Great Planes Northrop F 5 Freedom Fighter Documentary

Video from the channel ForensicKz about Northrop F-5, linked on its Above Ten Thousand entry. Duration: 45:22. Language: English. Video type: Documentary.

This documentary from the Great Planes series covers the Northrop F-5 family, a small, lightweight, and cheap fighter. It was conceived to equip the United States' minor allies under the Military Assistance Program (MAP) and ended up in service with more than 20 countries.

Northrop went against the trend toward ever larger and more complex fighters. Its 1955 studies produced the N-156 design. At first the Air Force only wanted its trainer version, the T-38 Talon, which flew on April 10, 1959. The company kept developing the N-156F fighter on its own. It found no buyers until October 1962, when the program was formalized with the F-5A and F-5B versions. The third prototype, completed as the YF-5A, flew on July 31, 1963. In 1964 training of foreign crews began at Williams Air Force Base, and Iran put its first F-5s into service in February 1965.

That same year, the Skoshi Tiger evaluation sent 19 modified aircraft, designated F-5C, to Vietnam. In 150 days they flew more than 3,500 sorties with only a 1.5% abort rate. That experience gave rise to the F-5E Tiger II, which made its maiden flight on August 11, 1972. Later came the F-20 Tigershark, with a much more powerful engine, which was abandoned for lack of orders.

The documentary stresses how easy the aircraft was to maintain: three mechanics could change an engine in 20 minutes. The F-5A carried two 20 mm cannons with 280 rounds each and seven external hardpoints. A total of 3,806 T-38s and F-5s were built, and the last F-5Es and Fs were delivered to Singapore in 1989. It also covers the T-38 with the Thunderbirds and as a chase plane in tests such as those of the XB-70 and the Space Shuttle, the F-5 fuselage used in the X-29, and the F-5Es flown by Red Flag's aggressor squadrons, chosen for their resemblance to the MiG-21.