Northrop F-5 variant
Northrop F-5 F-5N
Designation of the refurbished ex-Swiss F-5Es operated by the US Navy and Marine Corps as adversary aircraft, fitted with the AN/APG-69 radar. The Navy bought 36 low-hour Swiss F-5Es and F-5Fs in 2006 and distributed them among its aggressor squadrons.
History
Swiss airframes for the US Navy
The F-5N is not a new aircraft: it is the US Navy's answer to the wear on its adversary F-5Es, bought in the 1970s and 1980s and by then carrying decades of demanding flying. The solution was to find low-hour airframes of the same type, and they were found in Switzerland, whose air force had operated a fleet peaking at 98 F-5Es and 12 F-5Fs in 1981 and shrinking with the arrival of the F/A-18 Hornet. In 2006 the US Navy acquired 36 lightly used Swiss F-5Es and F-5Fs, put them through a refurbishment programme and designated them F-5N, with the AN/APG-69 as their primary radar.
The operation was repeated later: in 2020 Switzerland sold a further 22 aircraft to the United States, with deliveries from March 2024, in a transaction valued at 32.4 million dollars.
The adversary squadrons
Alongside the F-16 and F/A-18, the F-5 is a pillar of the Navy's dissimilar air combat training. VFC-13 "Fighting Saints", based at NAS Fallon, converted to the F-5E in April 1996 after flying the A-4 Skyhawk, and has since been one of the busiest aggressor squadrons on the type. VFC-111 "Sundowners" at NAS Key West operates eighteen aircraft: seventeen F-5Ns and one F-5F. That two-seater is a "FrankenTiger", the result of grafting an F-5F two-seat nose onto a low-hour Swiss F-5E airframe; three have been built.
The F-5's appeal as an aggressor is twofold. In size, thrust and handling it resembles the light fighters a Navy pilot might meet, and its cost per flight hour is a fraction of an F/A-18 or an F-16 used in the same role. That economic argument is what has kept the family in American service half a century after its first flight.
A successor in sight
In April 2022 a plan was announced to replace the Navy's adversary F-5s with Block 32 F-16s, with the F-5s passing to squadron VFA-204. The move does not close the type's American story — the newly acquired Swiss airframes are still arriving — but it marks the beginning of the changeover for an aircraft whose front-line fighter career ended decades ago and whose second life as an adversary has lasted longer than the first.
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