"Northrop Grumman’s latest TV commercial..." Topic

"Look closely at Northrop Grumman's latest TV commercial, because it appears to include just a hint of the company's top-secret new stealth bomber.

"At Northrop Grumman, we've always been at the forefront of innovation," a deep voice intones as seven decades worth of the company's warplanes zoom across the screen. A YB-49 bomber prototype. An F-14 fighter. A B-2 stealth bomber. An X-47B attack drone demonstrator.

And at the end of the 30-second spot, an unseen warplane casts an indistinct shadow on shifting clouds. "And when the world asked for the future … " the narrator proclaims, trailing off without identifying the mystery craft…"
Full article here
link

Amicalement
Armand

Project Aurora, is real, and no doubt, prototypes have been flying for quite some time, as reported by many pilots, and aviation observers.

Project Aurora is still around? Man it seams a lifetime since I heard of that back in the late 80s. For how quickly the advances in computers and technology, new aircraft take forever to come to light.

Project Aurora was first raised in Timothy Good's entertaining book 'Above Top Secret' in the mid-1980s.

The trouble is that virtually everything else mentioned in the book is a festering pile of ordure. I loved the book when I first read it as an impressionable and gullible teen, but when I joined the RAF I came to have direct experience of many of the RAF locations, procedures and even the people mentioned in the book. I found that every last thing re the RAF in that book was utter cockwash. I could therefore only conclude that every last thing in that book re the USAF, including 'Aurora' was similarly accurate…

Sorry.

The claim that I'd heard was that Aurora was the code-name for the F117 program that year, and someone missed it when scrubbing the budget for classified information.

And given the rules for the "Glomar Response", all you're ever going to get from the USAF is "we can neither confirm nor deny ever having a program of that name." You see, the "Glomar Response" rule is that when even admitting that a program exists (or admitting that it doesn't exist) would be a violation of classified information laws, you have to say, even in response to Freedom of Information Act requests, "can neither confirm nor deny" is what you have to say.

That's my guess as well. They did an excellent job on disinformation re the F117, with the whole 'F19' shaggy dog story.

What no F-5 or T-38. That's Northrop's true success story and the one that has probably had the most influence (equipping lots of US allies and training US pilots)!

Well, what I'd heard was that "F-117" is what pilots flying classified aircraft (like MiGs) had to write in their logbooks. The Stealth Fighter was actually supposed to be the F-19, but LockMart printed the flight manuals with F-117A on it, and the USAF wasn't willing to foot the bill to reprint the flight manuals!

And I definitely agree that the T38 should have been included as the primary supersonic trainer for pretty much every US and NATO pilot.

In reality the F-117 should have been an A-11 or A-13. It had no fighter capability at all.

F-111 was the only strike bomber that warranted a "F" designation as it started out multirole with the USN F-111B version being a fleet defence interceptor before it was scrapped due to weight and other problems.

From what I've read F-117 designation might have been used to confuse aircraft's identity – the US assigned pre-1962 style Century series designations to captured Communist aircraft:

YF-110B: MiG-21F-13
YF-110C: Chengdu J-7B
YF-110D: MiG-21MF
YF-113A: MiG-17F
YF-113B: MiG-23BN
YF-113C: Shenyang J-5
YF-113E: MiG-23MS
YF-114C: MiG-17F
YF-114D: MiG-17PF

The designation system has been losing the plot for a long time:

F/A-18A/B/C/D – should've been F-18A/B/C/D. F-16 and F-15E are just as multirole.
F/A-18E/F – should've been F-24A/B
EA-18G – should've been EA-15A
F-35 – should've been F-25
F-16C/D-40 – should've been F-16G/H
F-16C/D-50 – should've been F-16J/K
C-27J – should've been C-27B

Politics and marketing considerations have made the designation system a joke.