How Good Was The F-20 Tigershark? 

Miodrag Mijatović Northrop always seems to go boom or bust with its aircraft industry. F-20/YF-23: Bust. B-2 Bomber: Boom (“shaka-laka”)

Wrong We sold F-5 to Iran. That’s why it was no longer further developed. Similar to why the F 14 was dropped...Noticed the F-15 an F-16 which sold Israel are still being produced.

@@williamkillingsworth2619 The F-14 continued to receive upgrades and the Navy even wanted new airframes with built in upgrades. The reason the F-14 was canned was because it was old and expensive as hell. The reason the F-5 is no longer developed is because the F-16 was allowed to be sold to foreign markets and because it was outdated. That's the reason Northrop went with the F-5G/F-20 to begin with. Seriously, nothing you've said here is correct.

Why did they cut all the F-14s up? To keep them away from who?? Are u aware what the HESA saeqeh is??? It’s Iran’s indigenous copy of the F5. There’s never one reason for anything but this, keeping our weapons development from being used against us , is a big one!

That foreign market u mention was Iran. You twit, jesus People are so shortsighted

Quality reference...

Reminds me of James Tolkan's line in Top Gun: "BULLSHIT TEN MINUTES! THIS THING WILL OVER IN TWO MINUTES! GET ON IT!!!!"

The operational F-20 would have been to the F-16 what the F-16 is to the F-15.

​​@@Dad_BradBut the F-20 was never designed or intended to compete directly with the F-16, both of which were designed from the outset to be point defence interceptors. Think of them as greatly improved, jet-engined versions of the Spitfire or bf-109. From the very start, the F-20's entire design philosophy was to serve as a significant upgrade for existing F-5 customers, of which there were a great many. Buying Tigersharks would have meant retention of existing air and groundcrews with a bare minimum of training required to transition from Freedom Fighter/Tiger II models to the Tigershark. That, combined with the F-20's tremendous ease of maintenance and outstanding sortie generation rate would have provided a quantum leap forward for existing F-5 customers.

@@That70sGuitarist makes sense. I sometimes have referred to the F-20 as an F-16 stripped for export, but that’s a little off the mark. It is like you say, a radically upgraded F-5 style aircraft.

That's a cool piece of unknown history, just another reason to hate china even more.

Which are still flying today as private contractor aggressor aircraft for the US military alongside Kfirs and Mirage F1s. From what I've researched they have Hornet gear in them now.

These would have been perfect for the RNZAF. With upgrades they would have provided high capability and service life well beyond the present. Politics killed what would have been the most cost effective fighter in history.

@@summerlotus3966 Probably because it punishes any country that tries to sell arms to Taiwan.

@@rodneypayne4827 it kinda makes sense that they are using F-18 equipment nowadays since the F-18 is more or less a descendant of the F-5/F-20. Im also pretty sure that the aircraft used as aggressors and trainers are F-5E/F Tiger II’s, not F-20s (there were only 3 F-20s ever built). A shame, since it is a pretty big upgrade over the F-5s. That also means more expensive though. Being cheap to purchase and maintain was a major selling point of the F-5. There are still hundreds of F-5s being flown today, which speaks volumes about an inexpensive, easy to operate aircraft.

Yeah and it’s sad that although they had two crashes and planes were cleared of error it basically ruined any chance we had to mass produce this beast

And I'd probably toss my hat into the ring to do some of the modeling work.

Strangely, same here - far too many years ago my dad bought me an F-20 kit because he knew I was into planes, and my first thought was "...what the hell is an F-20?" haha. I've always had a love for the Tigershark since then as it reminds me of him. He's been gone for ten years, but I always think of him when I see anything about the F-20.

I probably had the same model kit as you. Late 1990s/early 2000s? Surprisingly small box? Badass box art? I got one as a Christmas gift.

