death in the streets
@@abcdef-qk6jfFunny… I didn’t know Ukraine was “ours” to decide.
Are these videos ai generated?
I wonder if you think that everything is AI these days.
These are older interviews, made when AI, as we know it these days, did not even exist.
I wonder…If you lose the basic ability to distinguish between reality, and AI at this very basic stage of its evolution, perhaps soon enough people will start questioning if they are themselves AI generated 😬
Jokes aside, your comment is more common than you may think, which I makes me think.
I guess you can look the people being interviewed up, and easily realize they are very real, but I also understand that we are all slowly mutating into one minute TikTok driven species, and that is going to be the dominant length of any thought in the future, unless they manage to make it worse, and to bring it down to a few seconds, so even a basic research will becomes too much of an effort.
Eventually a feline will have a more complex thought process than humans.
Again, I am just joking 😉
@Dronescapes
That response tells me a lot, you are very defensive. I didn't say the footage was AI generated I said the video is. You are pumping out hour long videos nonstop none of them are commented so either you are stealing/reuploafing someone else's work or you take footage&information and do a lazy ai edited "documentary". Either way very lazy and low effort, keep barking like a child.
Hal what's his name is boring AF. He seemed to have forgotten the video the was not about him. He added irrelevant personal BS that just was pointless. The entire video jumped ALL over different types of aircraft, did not stick to the airframe in the title which is the one I was looking for.
Adds on this are unacceptable
You have the option not to see any ad. Perhaps you should consider RUclips Premium
loose the background music
The Mig 41 will render these US high cost toys into useless victims.
Ha!