stever_sl
https://www.secretprojects.co.uk/thread ... ost-677530
All speculations and opinions aside, the simple fact is that X-32 lost for two basic reasons. (My credentials: I worked on AV-8B, advanced Harrier variants, McDonnell Douglas's ASTOVL and JAST, then Boeing's JSF after the merger.) First, the years-long secret relationship between Lockheed and DARPA to develop and mature the shaft-driven lift fan gave Boeing no choice but to go with what they knew worked. Second, the design effort was going on from Day One of the merger between Boeing and MDC, so all sorts of organizational incompatibilities were having to be fixed, reaching from program control all the way down to the fact that MDC used Unigraphics to design parts while heritage Boeing used CATIA. There was an entire unit in each location whose only task was to take drawings from the other site and convert them from CATIA to UG or UG to CATIA, whichever was needed by that site. This introduced delays and was a significant drain on resources, but not nearly as much as the squabbling over who was in charge of what. The original ugly X-32 tailless delta was purely a Seattle idea, and I believe they had patented it. It wasn't capable of meeting the requirements, as I recall particularly for the USN variant, and it was only after a great deal of time-wasting struggle that a tail section was finally put on the basic design, which, along with the change away from the backward-facing inlet, (in my opinion) made it look 100% better. But it was always overweight, and the basic engine core had been stretched as far as it could be without spending billions to develop a whole new engine. In a very strange move, the St Louis site leadership brought back a senior exec from retirement to secretely form a small team whose charter was to find a way to get rid of the excess weight. I was on that team. It was found that replacing the 2D rear nozzle with an axisymmetric one would buy back the weight we needed. When the axi nozzle was sprung on Seattle, they reacted with vehement negativity to this unexpected and unasked-for St Louis idea. Instead, they revealed in one of our periodic coordination meetings that they were going to fix the weight problem by adding "lift thrust augmentors" (small jet engines) for vertical operations. I was on the conference call where that was announced, and there was consternation not only in St Louis (because we knew the Marines would never accept a multiengine VTOL solution) but also among the Seattle crowd, whose subsystem people objected that they hadn't been consulted about things like what would have to be relocated to make room for these LTAs and how the things were to be provided with fuel and air and electrical power. Whoever was in charge of that meeting told them that the decision had been made, and LTAs were going into the aircraft. I recall that we St Louis people knew the jig was up, and we muted our end of the call and filed back to our desks. We were right. None of this would have happened if the Harrier 21 had been allowed to go forward years earlier instead of being quashed by MDC's ASTOVL group, but that's a whole other story.