Here’s an interesting item from the 1980s: A “first” and probably “only” for The Wall Street Journal: The newspaper’s 1986 report on the release of Testors’ 1/48 “F-19 Stealth Fighter,” an event which gained the attention of the national media in the context of the (then) novelty of Stealth Technology, the aura of mystery inherent to the classified nature of the actual aircraft (in reality, Lockheed’s F-117 Nighthawk) in use by the United States Air Force as far back as 1983, and in terms of both, the assumption – and an assumption only, it turned out to be! – that a relatively small firm had come up with a “scoop” well ahead of the major news media.
The Journal’s article included an artist’s rendering of Testors’ F-19, probably based on the kit’s box art, composed in the speckled / shaded style characteristic of illustrations published in the newspaper.
I do find it interesting that the article took a swipe at the two plastic model companies then preeminent in the United States (again, we’re talking the 1980s): Monogram Models and Revell. (Unfortunately, Airfix, Tamiya, and Hasegawa weren’t approached for comment.) “Testors’ competitors aren’t quite so complimentary. “Educated guesswork,” sniffs a spokesman for Monogram Models Inc., the largest military model maker. Says Thomas West, marketing director of Revell, “I don’t think what Testors did was accurate.” Despite the not-so-subtle dismissal of those firms’ responses to the release of Testors’ kit, the representatives of Monogram and Revell proved to be entirely correct. The success of Testors’ F-19 seems to have been the result of fortuitous (or well-planned?) timing and canny marketing, and, a combination of misinformation and disinformation.
The full text of the Journal article follows below…
Secret ‘Stealth’ Fighter Is a Best-Seller
(In 12-Inch Plastic – Assembly Required)
By BILL RICHARDS
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
The Wall Street Journal
August 21, 1986
There’s no such thing as the F-19 “Stealth” fighter airplane – or so say the people at the Pentagon.
But the F-19 exists. It’s at the local hobby shop.
Although the design of the radar-evading Stealth is top-secret, Testors Corp. of Rockford, Ill., has somehow managed to produce a 12-inch plastic model of it. Since its introduction last month, the model has become an instant best-seller.
That’s great for the slumping model airplane industry, but terrible for the Air Force and Lockheed Corp., which builds the real Stealth. At a recent congressional hearing on leaks of Lockheed documents concerning the Stealth program, Rep. Ronald Wyden waved Testors’ F-19 model in front of embarrassed Lockheed officials and the TV cameras. If Testors could come up with details of the supersecret Stealth, wondered Mr. Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, could Soviet spies be far behind?
Probably not, says John Andrews, chief model-airplane designer for Testors. “Once an airplane comes out of the hangar, people find out about it.” Testors’ model, which Mr. Andrews estimates to be 80% accurate, comes from “bits, pieces, comments and friends you meet and know,” he says cryptically.
Awkward Moments
For Testors, a unit of RPM Inc. of Medina, Ohio, the events of recent weeks have been awkward. Testors officials squirmed when federal investigations disclosed that hundreds of classified documents were missing from Lockheed’s Stealth program and used Testors’ F-19 to dramatize the leaks. They were further distressed when a real F-19 crashed on a test run over California last month and several news organizations used Testors’ newly introduced model to illustrate their crash stories. Then, to top it all off, FBI agents recently visited Testors after another model maker, Revell Corp., was mailed an apparently authentic drawing of Northrop Corp.’s classified Stealth bomber.
Charles Miller, Testors’ president and a former Marine pilot, insists the company isn’t privy to any classified secrets. “We’re just a little company that made a model of what we think is the F-19,” he says. “We’ve become an innocent bystander to a swirl of news.”
The flurry of publicity over the F-19 should give both Testors and the model industry some welcome attention. Military model sales have been in a slump since Vietnam, and the entire model industry declined precipitously in the early 1980s when video arcades began attracting youngsters’ allowance money.
Although other model makers have replicated top-secret weaponry, Testors is especially aggressive in producing cutting-edge aircraft models. Three years ago, for example, Testors produced a detailed version of Lockheed’s top-secret SR-71 “Blackbird” spy plane. “We sat on the SR-71 for 10 years,” says David Miller, Testors’ executive vice president, until the company felt confident that the replica was accurate. Testors officials say they also had detailed information about the U-2 spy plane well before the public had seen it. And Mr. Andrews was able to take photographs of the A-12, the CIA’s version of the SR-71, while parts of that plane were still officially secret.