@@matchesburn Late 80s for me

Bingo. A plane that is low cost, highly effective, with long service life is NOT what the military industrial complex wants. This thing would have been perfect for the USA and its allies and would fill in a lot of present gaps. But you know, politics, can't have the tax payer getting value for money can we.

The f20/f5 was the basis for the hornet design which obviously spawned the superhornet

Quite literally.

Nonsense. Hornet evolved from YF 17 years before the F20.

Mini-hornet

Yeah, it was just too good.

G.D. didn't want it out there...

@@alastair9446 Oh, seriously? What was its mission? The F-20 was never a serious contender for anything. It was a “good idea”, rather than an aircraft designed to meet mission requirements. It was an early example of manufacturers trying to capitalise on air forces who had fuzzy strategy and worked on capability based planning.

@@alastair9446 it wasnt.. i mean it was very good , the concept is pretty cool and its a great plane but in the end its still a F-5 with limited stores and range capability.. also a small nose means a small radar antenna wich limits the range (the radar was really good but still way less range than the APG-65 or APG-66) and that also meant less space to grow avionics and stuff than the 2 contenders.. That was why when US lifted vetoes to expert the Hornet and Viper it was sadly game over.. and both have continue to evolve and grow up to today..a Tigershark would still be handycaped to a point by space limitations.. so air forces turned to the Viper or Hornet (The Hornet was another history alltogether cause it even had a version for land operators wich would had ditched all the carrier stuff and waterproofing meaning it would been lighter and so better range/thrust to weight.. but that version ended up ditched and all Hornets sold ended up being variants of the naval one)

And thats how we roll in Sweden :)

Maybe we could get Northrop Grumman to sell the design/blueprints of the F-20 to Saab...

The F-20 was actually considered when developing Gripen

What was its intended mission?

@@thethirdman225 multi-role just like the F16. It could carry just about any weapon available and even the AMRAAM which at the time even the F16 wasn't able to use.

@@phoenixrising4073 The F-20 couldn’t really do much at all. Like the MiG-29, it couldn’t fly out of sight on a dark night. Unlike the MiG-29, its payload was very limited. The point of the F-20 was not to be part of a larger organic defence system. The point of the F-20 was to sell aircraft. It appeals to what’s known as capability-based planning, rather than to military strategy. This is why I’m asking what its mission was. On the surface it looks like a good idea: small, cheap, good performance, rapid turnaround and a level of flexibility. But if you look beyond that there’s not much else to it. If you have a really small airforce, a really small budget, a really small land mass to defend and a not very formidable enemy, it might fit but that’s a pretty narrow set of parameters and doesn’t take into account who your expected enemy is or what they operate or how they think. In defence planning, you plan for what you expect to happen. If you find an aircraft that fits your needs, your cost structure, your expected scenario for use (i.e.: war - who you expect to fight and where) and can work well within the overall structure of your defence forces, then you buy it. Not many countries today can afford the F-35, yet a lot are buying it. Why? Well, I suspect in 20 years time they’ll be saying, “Well your Honour, it seemed like a good idea at the time.” But an awful lot of countries are buying it _solely because of its perceived technological advantages_ and nothing else. But if you expect to operate from austere strips or in environments where electrical power is extremely limited or you simply don’t have an adequate support structure like air conditioned hangars or a good perimeter guard, you probably should be looking at something else. Of course, I’m talking two different things. The F-20 and the F-35 are at opposite ends of the spectrum. I’m just trying to illustrate that what looks good on paper isn’t enough. Now, an example of an aircraft that is the complete opposite of capability-based planning is the Grumman F6-F Hellcat of WWII. That aircraft was designed from the ground up to meet the very specific needs of the US Navy, _based on their experience fighting the Japanese in the Pacific._ While that kind of development cycle -about 18 months - is never likely to be repeated, it gives you some idea of the difference between planning from real world experience (military strategy) and developing something that would be nice to have (capability-based planning).

@@thethirdman225 epic level troll. Well done sir.

