I thought it was a crazy idea to retire the two engine F-14 Tomcat for a plane with one engine the F-35 ..  Why the NAVY gave the F-23 no thought is also strange..

Now that both Russia and China have their own version of the  F-22 heat's things up ..  The F-23 would have been my choice to come off of the deck of any AMERICAN carrier , hands down...  

Enter the Proto type next NGAD off of the AMERICAN carriers..

 

 

 http://www.flightglobal.com/ne...

Has any progress been made on advancing, refining, improving the F-23?  The ten or twenty years F-22 has been in the pipe have only served to show its age and weaknesses.  Is F-23 decades better or decades behind a clean sheet of paper, or whatever Rutan was last working on in his basement?  Oh yeah, that 80s aircraft is no good, let's replace it with...another 80s aircraft!

 

Could we at least briefly recap the reasons WHY people want new life for the F-23?  'Cos all I know is it lost.  IIRC it was faster and stealthier than F-22, but less maneuverable; some seem to contend on the stealth; but I can see that in the new air doctrine of all-BVR-all-the-time, maneuverability may be deprecated and F-23 come into its own.  But is there anything else?  Some seem to talk of bomberizing it.  Then why not bomberize F-22?  Navalizing it?  Why not navalize F-22? 

 

I'm open to persuasion, tell me why. 

 

 

How about we reopen the Boeing X-32 and dump the F-35, I always liked the Monica for some reason.

 

2)  I think the state of the art will lead to countermissiles and/or DEW to guard against the missile threat

(why the heck shouldn't you be able to shoot down an S-400, it's fighting gravity and you know EXACTLY where it's going; you should be able to drop a Griffin or APKWS on it let alone an AMRAAM). 

 

3)  We might also see a tweak on the parasite fighter concept - a twin engine fighter whose engines are actually separable in flight and wrapped in the minimal possible aeroshell, with perhaps one or two weapons each and just enough fuel to fight a 20g dog, run whatever Wild Weasel/SEAD/DEAD gauntlet, ram whatever high value target, and park themselves back on the fighter if they survive (the fighter could on fly one engine, glide to some extent, have a small aux powerplant, have three engines, have a twin-engine configuration with one as a parasite and one captive, say stacked as with the B-58 weapons pod...or Zzzz...

 

Sorry, ran out of psychedelic drugs ;>