One competitor grudgingly calls Mr. Andrews, 53 years old, an “all-star” model designer, especially in the area of state-of-the-art aircraft. His cluttered office, in an industrial park just north of San Diego, Calif., looks like the lair of a high-tech spy as well as a model builder. Along with tiny aircraft models, his work tables are littered with satellite photographs of Stealth’s Nevada test site. Aircraft industry trade journals and technical publications on esoteric subjects like microwave absorption and the fine points of radar transmission are piled around the office.
Mr. Andrews is also well-connected in Southern California’s close-knit aerospace community. When a group of engineers, pilots and others who worked on the SR-71 gathered for a reunion several years ago, Mr. Andrews was one of the few outsiders invited.
Mr. Andrews says his first clue that Lockheed was getting ready to develop the Stealth fighter came from an item in a trade newsletter in 1976. The story said Lockheed had recalled the retired chief of its so-called black programs, which involve top-secret aircraft and satellite projects, but gave no details. Gradually, Mr. Andrews says, he accumulated a folder full of snippets about Stealth. In 1978 he wrote to the Air Force asking about the project. “They wrote back and said there wasn’t anything available,” he says. “That really turned my lights on.”
A short time later Lockheed, in what Mr. Andrews says was an unusual burst of cooperation, allowed him to photograph one of its A-12 spy planes. He now says the gesture may have been an effort to deflect his interest from Stealth.
It didn’t work. Testors’ F-19 made its debut last February at a hobby industry trade show in Chicago. Ironically, Testors managed to keep its own Stealth model so secret-company officials, for example, referred to it by its code name, “Super Tomcat” that few outsiders at the show understood what the company had succeeded in doing.
Mum’s the Word
Mr. Andrews is uncommunicative about some of his sources for the model. But he acknowledges that one break came from a commercial pilot who got a good look at a Stealth fighter near the Air Force’s test site at Groom Lake, Nev., in 1983. The pilot, an avid modeler, sent a sketch of what he saw to Mr. Andrews.
Lockheed is equally quiet about Mr. Andrews’s effort. “He did a very clever thing,” says a spokesman for the aerospace company, declining to speculate on the accuracy of the model. But, the spokesman adds, “if there is a Stealth fighter, most of the secrets are probably inside the plane anyway.”
However accurate it is, the model seems to have caught on big with one group of fans – Southern California aerospace workers. Hobby shops near several big test facilities in the region quickly sold out of the F-19 when it went on the shelf last month. One group of employees from Lockheed’s top-secret “Skunk Works,” which developed the F-19, ordered 100 of the models from the Far West hobby shop in Lancaster, Calif. “I would assume the model is pretty accurate for that much interest,” says Larry Trumbull, owner of Far West.
Testors’ competitors aren’t quite so complimentary. “Educated guesswork,” sniffs a spokesman for Monogram Models Inc., the largest military model maker. Says Thomas West, marketing director of Revell, “I don’t think what Testors did was accurate.”
That doesn’t bother Mr. Andrews, who has already moved on to a new interest – UFOs. “Something is going on,” he says, indicating a thick folder of material he has been collecting on the subject for several years. Possibly, he says, some UFO sightings were actually glimpses of another new-and very secret-aircraft. “I’m not sure what it looks like yet,” he says, “but if it flies, I’m interested.”
References
Testors F-19 Stealth Fighter 1/48 Plastic Model, at Fantastic Plastic
La aeronave más conocida que jamás existió, el caza stealth F-19 (“The best known aircraft that ever existed, the F-19 stealth fighter”), at No Barrell Rolls (Blog dedicado a aviones prototipos, abandonados o poco conocidos (“A blog dedicated to prototype aircraft, abandoned or little known.”))
“The F-19 stealth fighter: Would it have worked in the real world?”, at HushKit
“10 Fictional ‘Black Jet’ Toys, Models, And Video Games From The 1980s To Today – All I want for Christmas is an F-19 stealth super fighter,” by Brett Tingley, at TheDrive
Testors Corporation, at Wikipedia
Testors Corporation, at WikiMili
Testors Corporation: “So why did Testors exit the plastic kit market?”, at Hyperscale Forums
RPM International, at Wikipedia
– – Behind Paywall – –
Ciotti, Paul (1986-10-19) “Tempest in a Toy Box: The Stealth Fighter Is So Secret the Pentagon Won’t Admit It Exists. John Andrews Shocked Everyone by Building a Model of It. To Tell the Truth, He Says, It Wasn’t All That Much Trouble”, Los Angeles Times