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Back in the mid-to-late '80s. I remember a model for a, I'm guessing theoretical, Stealth Fighter with a flattened fuselage and oval-shaped wings. An old G.I. Joe toy, the Phantom X-19 was loosely based on it.

Does anyone have any idea where that design originally came from, and if it had an official name/designation?

That is kind of familiar, but the the US had dozens of Advanced Tactical Fighter projects in the 1980s, with varying levels of stealth. Without more details I couldn't tell you; you might have the most luck browsing some of the ATF threads on Secret Projects, though you need to create an account to view attached images. Only the YF-23 and YF-22 had would official designations, everything else would have company designated model numbers and nicknames.

Didn't Tom Clancy (or some author) write a book about the 'F-19' that was so wrong the military was happy to have people believe it secretly existed?

The Clancy/Larry Bond book Red Storm rising had an F-19 in it, but this was hardly unique to those authors, the F-19 designation was VERY commonly referenced for the known but black US stealth fighter program which turned out to be F-117 because it had skipped over in public documents. Only in the last couple years has it finally been clarified that the F-19 designation was intentionally skipped at the request of Northrup. Northrup wanted an even number F-20 for its Tigershark fighter because they thought that might help exports a little bit; all the MiGs of the third world being odd numbers. The designation of F-117 meanwhile is now know, but not with any great clarity, to be linked the USAF practice of using century series numbers for captured/stolen/bought Soviet MiGs flown secretly over Nevada. Some numbers were used for multiple projects and aircraft, so by using 'just another one' for stealth fighter related activities they helped confuse even people working on the classified test ranges and classified air traffic control channels as to what was really going on.

Sigh. Infodumps aside, the Clancy book had a specific design which later showed up in other media (like the F-19 game), and which certainly influenced 80s toys. The GI-Joe stuff was at least semi-original, unlike the masses of horrible line drawings flight sim players had to live with.

The book description and the toy are both based vaguely off some real projects. Indeed some companies not even invited to take part in ATF ended up putting out fairly reasonable stealth designs, to the point that the USAF became concerned it had leaks. Not much more to say then that. Stealth shaping isn't exactly magical in the broad spectrum, its all about puny details and materials.

Is this what you're looking for?

Hm... its both cool and fugly at the same time. Anyone else agree?

It looks wonky, but almost like it would work... not sure about that tail configuration, mind you.

I wonder what payload capacity on a fighter built that way would be- you've got room for a pretty wide bomb bay, I think.

SAMAS wrote:Does anyone have any idea where that design originally came from, and if it had an official name/designation?

AFAIK, design came from scale model company Testors in 1986, and most other "F-19" models were directly inspired by it.

Testors F-19 "Stealth Fighter"

Very similar concept was first shown in NatGeo in 1981, which most likely inspired Testors to make "F-19":



Information gathered from here.

Yeah, Testor also put out an 'Aurora' which was basically a triangle with jet engines; not sure how much of that was conjecture and how much was based upon what was actually known about the F-117 at the time. Always liked the lines of that one, although in retrospect the engines it had sitting on its ass were kind of out of place...

Looks like one of the contenders for the Havblue project. I think it was the Northrop entry.

Elheru Aran wrote:Yeah, Testor also put out an 'Aurora' which was basically a triangle with jet engines; not sure how much of that was conjecture and how much was based upon what was actually known about the F-117 at the time. Always liked the lines of that one, although in retrospect the engines it had sitting on its ass were kind of out of place...

Revell also had some nice ideas, for example look at their B-2, before real B-2 was shown to public:



Credit to ARC's Steve Eggers for photo and model

Of course, there were some totally wacky ideas, such as MiG-37 "Ferret" and Zvezda's "Ka-58" (I've seen this helicopter promoted as a real project on several websites).

Drifting OT here, sorry.

There is also this toy, which fits the OP description:


I suppose the awe surrounding the SR-71 and XB-70 programs account for the prevalence of canard-delta planforms, inward-canted vertical tailplanes, and drooping wingtips among these pre-F-117 conjectural stealth designs.

PhilosopherOfSorts wrote:Is this what you're looking for?

Yep, that's the one!

On another note, while looking for other pictures on it (now that I have a name to start from), I came across this comic panel:

[imghttp://img244.imageshack.us/img244/1189/f19sparkeder5.jpg[/img]

Anybody know what comic it's from?

I'd say that's probably a G.I. Joe comic.

Gervasius wrote:Revell also had some nice ideas, for example look at their B-2, before real B-2 was shown to public:


Credit to ARC's Steve Eggers for photo and model

Again slightly off topic but was that not the model that had the company receive a visit from some military types wanting to know how they could make such an "accurate" model??

The_Saint wrote:Again slightly off topic but was that not the model that had the company receive a visit from some military types wanting to know how they could make such an "accurate" model??

There was a rumor (marketing ploy?) about the Navy forcing a recall of a Nautilus submarine kit due to it's extreme accuracy in the 1960s, and Hyman Rickover supposedly did complain about Revell's 1961 Polaris sub kit having too accurate a floorplan in it's missile silos, but I've never heard anything about military concerns in connection to B-2 kits.

By 1986-87, practically everyone knew it was going to be a flying wing, anyway.

I think he's remembering the B-2 prop from that 80s Honda commercial.

Elheru Aran wrote:Yeah, Testor also put out an 'Aurora' which was basically a triangle with jet engines; not sure how much of that was conjecture and how much was based upon what was actually known about the F-117 at the time. Always liked the lines of that one, although in retrospect the engines it had sitting on its ass were kind of out of place...

Aurora wasn't based on the F-117 at all. Instead, Aurora was (some say is) a hypersonic spy plane, hence its conjectured triangular shape and strange engines.