Slightly off-topic...Aviation thoughts
Those of you who know me know that I am an aviation-NERD
(yet I never got around to getting a pilot's lic, one of my larger life regrets)
Back in the 1990-91 there was a major competition for the ATF Program, ATF being the Advanced Tactical Fighter, what was supposed to replace the then-current Air Superiority fighters in the USAF and USN, the F-15 Eagle and F-14 Tomcat, although predominantly slanted towards the USAF and the F-15 & F-16 fighters. Thanks to the recently "declassified" F-117 Stealth fighter (not actually a fighter but a damn-good PR move), Stealth was all the rage. 30 years later all of the major Air Forces of the World have the newest-generation fighter jets that look suspiciously like the AFT Program winner, the F-22 Raptor (oddly enough originally proposed name was Lightning II, which is what the current Hot Sexy New Toy fighter, the F-35, was named)
The "loser", the F-23 Black Widow, has in the last 10 years been revealed/declassified to an extent to be far superior than the F-22:
1. More Stealthy
2. More Maneuverable
3. Less expensive to produce, initially
4. Had slightly better Avionics/sensors
5. Slightly faster
But, the F-22 "won" the competition in the end. Oddly enough/nor surprisingly, the USN decided to back out of its desire to replace the F-14 with the "Navy Version" F-23, because it would have been needed to be completely re-designed to fit on the then current Carrier flight deck & limited space. (The F-14 Tomcat was finally retired in 2005, but remains one of the most popular/favored fighters in aviation history to this day and has a bit of a cult following. No thanks in part to that movie it starred in)
Many have since argued that the F-22 won only because it looks so close to standard/conventional aircraft designs, and the claim was that it was more "adaptable" to changing technologies and computer systems, and many have since said that the F-23 was just "too far ahead of its time" at the time.
Only a year or so ago, there have been rumors of the F-23's "return" and undergoing some revisions and updates. (although the actual flying prototypes are gutted and currently in museums).
I have a growing....theory/suspicion that the USAF brass "knew" the F-23 was a better aircraft and might have had just enough foresight to realize that the moment the F-22 Raptor came into operational service, all of the other completing countries would try to "copy" it and within, well, 10-15 years (from the 1990s), there would be a need for the "next generation" of Stealth, F-22-like aircraft to be designed and introduced and put into service. And they "knew" in 1991 that the F-23 was probably the next best bet by (now).
Although, there is the gutting, emotionally, economically, of the company (Northop) that designed it and bet almost literally everything on it. They knew they had the superior aircraft and tech. But the second they lost the competition, they knew they were tanked and it was time to pack it up. Northop got bought out by Grumman (which designed & built the F-14), and also ironically, is now part of General-Dynamics, which designed & built the F-16 which beat out Northrop's F-5/F-20 and later F-17, which also ironically became the F-18 Hornet, which the Navy "didn't want" at the time, but then all of a sudden, couldn't buy enough of them, and is still flying them almost 40 years later. They're only now starting to be replaced by that abysmal F-35.
By the way, Northrop designed and built the B-2 Stealth bomber, which is still in service and still very top-secret. So it's not like they don't know how to design superior aircraft. Only it took Northrop (himself for years) decades to convince aviation knobs that tailless/flying wing aircraft are viable.
Lockheed's F-117 was "retired" from service around 2004, but has very recently been spotted, apparently they dusted off a couple in secret storage and it's being used to evaluate stealth tech & tactics and radar systems that are allegedly going into the F-35 and what may be the "new" F-23 in a couple of years.
- - -
Going back to 1990-91, and closely watching the competition on TV and through newspapers/Popular Mechanics as a kid, I was enthralled, and I do admit, At the time, I "liked" the F-22 from a design standpoint, I felt it "looked cooler" than the F-23 Black Window, because of course I was in my Teens and I was just so used to conventional designs esthetics. I was even given a YF-22 model kit (Testors brand) and really enjoyed building the kit, as it presented some unique painting challenges, but Testors also just released some new paints that revolutionized the scale modeling world.
...It was also on the heels of the first Gulf War, where the F-117 made its mark on Pop Culture and a Media Darling. it was a crazy exciting time, I tells ya!
But there was something equally fascinating about the 'unconventional' design of the F-23. The more "declassified" info that came out about it, how much better of a design and performance it was over the F-22, about 7-8 years after the competition, the more I realized I'd been "had" and was angry about the Brass decisions to go with a "weaker" airframe....And then there's the whole F-35 fiasco of the past decade. When that aircraft starting to create buzz, and the arguments about introducing far-advanced technology "too early", was part of it's own success problem.
Another funny thing about the F-22, thanks to interviews with pilots who've flown it on a couple of aviation podcasts/vidcasts I follow, there is now a "Helmet Queueing System" that the USAF "borrowed" from Russian designers/aircraft, where flight and targeting information can be projected on what is essentially GoogleGlass optics mounted to the flight helmet. The F-22 when it was designed, this technology wasn't even a reality, but was in secret production (in Russia), and the Canopy is too small for the larger helmets with the integrated queuing system & optics!
(this helmet-optic system I am many times baffled with, and why the USAF/USN hadn't adopted it sooner. The US Army has been using it since the 1980s with their AH-64 Apache helicopter. One of my Uncles who worked at a Instruments design & build company, had a subscription to a advanced technology magazine published out of Switzerland, that literally had advertisements for weapons systems, avionics, and instrumentation from around the world....One of the magazines he loaned me (and under strict restrictions, he said I could be in trouble with the Gov't if I was caught with it), had an article about just this kind of technology in development with helmet mounted reticles and sighting systems, like out of Sci-Fi here. And that was 1989 IIRC. (in between full-page ads for Augusta attack helicopters and FLIR systems)