A Glance Back at the Northrop F-5 Fighter

Starting in 1959 the Northrop Corporation produced over 2,600 copies of the various versions of the F-5 fighter over a period of nearly three decades (the last F-5 rolling off the production line in 1987).* Those planes entered service with the armed forces of over thirty countries, including the United States' Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps; the air forces of fellow North Atlantic Treaty Organization members Canada, Greece, the Netherlands, Norway and Turkey; and beyond the NATO alliance, those of other important American allies such as South Korea, South Vietnam, Taiwan, Saudi Arabia and (the Shah's) Iran. In the service of those forces flyers of that plane saw action in several conflicts, including a number of interstate wars (the largest and most important of them likely the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War, but also the 1977 Ogaden War between Ethiopia and Somalia, and the 1979 Yemenite war between what were then North and South Yemen).**

With the help of upgrades many of those militaries which acquired the aircraft continue to fly them down to this day.

Still, the plane's profile seems relatively low in aviation history, at least in American discussion. One reason may be the anomalous character of the aircraft given how we think about fighter aircraft "generations"--a light fighter that did not quite fit in with the trend already evident in its day with the second-generation interceptors' increasingly stressing high-technology combat in that way epitomized by planes like the U.S. Air Force's "Century Series" aircraft and the U.S. Navy's F-14 Tomcat, heavier multirole aircraft like the third-generation F-4 Phantom, and the fourth-generation F-15 Eagle. This is all the more the case in as, in spite of the plane's finding so many takers, there having been no real follow-up, the F-20 Tigershark that was a further development of the aircraft ultimately canceled for lack of customers (as, instead, the higher-tech F-16 and F-18 triumphed in the marketplace). Indeed, it is worth remembering that in U.S. service the plane's primary usage was as an "aggressor" aircraft, simulating Soviet MiG-17s and MiG-21s, rather than as a front-line fighter (all as, ironically, the Soviets seem to have used the F-5s they got from Ethiopia and Vietnam after those countries' changes in government in the same role, as aggressor aircraft against which to train their own pilots). All of that has the plane off the main path of fighter development--even if it may be credited with playing a noteworthy part in the post-World War II history of the fighter aircraft.

* The F-5 lineage includes both the earlier F-5 A and B "Freedom Fighter" and the later F-5 E and F "Tiger II," a larger, heavier plane with a more powerful engine that also incorporated the radar lacking in the Freedom Fighter, but remained a light jet next to others like the "Century Series" fighters, or the F-4 Phantom. (Even the first of the Century Series, the F-100 Super Sabre, is twice as heavy as the F-5 Tiger when empty.)
** Iran received its F-5s (like its F-4 Phantoms and the F-14 Tomcats for which it was the only customer but the U.S.) in the era of the Shah's rule, but the planes have apparently remained in service with the country's successor government down to the present.