Northrop's AX Contender, the YA-9

[Old Viper Tester]

As I noted in the Icing a Hog posting, when the A-10 Combined Test Force at Edwards AFB was shut down, we were told to do what we wanted with what remained after the engineering and history offices had retrieved what they wanted. I had found a number of slides in the back of a desk drawer. Here are more of those slides, cleaned up as best I could.

 

This is one of the Northrop YA-9 aircraft, s/n 71-1368, used in the fly-off competition with the Fairchild A-10. The YA-9 lost the "Attack - Experimental" (AX) competition and both airframes eventually ended up on display. '368 is on display at March AFB. Its sister ship, '367 was on display at Castle AFB and has since been moved back to Edwards AFB as part of the Flight Test Museum.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Left console and throttles

 

Right console

 

The YA-9 has been the subject of two 1/72nd scale models: a vacuform from Maintrack Models Project-X series and a resin kit from Anigrand. The only 1/48 kit I am aware of is a card model. I have the Maintrack kit in my stash (somewhere), maybe I'll get to it one day.

 

Thanks for looking,

Sven, still cleaning retrieved A-10 slides!

Edited February 19, 2018 by Old Viper Tester

[Andwil]

Interesting photos.  And I thought the A-10 was ugly!  Interesting too that the SU-25 has a similar layout.  

 

Andrew

[roginoz]

 

We NEED that kitted in 48 !!!

 

Anigrand......where are you ??

[upnorth]

Those pictures really show how crude the YA-9 design was, even compared to the Sukhoi Su-25.

 

The more I read about the AX competition, the more I'm convinced that the YA-9 was only created so that there could be a competition at all. Apparently around 12 companies were invited to submit designs for the competition, but only two ever did.

 

Fairchild designed the YA-10 like they actually cared if they won or not while Northrop designed the YA-9 as if they said "Yeah, whatever" on a Friday afternoon.

 

Mind you, the fortunes of the two companies couldn't have been more different at the time. Northrop could afford to lose while Fairchild had to win or die.

[Britman]

When looking at the A9 , it really was a flack gunners dream! The thought that went into the A10 just leaves this one in the dark ages. Thank you very much for sharing these most interesting insights to the testing world.