By early 1991, the U.S. Navy had been reported to declare that its stealth “flying wing” carrier jet was approximately 8,000 pounds overweight, which had transformed a prospective deck-launched strike aircraft into a physics problem which paperwork could not fix.
This plane was the A-12 Avenger II, which was an all-weather, carrier-based stealth attack plane that was to replace the A-6 Intruder. The program, of a sharp triangular flying-wing planform, or what is sometimes known as the “Flying Dorito,” was an effort by the Navy to introduce stealth to carrier aviation without stealing an Air Force design. This idea was guaranteed to have deep-strike capability, the ability to survive in defended airspace, and internal weapons carrying which would maintain a low observability but still provide significant combat power.
Its origins were in the Navy Advanced Tactical Aircraft (ATA) program to deploy a replacement to Intruder by the mid-1990s. In January 1988 the General Dynamics/McDonnell Douglas team was awarded the development contract and the plans of the Navy soon became a large scale procurement vision: 620 aircraft of the Navy and 238 of the Marine Corps were considered in the initial planning of the program. The size of the A-12 was an emphasis on the wager: about 37 feet in length with 70 feet wingspan, such that carrier deck operations and catapult could be made to fit even with the generous planform. Then the manufacturing and engineering reality came in.
The stealth shape of the A-12 relied on intricate composites and strict manufacture management, precisely where a change in the requirements at the end of the schedule and tooling reality can ripple into the increase in weight, schedule and costly rework. With the development of the design the design was reported to have gone up dramatically in weight, one report saying that there was a 30 percent increase over design specification and that the aircraft was reported as lagging behind schedule by about 18 months. In the case of a carrier aircraft, the weight would not be an abstract value; it would be more closely related to approach speed, bring-back fuel, trap loads, and the margins which make landings survivable. Above a point established by the A-12, the arguing of the carrier suitability case became more difficult without redesigning significant structure an intervention that would have taken cost and time even beyond bounds.
The delicate nature was enhanced by the contract structure. The program was run under a $4.8 billion fixed price development arrangement, a model that was made to safeguard the taxpayers and it has been known to foster hopeful thinking at the start and sore disappointment in the future when technical mishaps must burst. The situation with the A-12 resulted in costs that were reported as exceeding 1billion over and above the expected estimates as trust weakened within the Pentagon. Oversight also had a hard time under the secrecy and momentum of the program; one post-cancellation accounting of what went wrong, noted how “excessive secrecy” and informal reporting might result in problems not being brought to the surface, being compared and rendered in decision-grade form.
On 7 January 1991, the Defense Secretary Dick Cheney canceled the program on a breach of contract, breaking through the more common tradition of lengthening schedules and reducing quantities to keep a troubled aircraft flying. The finishing was not the termination of the expenditures, however. This cancellation led to years of legal action that eventually settled in 2014 with the McDonnell Douglas successor and General Dynamics paying back the Navy 200 million apiece.
The “carrier-B-2” aura of A-12 continues to generate interest due to the timelessness of its hypothesis: place stealth and accuracy on the flying deck and place crushing capability further without having to use massed formation as the foundation. The failure of Avenger II was not, however, a one-dimensional failure. It had been an accretion of weight, the complexity of materials, immaturity of production, and a shrinking model that did not allow bad surprises, until the plane was a contracting model which could no longer plausibly promise a carrier landing, and certainly not a deployable squadron.
