Aviation: Riding the Little Tiger

The pride of many a small-budget nation’s air force is a snoop-nosed, 1,000-m.p.h. whizbang called the F-5 Freedom Fighter. A flight of Philippine F-5s snapped into escort positions around Air Force One when President Johnson took off on the Manila-to-Bangkok leg of his Southeast Asian trip. Belgium and The Netherlands are about to order the planes. This month Morocco’s King Hassan, anxious to retire his aging Russian-built MIG-17s, will take delivery of a dozen F-5s.

Survive & Win. Built by Beverly Hills-based Northrop Corp., the plane is that rarest of all U.S. birds: the military jet that succeeds without a fat Pentagon order. So far, some 300 F-5s have been purchased by 15 countries, ranging around the globe from Ethiopia to Canada to South Korea. On the books, Northrop has orders for 800 more, worth a total of $600 million.

An old-line aircraft builder, famed for its World War II P-61 Black Widow fighters and the F89 Scorpion all-weather jets, Northrop went through a severe slump in the late 1950s. To keep the company going, Northrop President Thomas V. Jones, 46, pushed the company into electronics and aerospace projects; Northrop now produces such diverse hardware as missile-tracking equipment, Gemini recovery systems and navigation gear for Polaris subs.

The success of the F-5 has led to the resurgence of Northrop as an aircraft maker. The company developed the plane in 1959 at a relatively cheap cost of $80 million, of which the Government provided $60 million. It was designed to meet Jones’s demand for a supersonic jet that “could survive and win in a sky full of MIGs” — yet sell at a price U.S. allies could afford.

For a price tag of $900,000—about a third of the cost of the F-4 Phantoms the U.S. is using in Viet Nam—the Freedom Fighter is a lot of plane. With a razor-thin wingspan of only 27 ft., the F-5 can carry ordnance, including nuclear bombs, weighing up to half of its own 61-ton weight. That makes it, pound for pound, just about the biggest payload carrier of any supersonic plane. So maneuverable is it that pilots claim that “under 30,000 feet, the F-5 can lick anything that flies—no matter how fast it is.”

The Air Force took twelve F-5s to Viet Nam last year for a four-month combat test called Operation Skoshi

(Japanese for little) Tiger. The planes lived up to the name. Easily maintained, the F-5s could fly two missions a day, compared with one for the bigger jets. Enemy gunners managed to hit them on an average of only once in every 250 combat flights, as against one time in 90 for other planes.

Up with the Neighbors. After the test ended in March, the Air Force kept the Little Tigers in Viet Nam—and talked of an order for from 300 to 500 more. Such talk stopped with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who argued that the F-5 still could not match the range and payload of the 1,600-m.p.h. Phantom, the No. 1 U.S. fighter.

Even without a U.S. Air Force order, Northrop is riding high on the Little Tigers. For the fiscal year that ended in July, aircraft building accounted for nearly half the company’s $359 million record sales, which have increased 40% over the last eight years. For the future, Northrop has a contract, which eventually may be worth as much as $500 million, to build fuselages for the Boeing 747 jet. Moreover, foreign sales of the F-5 can only increase. With the expected orders from Belgium and Holland, Northrop hopes that Denmark, Austria and Switzerland will sign up too—just to keep up with the neighbors.