@@phoenixrising4073 *_"epic level troll. Well done sir."_* This for daring to have an opinion... I can back up everything I say with writings from everyone from Sun Tzu to Pentagon strategists. Sorry buddy. If a non-conforming opinion is so offensive to you, then you probably shouldn't be on the internet.

Might not have intended to compete with it, but inernational sales was taken up by the F-16 leaving F-20 dead in the water.

I think it was initially designed to compete but dropped early on as it really is a 3rd or maybe 3.5 generation design rather than a 4th generation fighter and lacked the features needed to compete directly with the F-14/15/16/18 in really any frontline role but did represent an excellent pairing with F-4s

@@LordOceanus The F-20 was never sold because the Pentagon refused all requests for the aircraft. Several Countries who flew F-5E's specifically requested the F-20 because something like 80% of their ground equipment could be reused with a minimum of retraining of ground crews. The Pentagon offered F-16's at below cost and Countries were told buy F-16's or you get nothing. The Pentagon and General Dynamics were shoving the F-16 on everyone because every F-16 sold lowered the per unit cost for the USAF and the lower the cost the more F-16's the USAF could buy.

@@Anlushac11 What he said! This was infuriating at the time, because despite the lower per-unit price the F-20 was literally MILES ahead of the F-16 program and the airframe was way lower in cost to support logistically.

@@LordOceanus Umm.... what? Fly by wire, 4th gen, puls doppler radar, 4th gen, combined air to air and air to ground, 4th gen, laser Ins 4th gen, automatic engine management 4th gen, Fox 3 compatibility 4th gen. This thing is more of a 4th gen than the F-14 ever was, or the F-15 has been until the current production. Plus I guarantee you it could compete just fine against the Hornet and the Viper. I suspect that was why it was canned. If it had been let out into the world as it was in the preproduction models, we might have had to face it. I suspect we didn't want that. This was a way better multi role design then the F-16A.

Don't forget GD also came out with a watered-downed version of the F-16A (the F-16/79) specifically aimed at the export market, which made sales of the F-20 even more difficult for Northrop.

@@F15ElectricEagle but still more affordable: "cost-wise it was estimated in 1983 that the unit fly-away cost of the F-20 (based on a 150-unit buy) was $10.7 million, compared to the F-16/79 at $11 million and the F-16A at $12.4 million. Unit life-cycle costs for the F-20 estimated as high as 40-50% lower than for the F-16"

The F-20 belongs in the “good idea” category but it could not have met the needs of many air forces. It was an early example of a move towards capability-based planning, rather than strategic planning.

It had many serious drawbacks. First of all it had very low capacity of payload. Secondly, its nose was so small that future radar upgrading programs were impossible as opposed to f 16

Pakistan was a customer for the F-20. So the resemblance is not coincidental.

Yes - love the sales pitch disclosing all it's attributes. Surely this is done as misinformation to bait the opposition?

Bro 😂😂😂😂

The JF-17 owes much more to the Chengdu J-7 (an earlier Chinese-built variant of the venerable MiG 21) than it does to the F-20 Tigershark. Look at the JF-17 side-by-side with the Chengdu J-7 and you'll clearly see the familial resemblance. I'll admit that even I was fooled at first, thinking that they'd built an improved F-20 copy with a blended wing/fuselage structure, but someone with a more intimate knowledge of the subject soon explained its true lineage to me. Even the leading edges of the wing and horizontal stabilator are identical.

the F-20 cockpit had way more advanced avionics than the YF-17 one ... neither the YF-17 or YF-16 had even MFDs as the prototypes were meant to test flight envelope and engines... F20 got proper avionics cause was private developed from Northrop to sale..so they really wanted the thing to look ready to go and low risk

All from the same family; used the same airframe. Raise the wings up on an F-5, add lead edge extensions, narrow the canopy and move it slightly forward, then add vertical rudders and you essentially have an F-18, sans two engines.

Nope, this was designed at the same time as the Hornet. It was faster than the hornet, probably even turned better. Same weapons and radar as the Hornet, just cheaper. Just didn't have the load and virtues needed for a carrier.

