The F-20 was the F-5's last and boldest step: same family look, one big modern engine, a real radar, and a price that undercut the F-16. It flew beautifully. Nobody bought it.
It started as the F-5G
The idea was simple: take the F-5E Tiger II and swap its two small J85 engines for a single General Electric F404, the engine from the F/A-18 Hornet.[1] Northrop called it the F-5G and aimed it at a U.S. policy of the late 1970s that wanted allies to buy a purpose-built export fighter instead of America's front-line jets.[1][3]
Politics hurt from the start. President Carter blocked a sale of the F-5G to Taiwan, and the 1982 U.S.-China communiqué kept that door shut.[1] Because an "F-5" label made the jet sound old and cheap, Northrop asked for a new number: it became the F-20 in November 1982 and got the name Tigershark in March 1983.[1][2]
First flight
The first aircraft, 82-0062, rolled out at Hawthorne in August 1982. Northrop test pilot Russ Scott flew it at Edwards Air Force Base on 30 August 1982, reaching 40,000 feet and Mach 1.04 in a 40-minute flight.[2] Chuck Yeager later became its most famous spokesman.[4]
A myth about the engine
You'll often read that the F404 doubled the F-5E's thrust. It didn't. Two J85-21s give about 10,000 lb together with afterburner; the F404 gives about 17,000 lb.[3] That's roughly 60 percent more, which was plenty to transform the jet.[1]
Two crashes, no orders
Three Tigersharks were finished and a fourth was partly built.[1] Two were lost on overseas sales tours. On 10 October 1984 the first prototype crashed at Suwon in South Korea, killing Northrop chief test pilot Darrell Cornell. On 14 May 1985 a second went down at Goose Bay, Canada, killing pilot David Barnes.[5][2] Later accounts put both crashes down to the pilots blacking out under heavy g during demonstration routines, not to a fault in the jet.[4]
By then the rules had changed. The Reagan administration let allies buy the F-16 itself, and the export-only fighter lost its reason to exist.[4] Northrop had spent about $1.2 billion of its own money and ended the program in 1986 without a single sale.[2][3]
See the last one
The only surviving F-20 belongs to the California Science Center in Los Angeles.[2] For the jets that came before it, start with the F-5E Tiger II.
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