The YF-23 Is Back - The Fighter Jet That Was Decades Ahead

Imagine if the military had chosen the YF-23 in 1990 as part of the Advanced Tactical Fighter (ATF) program. What would the sixth-generation fighters have been like then? The irony is that despite the official loss to the Lockheed prototype, the ideas put forth by the Northrop team in the YF-23 not only survived, but ultimately won... just with a 30-year delay! Stealth, thermal camouflage, advanced aerodynamics - all of these later became the norm rather than an experiment, and now we are seeing the return of many of these solutions in the most ambitious military aircraft of the 21st century! Today we’ll be telling you why the YF-23 was called “the plane from the future” and how it managed to get a second life in next-generation configurations.