The Hornet comes for the YF-17, that lost to the F-16. So the missing link is the YF-17.

@@roblockhart6104 You're half right. They took and F18 engine and stuffed it in the lighter, smaller, F5 airframe. Sucker would top out over mach 2. The avionics though...yah, they just used the same hardware they were developing for the Navy Hornet. F18 is a significantly bigger, heavier [has to be for carrier operation] air frame. Basically its Northrop's take on what the F16 would eventually become, developed for export. And when the US started exporting F16s, thats what killed it "Who wants the "cheap" F16 knockoff when you can order REAL F16s", was the basic thought process.

Actually jf17 was not inspired from f20, in the 80's USSR was trying a single engine engine flanker, sukhoi presented s 33 also called t 53 and s52 vs the mig ye 33 also known as mig 33. By the 90's Soviet union collapsed, and Russia didn't have the money to begin production of both. China and Pakistan were interested in both but Russia didn't want to sell them, sukhoi got a big contract with china and India, but mig was struggling. So the terms of the sell was you can develop and build it, but we reserve the right to sell it to another country or build it ourselves. The first prototype, of jf 17 looks exactly as the mig 33. The pilots love the design but they were used to J7 the Chinese mig 21, so they redesigned it to look like a mig 21 lowering the cockpit and moving the intakes to the sides. And that's how it was born the jf17, then for avionics the Pakistan engineers made a contract with the same builder of f18, to use same avionics, but russian mig engine. Thats why many think it comes from a mixture of mig 21 and f18, or as inspiration of f20, but not.

@@quetzalcoatlarmadaimperial754 my source is history of Pakistan Air Force 1988-1999

elmo2you The opening music was ‘Star Trek 2: Wrath of Khan’-esque.

@@Alsigmund - it was literally the same music.

YF-17 Cobra, which the F/A-18 is based on was literally a smaller Hornet. And a Northrop design.

Rainbow Dash I think of the F-20 as the Air Force’s single engine little brother of the F-18. Similar to how the F-16 is the single little brother of the F-15

Perhaps a bit of hyperbole there. The Hornet is not "literally" an F-5. The Hornet is derived from the YF-17, elements of which were derived from the N-300, which was derived from the F-5E. A thrice removed derivation is not literally the same thing.

Really? AN F-5 with chines? One F-404 is 400% more powerful than the J-85.

Looks like the US/World miss out on a great little interceptor... They would have made a good/quick first contact A/C to precede the higher end fighter jets... 👍🇺🇲🤔 What a waste... I know what they learned here, with this A/C gets passed on to the next new system...

Thx man

hotas x is plenty, i play fine with a extreme 3d pro.. dont get me wrong its not ideal, but its totally doable, just need to remember a few extra keyboard shortcuts. just jump in and give it a go, wont be long before war thunder just feels silly if you go back to it.

Umm..The Arrow was no better than the F-4 Phantom. The F-20 was no better than the F-16, and the TSR-2 would not have been as good at conventional as contemporary designs. These aircraft were not chosen because smarter people decided not to build them. So deal with it.

@@michaeldenesyk3195 True for some not so much for others. The F-20 wasn't better than the F-16 in flight characteristics but it was better in maintenence cost, acquisition cost, and aircraft availability. The main problem was that it was mainly meant to be an export fighter and it was required to be marketed by the US state department. There was alot of politics involved during this period where the US which was fielding the F16 was trying to build common fighters with allies and potential allies and back seated the sale of the F-20. The F16 was also being sold at a loss to keep it competitive in poorer nations and keep the F20 out. It is what it is but it wasn't just the better fighter winning purely.

@@michaeldenesyk3195 The F-4 wasn't out when the Arrow took flight, and the Arrow needed a very long time to become good. The F-20 was made as a cheap alternative to the F-16, and was copied by the Chinese for Pakistan, who would've bought the F-20.

