The F-16 was designed as a lightweight day fighter, but was then turned into an all weather 24 hour bomber. If it had been designed for that role from the start, I’m sure it’d have looked very different.
This is of course true, and Harry Hillaker acknowledged as much himself.
If we had stayed with the original lightweight fighter concept, that is, a simple day fighter, we would have produced only 300 F-16s, the same number of F-104s that were built. This is not to say that their complaints are unreasonable. When you load up an F-16 with external fuel tanks, bombs, and an electronic countermeasures pod on the centerline, you’ve doubled its drag. For someone who’s worked all his life to achieve minimum drag, that’s sacrilegious. Nonetheless, it speaks well for the airplane.
The F -16 has far exceeded my expectations. However, if I had realized at the time that the airplane would have been used as a multimission, primarily an air-to-surface airplane as it is used now, I would have designed it differently.
Is this difference represented by the F-16XL?
Yes. The F-16XL had a better balance of air-to-air and air-to-ground capability. In fact, when I first started going to the Air Force with plans for the F-16XL, some of the Air Force people were so enthusiastic about it that they accused me of holding the design back so that we could sell the airplane twice. If you know anything about the history of the lightweight fighter, you know that this was not the case.
With the F-16XL, we reduced the drag of the weapon carriage by sixty-three percent. The drag of the XL with the same fuel and twice as many bombs is a little over thirty percent less than today’s F-16 when you load it up. This points up a fallacy that has existed for thirty years, and I’m concerned that it may still exist. Our designs assume clean airplanes. Bombs and all the other crap are added on as an afterthought. These add-ons not only increase drag but they also ruin the handling qualities. They should be considered from the beginning.
We ought to start with the weapon. That’s really the final product. We ought to determine what the weapon is and what it will take to deliver it and then do the airplane. Now, we design the airplane and smash the weapon on it.
http://www.codeonemagazine.com/article.html?item_id=37
That is why I find it so amusing when fankiddies try to invoke Hillaker. He freely acknowledged that in retrospect the F-16 should have been approached differently with a much smaller emphasis on clean performance and a greater emphasis on loaded performance.
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