Dauntless Posted December 28, 2021 Share Posted December 28, 2021 https://www.military.com/air-force/f-16xl-why-america-didnt-get-best-f-16.html?ESRC=eb_211228.nl Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
F-2 Posted December 28, 2021 Share Posted December 28, 2021 I don’t believe the XL ever got any avionics? I could be wrong and it had whatever F-16 of the day had. I’m perfectly fine with no product aircraft provided they actually where combat able. I’d actually like to propose that aircraft that where built but never equips would be perfect for community mods. The XL for example has tons of documentation through NASA. Imagine taking it to the Navada map and using it for DACT? Same with planes like the YF-23, perfect as sparing partners. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
upyr1 Posted December 28, 2021 Share Posted December 28, 2021 This might be a cool mod Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mkellytx Posted December 28, 2021 Share Posted December 28, 2021 2 hours ago, F-2 said: I don’t believe the XL ever got any avionics? I could be wrong and it had whatever F-16 of the day had. I’m perfectly fine with no product aircraft provided they actually where combat able. I’d actually like to propose that aircraft that where built but never equips would be perfect for community mods. The XL for example has tons of documentation through NASA. Imagine taking it to the Navada map and using it for DACT? Same with planes like the YF-23, perfect as sparing partners. The two XL's were very much demonstrators. They were modified A airframes with modified Block 30 avionics at first. NASA later upgraded one of them with a Block 40 FLCS computer and rewrote the control laws a bit to take advantage of the digital computer for a Flight Qualities (FQ) program. The NASA FQ report showed that the control laws were WIP, there were a lot of high Cooper-Harper numbers recorded for various tasks. That said, the aero and performance is one of the best publicly documented and is regularly used to validate CFD in research. The control laws were never developed like those of a production A/C since the plane was never pursued. As an aside, the Mud Hen competition is often referenced as the end of the XL, but the Air Force had the option to convert the tail ends of both the F-15C and F-16C production into E's and XL's. They chose not to pursue the XL because the Cold War ended and they wanted to protect ATF funds. The XL would have been an FY90-1 plane so it would have been between the Block 40 and 50. As F-2 alluded, the best hope is a mod... 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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