Northrop F-5E Tiger II

In the mid-1950s Northrop set out, at its own expense, to build a small, cheap supersonic fighter that the smaller air forces of the free world could afford to buy and to keep flying. The design, the N-156, was built around two small General Electric J85 turbojets and a thin wing, and it took two forms. The two-seat trainer became the US Air Force’s T-38 Talon; the single-seat fighter, the N-156F, first flew on 30 July 1959 and went into production as the F-5A Freedom Fighter, supplied in large numbers to American allies under the Military Assistance Program.

In November 1970 an improved version won the US government’s International Fighter Aircraft competition for a successor to the F-5A. The F-5E Tiger II had more powerful J85-GE-21 engines, a longer and wider fuselage, a larger wing with leading-edge root extensions and manoeuvring flaps, more fuel, radar and two 20 mm cannon in the nose. It first flew on 11 August 1972. Well over a thousand F-5Es and two-seat F-5Fs were built, by Northrop and under licence in Switzerland, Taiwan and South Korea, and more than twenty countries flew them, from Brazil and Mexico to Iran, Saudi Arabia and Singapore. Several still do, the Swiss Air Force among them.

Small, agile and smoky, the F-5E was about the size of a MiG-21, which made it the ideal stand-in for Soviet fighters in training. The US Air Force formed aggressor squadrons that flew F-5Es painted in Soviet-style camouflage and tactics, at Nellis in Nevada, at Clark in the Philippines and, from 1976, at RAF Alconbury in Cambridgeshire, where the 527th Aggressor Squadron gave NATO crews in Europe dissimilar air combat training until it turned in its F-5Es for F-16s in 1988. The US Navy’s Fighter Weapons School, Topgun, used them in the same way, and Navy and Marine Corps adversary squadrons still fly F-5s bought second-hand from Switzerland.