Behind the ropes at a Midwestern museum, the angular YF-23 Black Widow II sits in silence, a stealth fighter that never went to war but now feels like a haunting reminder of what the United States might have flown. The aircraft first took to the air on August 27, 1990, yet by 1991 it had lost the Advanced Tactical Fighter competition to what became the F-22. Decades later, with the F-22’s cost and schedule problems on the record and test pilot Paul Metz recalling the YF-23’s “butter-smooth” handling, the Black Widow II sends a pointed message about risk, choice and missed potential inside the US Air Force.
The Origins of the Advanced Tactical Fighter Program
The Advanced Tactical Fighter, or ATF, program began in 1981 as the US Air Force sought a next-generation air superiority fighter to counter high-end Soviet threats. According to an authoritative GAO assessment, the service framed ATF as a leap in stealth, agility and sensor technology, while assuming that ambitious performance goals could still be met within a relatively controlled budget. Phase 1 focused on concept studies and technology maturation, which ultimately narrowed the field to two competing demonstrators that would embody different answers to the same problem.
Those Phase 1 efforts produced the Lockheed-led YF-22 and the Northrop/McDonnell Douglas YF-23, each intended to validate the ATF concept in flight before the Air Force committed to full-scale development. The GAO report on ATF and F-22 acquisition later highlighted how early cost assumptions and business-case logic were built around optimistic expectations about technical risk and production volume. That framing set the stakes for the 1991 downselect: whichever prototype won would carry not just the Air Force’s air dominance mission, but also a financial model that would prove far harder to execute than planners originally projected.
Designing the Black Widow II
The YF-23 emerged from a Northrop/McDonnell Douglas team that pursued a very different shape from its rival. When the aircraft was publicly rolled out at Edwards AFB in June 1990, its long, diamond-shaped wing and canted tail surfaces signaled a stealth-first philosophy. Reporting from that unveiling described how Northrop leaders framed the Black Widow II as the product of substantial internal investment, portraying the design as a high-payoff bet on low observability and efficient aerodynamics rather than raw maneuvering performance.
Official Air Force museum material later captured the aircraft’s identity as the Northrop-McDonnell Douglas YF-23A Black Widow II, cementing the name in service history. The USAF museum fact sheet notes the distinctive planform and twin-engine layout that aimed to combine stealth with high speed and long range. Taken together, the Edwards rollout coverage and the museum record show a design that prioritized survivability and reach, reflecting Northrop’s belief that avoiding detection and striking first would matter more than acrobatic dogfighting in a future conflict.
Flight Testing and Early Promise
After the June rollout, the YF-23 moved quickly into the air. An authoritative USAF narrative recounts that the prototype’s first flight took place on August 27, 1990, launching the Black Widow II into a compressed but intense demonstration program. By the fourth flight the aircraft had already completed air refueling, and test teams soon pushed into supersonic and supercruise regimes to show that the design could sustain high speed without using afterburner. That tempo reflected both the limited time available before the ATF downselect and the confidence Northrop’s engineers placed in their unconventional airframe.
Test pilot Paul Metz later described the YF-23’s handling as “butter-smooth,” a phrase cited in the USAF account of the flight-test program. His assessment reinforced the impression that the Black Widow II was not only stealthy and fast, but also stable and predictable in the cockpit, a combination that advocates argue made it a relatively low-risk path into production. While the test program was short, the documented pace of achievements gave Northrop a strong technical story to tell as the Air Force weighed which prototype to back for full-scale development.
The Controversial Selection of the YF-22
In August 1991 the Air Force chose the Lockheed-led YF-22 over the YF-23, a decision that reshaped the future of American fighter aviation. Contemporary reporting described how Air Force Secretary Donald B. Rice framed the outcome, calling the Lockheed proposal the “best value” and asserting that it offered “better capability with lower cost” compared with its rival. That same coverage detailed the Engineering and Manufacturing Development, or EMD, contract that went to the YF-22 team, as well as the Air Force’s plan to buy 650 aircraft under the ATF umbrella.
The financial stakes were enormous and, according to later GAO analysis of the F-22 program, the cost picture soon shifted. The oversight report traced how unit costs for the F-22 rose from roughly 150 million dollars to more than 350 million dollars per aircraft as the program moved forward, while schedules slipped and the original 650-aircraft vision eroded. That record does not prove that the YF-23 would have avoided similar problems, but it does undercut the early narrative that the chosen design would deliver clearly “better capability with lower cost,” which is why the 1991 decision remains a subject of debate among aviation historians and some former officials.
The Fate of the YF-23 Prototypes
The YF-23’s story did not end with the contract announcement. A NASA archival account explains that both prototypes, known by their serial numbers PAV-1 and PAV-2, were transferred to NASA’s Dryden facility after the competition. They arrived without engines, and NASA had no plans to fly them; instead, the aircraft were stored as research assets while engineers studied aspects of their design. That quiet coda contrasted sharply with the high-profile competition they had just lost.
The same NASA record notes that both aircraft remained in storage until the summer of 1996, when they were transferred on loan to museums. According to the National Museum of the US Air Force fact sheet, one YF-23 now resides at the museum in Ohio while the other is displayed at the Western Museum of Flight in California. Each sits engineless but largely intact, offering visitors a rare look at a full-scale prototype that came within a single decision of defining the Air Force’s fighter fleet. Their presence in these galleries is what gives the Black Widow II its haunting quality: a near-miss future preserved behind stanchions and placards.
A Haunting Message for Today’s USAF
The YF-23’s museum life coincides with a long public record on what happened to the program that beat it. The GAO’s reporting on ATF and F-22 acquisition details how the business case that justified selecting the YF-22 unraveled as costs climbed from about 150 million dollars to more than 350 million dollars per aircraft and schedules slipped. Those numbers sit uncomfortably beside Air Force Secretary Donald B. Rice’s 1991 assertion, reported at the time in major national coverage, that the winning proposal offered “better capability with lower cost,” and beside the original plan to buy 650 fighters that never materialized. The gap between promise and outcome is a central part of the Black Widow II’s message.
Because the YF-23 never entered production, no one can say with certainty how its own costs and schedule would have evolved, and the available sources do not resolve the internal politics of the 1991 decision. What they do show, through the USAF’s account of its “butter-smooth” test flights, the NASA record of its quiet transfer to Dryden, and the museum displays that now house it, is a technically promising design that lost out under assumptions later challenged by experience. As the Air Force pursues future efforts such as its next-generation air dominance concepts, the Black Widow II stands as a reminder that “best value” judgments are only as sound as the cost and risk estimates behind them, and that some of the most haunting aircraft in aviation history are those that never had the chance to prove what they could really do.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
