Steve Balestrieri

The Pratt & Whitney TF30 began in 1958 as a proposal for a short-haul jet airliner. It ended up in the F-14 Tomcat because the Navy was on a budget and a schedule. Navy Secretary John Lehman later said it was responsible for roughly 28.2 percent of all F-14 losses and called it “probably the worst engine-airplane mismatch we have had in many years.” Aircrew called the Tomcat a nice aircraft powered by two pieces of junk.

Northrop funded the F-20 Tigershark itself — more than $750,000,000 with no Pentagon research money. The aircraft out-turned the F-16 at 13.2 degrees per second against 12.8, needed roughly 15 maintenance man-hours per flight hour against about 34, could fire beyond visual range years before the F-16 could, and was offered at $15,000,000 against the F-16's $18,000,000. Not a single air force bought one, and Northrop wrote off about $1,200,000,000.

Colonel Zoltán Dani did not get lucky. He moved his missile battery constantly through the 78-day campaign, used couriers and landlines instead of radios, kept his radar lit for seconds at a time, and posted spotters along the corridors NATO kept flying. When Vega 31's bomb bay doors swung open over Budjanovci, the hard angles broke the aircraft's shaping for a moment and his crew fired twice.

The F-5E was never meant to be the best fighter available. It was built to be credible, affordable and easy to keep in the air — 47 feet long, 15,745 pounds loaded, two J85 turbojets of 5,000 pounds thrust each, 1,083 miles an hour, and simple enough that small air forces could maintain it themselves. More than 30 of them bought it.

The J58 burned JP-7, a blend so hard to ignite that a lit match dropped into it goes out. Starting the engines required a chemical shot of triethylborane, which flashes green. Below Mach 2 the J58 was a turbojet. Above Mach 2.5 it was effectively a ramjet wearing a turbojet's clothes. That was the SR-71 Blackbird

LPD-10 was commissioned in 1969, brought Marines home from Vietnam, answered the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989, and sailed for Desert Shield. The Navy retired her in 2008. Eighteen years later she was towed 200 nautical miles off Guam so the Air Force could prove a stealth bomber can sink a warship. The B-2 Spirit stealth bomber made history.

On March 11, 2011, the tsunami flooded Matsushima Air Base and submerged 18 F-2Bs in salt water. Five were scrapped. Japan repaired the other 13 at a reported cost of roughly ¥80 billion — an extraordinary sum to recover aircraft that had been sitting underwater.

The ECRS Mk2 folds radar, electronic warfare and jamming into one gallium-nitride array, which hands the Typhoon a Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses role it never had. The aircraft kicks down the radar doors so stealthier jets can follow through — a job the Typhoon was never designed to do.

Saab's JAS 39 Gripen answer to low observability is not shape. It is the Arexis suite — spherical electronic warfare coverage built on gallium nitride, designed to detect, jam and spoof a threat before it can shoot. Add an infrared search-and-track sensor and the Gripen can hunt without ever switching its radar on.

Denied the AN/ALQ-135 jammer, Japan fitted its own J/ALQ-8. Denied the AN/ALR-56, it built the J/APR-4. It even developed its own tactical data link rather than take one compatible with NATO's Link 16 — which meant Japanese Eagles could talk to each other but not plug into an American formation's picture. This is the F-15J fighter story.