Lockheeds f-19 stealth fighter, page 1

F-19 - No such animal. It is officially undocumented, but generally assumed that the F-19 designation was skipped in 1982 in order to honor the Northrop F-20 (qv) with an even "next-generation" number.

Striving to keep pace with technology, Testors hit the market with an F-19 kit based on eyewitness reports from "usually reliable sources," research, gut level guesswork, and patterned it after the smooth-surfaced Lockheed SR-71. By May 1986 their kit was on hobby shop shelves and nearly 700,000 were sold in 18 months. However, somebody had pulled a plug in the Pentagon.

Stealth technology at the time was one of our military's worst-kept secrets, and it was assumed that F-19 had been reserved for that department. There was so much speculation that the USAF, with uncommon humor, even roped off a vacant plot at the 1988 Edwards AFB Air Show with a sign identifying the "F-19 Flying Frisbee." But when the much-heralded stealth fighter was designated F-117A and was anything but smooth, the F-19 idea lost most of its lustre, and folks generally accepted that the designation had been purposely skipped when F-20 showed up.

Yet, much like with those little green men they scraped off the Roswell landscape, folklore and wishful thinking took hold, and there came many reports from "usually reliable sources" who saw the real Testors F-19 flying around in remote desert regions usually off-limits to reliable sources. (Because of the popularity of the designation, the USAF Museum's Internet page lists a "Lockheed F-19 CSIRS," but its link connects the F-117A.).

www.csd.uwo.ca...



"F-19"

More at web page...

This still leaves the question of the missing F-19 unresolved. Perhaps it really is the designation of some other super-secret project, so black that it will not be revealed for many years. Maybe the mysterious "Aurora" that is the subject of so much gossip, rumor, and speculation in this group is designated F-19. However, it is still not at all certain that any such aircraft as the "Aurora" actually exists. Maybe it will turn out that the Air Force had been telling the truth all along, that there never was an aircraft known as F-19. Perhaps all of this confusion was part of a deliberate plot by the Air Force to confuse Soviet intelligence--hoodwinking them into expending so much effort in trying to find out information about a plane that does not exist.

Source:
Lockheed F-117: The Black Jet, Robert F. Dorr, World Airpower Journal, Winter 1994.

Those models appear to have more in common with a fighter version of the Aurora. However, they're also not too far off the YF-23 Black Widow.

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