![]() ![]() ![]() While ASD supported new aircraft development programs, the lab pursued technologies related to military aircraft. Studies for a new fighter subsequently shifted away from ASD to the USAF Flight Dynamics Lab, also located at Wright-Patterson (and now called the Air Vehicles Directorate of the Air Force Research Laboratory). ASD would have to wait ten years to embark on another new fighter program. ![]() The F-16 Fighting Falcon, originally designed as an air-to-air day fighter, came in the back door to fill the air-to-ground role. The requirements called for an air-to-ground fighter that could fly Mach 2.5 at high to medium altitudes and carry standoff weapons designed to destroy tanks and other ground targets. The ATF would replace an aging fleet of F-4 and F-111 aircraft.ĪSD awarded concept exploration contracts for this ATF to General Dynamics and McDonnell Douglas. The requirements document pertained to a new air-to-ground fighter to complement the new F-15 air-superiority fighter. (ASD is now the Aeronautical Systems Center at Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio.) The term advanced tactical fighter and its abbreviation, ATF, however, appeared in a general operational requirements document issued to contractors by the Advanced Planning Branch of ASD almost ten years earlier in 1972. The official beginning of the ATF program usually traces to 1981 when USAF Aeronautical Systems Division, or ASD, released a request for information for concepts for an advanced tactical fighter. Part 2 can be viewed here.Ī significant portion of the history of the F-22 spent years encased in a collection of wooden boxes stacked in a small storage closet in the engineering building at Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Company in Fort Worth, Texas.The containers conceal a variety of design study models dating back to the earliest phases of the Advanced Tactical Fighter-to what eventually became the F-22 Raptor. This article is the first of a two-part series that was originally published in Code One in 1998. ![]()
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