U.S. Military ‘Mistake’: The YF-23 Black Widow II Stealth Fighter Isn’t Flying for America and Russia and China are Smiling

U.S. Military ‘Mistake’: The YF-23 Black Widow II Stealth Fighter Isn’t Flying for America and Russia and China are Smiling

19FortyFive spent a lot of time with this fighter jet (both fighters that were built, that is), and we have the photos in this essay to prove it. The YF-23, colloquially known as the Black Widow II, was a prototype stealth fighter developed by Northrop and McDonnell Douglas for the U.S. Air Force’s Advanced Tactical Fighter (ATF) program in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Although it lost the ATF competition to the YF-22, which became the F-22 R…