The Air Force made two rival jets fly off against each other instead of judging paperwork

问题

Fighter contracts were won on paper design studies and a contractor's reputation, never on how the plane actually flew

背景

换别人会怎么做

Award the contract to whichever established contractor's paper design study and past track record looked strongest, the Air Force's normal procurement process at the time.

他们看到了什么

Boyd's group saw a paper proposal measures how well a firm describes a jet, not how it flies — a gap wide enough that only a real flight competition between working prototypes could show which design truly won.

那一手

General Dynamics and Northrop each built two flying prototypes, the YF-16 and YF-17, and flew them through real evaluation sorties in 1974 — 330 sorties and 417 flight hours for the YF-16, 268 sorties for the YF-17 — with pilots directly comparing dogfight performance neither company's paper specs could fake.

为什么管用

Forcing both manufacturers to build flying hardware before any production decision removed their ability to hide weaknesses behind favorable paper assumptions, because pilots comparing actual dogfight performance could observe exactly what each design could and couldn't do, at a cost dwarfed by the risk of locking in the wrong airframe for a multi-decade fleet.

值了多少

The Air Force picked the YF-16 in 1975 on flight performance; it reached 4,600-plus built worldwide, and the YF-17 became the Navy's F/A-18.

什么时候会失灵

Prototype fly-offs only work when the cost of building two working competitors is small next to the cost of choosing wrong, which is true for a fighter fleet bought in the thousands but not for smaller or one-off procurements where funding duplicate real prototypes would itself be the bigger waste.

后来呢

The prototype fly-off became the Pentagon's model for future high-stakes procurement decisions and is credited with producing one of the most successful and widely exported fighter designs in history, at a fraction of what a paper-only competition between two entrenched contractors would have risked getting wrong.

资料来源

1. [1]Legacy of the Lightweight Fighter CompetitionAir & Space Forces Magazine, 2019airandspaceforces.com
2. [2]Lightweight Fighter programWikipedia, 2024en.wikipedia.org

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