The Stealth That Never Was

There was once a time when people knew a stealth fighter was on the way, but nobody was saying what it looked like. The technology behind the Stealth was classified, too, so speculation ran wild. The concept of the stealth fighter was intriguing — a plane that would be all but invisible to radar, heat-vision, and listening devices. It was something right out of science-fiction, which made it a prime candidate for theoretical brainstorming.

Testors/Revel was the earliest on the market with their F-19 Stealth Fighter, and its design became the industry standard at the time. It was a short, stubby plane, with shallow, rounded wings and in-swept vertical tails. It did include a little angularity that we’d see in the actual stealth fighter, due to a tip model-designer John Andrews got from an inside source working on the nose-tip for a military subcontractor. They were put into the spotlight by a crash of a real stealth fighter during testing, and Congress wondering loudly why a classified aircraft is being assembled by children and hobbyists. Andrews’ design was completely from his own imagination, using non-classified theories of reducing radar signatures and futuristic aircraft style that showed up in the SR-71 aircraft. This design was licensed — or stolen — by other companies and produced in other forms, such as Ertl’s die-cast version. Even today, despite the actual F-117 showing up at airshows and on the news, the Testors design still appears as ’stealth fighter’ on toy shelves from time to time.

My favorite wasn’t designed from scratch. Defense contractor Loral Corporation came up with a futuristic aircraft of the future in the 1970s that sparked imagination, with a long body and graceful curves, it looked more like a spacecraft than an aircraft. After seeing Testor’s stealth success, model maker Monogram released their own F-19 Stealth Fighter model based on the Loral design. I had built one of these as a kid, and when I ran across one in a toy store a few years ago I bought it again. This aircraft looked even less like the actual stealth, but seemed, to me, a much more plausible aircraft than Testor’s piecemeal design.

Now that our own stealth fighter is public knowledge, the interest in speculation just isn’t there like it had been in the 1980s. Do not fear, though: designers are happy to theorize what other countries’ stealth fighters will look like. Testors, again, was at the leading edge of this craze as well. At the tail-end of the Cold War, the same designer who produced Testors’ F-19 came up with the MiG-37, a conceptually-original Russian stealth fighter design. Sharp, angular, and rugged, it was quite a different design than Andrews produced for the F-19. He had no idea: his MiG stealth design turned out more like the real stealth than anything else on the market at the time, and also incorporates style that we’ve seen in the later-generation stealth designs from recent years. While the stealth is no longer the mysterious, space-age jet it once was, these conceptual designs remind us of that era.