@@michaeldenesyk3195 Just saying that if it weren't for coercive politics, the aircraft mentioned were all very viable designs and would have provided good service. As it is, The F-5E is in very high demand to this day.

@@michaeldenesyk3195 "The F-20 was no better than the F-16" Do you know what the original F-5 could do? It could launch AIM-9s for air-to-air defense. Do you know what the original F-16s ~20+ years later could do? The same exact thing. For millions more. ...Do you know what the F-20 could do? It could launch more than an IR seeker.

The background music alone is worth it to watch these... :)

@@CakePrincessCelestia yeah totally

There’s no evidence for this.

Not just that, the sales pitch was basically "if you have, and love the F5, you'll love this plane, as it's better in every way, and your pilots won't need much time to get used to.the new plane". It was a good idea, but, alas,it was not to be.

Nothrop has designed the F-17 (Cobra). The F-18 has design inputs from McDonnell Douglas ( later Boeing).

Please show the source of this claim. I'm not challenging you or questioning you on this claim. I'm a big fan of the F-20 and this is the first time I heard the F-20 was flown in Red Flag. I would like to see or read up on this event.

@@F15ElectricEagle I too would like to see what the source is, since there were only four built and to my knowledge never introduced to service; I think this augurs against use at a red flag event. I believe it is possible though and would make interesting reading.

@@unclejoeoakland Not even 4, only 3 built. Two were destroyed in crashes, due to the pilots pulling high G maneuvers and blacking out. There's only 1 left, and it's been put in a museum

I've heard of the Northrop F5 used in red flag but not f20

thx

I mean... If you're a pilot, do ya really WANT to pull much more than nine?

unclejoeoakland thats not the point XD, im saying that the F20 is better

@@shermanator76mm22 I understand. I am saying that the ability to perform a maneuver which could entirely incapacitate the pilot might not be a useful metric OR an advantage in substance.

@@unclejoeoakland that's why they crashed, the pilots blacked out. Amazing aircraft, but perhaps a bit too amazing.

The F16 wasn't more practical, the F20 was by far the more practical, cost effective plane. That is what killed it, the f16 was preferred for political reasons, the f20's practicality actually was it's weakness in that regard.

It's not like the F16 has a massive nose either though?

That was the plan, but General Dynamics offered the F-16N at a loss just to prevent Northrop from getting its foot in the door.

Another jet for which there was no mission requirement.

lol yes

Ghost Viggen I’m sorry but the joke didn’t bang

Did you see the hatch that opened and shut and all the smoke that poured out? Yeah didnt look like a clean starting system.

@@watcherzero5256 I can’t remember if I noticed that or not but I wouldn’t have expected them to use something that left dirty deposits in the engine. I guess they either burn off or they’re in a part of the engine where it’s not so important.

Should perhaps buy a few Gripen instead? Should be the same ballpark pricetag-wise. No?

That was not a mistake. The mistake was in Northrop thinking they could sell this airplane when the F-16 was already established in the export market for lightweight tactical fighters. You can't blame them for trying and hoping, but other countries were not going to buy a jet that the USAF did not want when they could buy the F-16 the USAF did want. It would have taken a high level conspiracy for the U.S. to buy this aircraft rather than to not buy it.

The F-5 Aggressors gave the Tomcat fits and crushed the Eagle before the rules were changed to heavily favor long range radar intercepts. The F-16 was just a superior true multi-role aircraft to even the upgraded F-20, given the limited of DAS strike capability on the part of the later. By the time of the 25+ Viper blocks came out in the mid 80's, the air-to air advantage that the F-20 enjoyed were no more. The F-20 was the best damn export role fighter that has ever been designed and a damned sexy plane, but there was no place for it in the USAF and no place for it in politics. We don't like dogfighters as evidenced by our Vietnam onward doctrine.

thxx

The USAF should have chosen the F-16XL over the Strike Eagle

@@lohrtom Ironically, F-15C/D pilots probably wish that, too.