On a Sunday two days after Christmas in 1992, Lt. Col. Gary North, a future four-star general, scored the first aerial kill in a U.S. Air Force F-16 when he downed an Iraqi MiG-25 that had strayed into forbidden air space in the skies over Iraq following the first Persian Gulf War.
North’s F-16 was one of thousands produced over the past half-century by the company now known as Lockheed Martin Aeronautics, making its debut from a Fort Worth assembly line in 1990. More than three decades later, in a testament to its stubborn durability, F-16 No. 90-0778 still serves the nation as a trainer for young pilots at Holloman Air Force Base in south central New Mexico.
The acclaimed F-16 program is observing its 50th year of service since the first prototype flew at California’s Edwards Air Force Base in 1974. Nowhere are the anniversary tributes more impassioned than in Fort Worth, where workers assembled 3,620 F-16s before the assembly line was moved to Greenville, South Carolina, in 2017 to make way for burgeoning F-35 production in Fort Worth.
“The last pilot who’ll fly the F-16 has not even been born yet,” North, the former commander of Pacific Air Forces and now an executive with Lockheed Martin, said in a recent phone interview from his home in Aledo. “We’re celebrating 50 years, which is monumental for a fighter aircraft to have that long of a run, and to have that many nations that have flown it.”
Echoing legions of other F-16 supporters, North describes the Fighting Falcon as a “fantastic” aircraft that continues to defy predictions that its days may be numbered as newer-generation models take to the skies.
At this point, the seemingly ageless Fighting Falcon — lovingly known as “Viper” to the pilots who fly it and the workers who build it — may yet be up in the air for years, if not decades. Lockheed Martin’s Greenville plant has a backlog for more than 130 fighters in overseas sales, and F-16s from existing fleets in other countries are poised to be flying out of bases in Ukraine in the country’s war with Russia.
At Edwards Air Force Base, another Fort Worth-built F-16 recently made aviation history in experimental tests to develop future military aircraft flown by artificial intelligence. Controlled strictly by AI, the renamed X-62A VISTA — with Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall a passenger in the front seat — engaged in a dogfight with a conventionally equipped F-16. The winner of the air-to-air competition has not been disclosed.
The Fort Worth Aviation Museum has begun staging 50th anniversary observances to show off the fully restored YF-16 No. 2, one of the two prototypes that General Dynamics flew in 1974 to ultimately win the Air Force contract for F-16 production. Lockheed took over production of the aircraft after purchasing General Dynamics’ jet fighter division in 1993. It became Lockheed Martin after another merger in 1995, this time with Martin Marietta.
Jim Hodgson, executive director of the Fort Worth Aviation Museum at Fort Worth Meacham International Airport, said volunteers have spent more than 5,000 hours restoring the YF-16 after it was returned to Fort Worth with the help of Congresswoman Kay Granger, a leading congressional supporter of the F-16 program. The prototype, which flew until 1979 before sustaining a nose gear failure, has spent much of the past half-century in the Air Force Research Laboratory in Rome, New York.
Granger joined top Lockheed executives, civic leaders and scores of former defense workers at the aviation museum Thursday evening as the pristine aircraft, wrapped in its original sky blue and cream colors, made its first return presentation in Fort Worth since undergoing the painstaking renovation.
“It’s amazing,” the longtime congresswoman told the Fort Worth Report in hailing the fighter plane’s decades of contributions to Fort Worth and the regional aerospace industry. “There were so many things that happened because of that one thing (the F-16).”
Spectators stood and applauded, many gasping excitedly, as a curtain adorned with an image of the unrestored original parted to reveal the refurbished prototype. Granger, the guest of honor, was presented with a gray flight jacket covered with military patches and bestowed with a call sign that was also emblazoned on the side of the aircraft: “Nails.”
Hodgson told the audience that the name came from the reputation she built throughout her political career for being “tough as nails.”
Lockheed Martin Aeronautics President Greg Ulmer called the fighter “a global icon and symbol of peace, partnership and strength — born right here in Fort Worth.”
“It doesn’t matter whether it’s day or night, there’s likely to be an F-16 flying somewhere in the world today,” said OJ Sanchez, vice president and general manager of Lockheed Martin’s Integrated Fighter Group.
A total of 4,598 F-16s have been produced in the United States and four other countries — Belgium, the Netherlands, Turkey and South Korea — for delivery to more than 25 nations, according to Lockheed Martin. The vast majority, 3,620, came from Fort Worth.
The last of foreign production wound down in the early 2000s, leaving Lockheed Martin’s Greenville plant as the world’s only F-16 production line. Its F-16s are built solely for overseas sales since the U.S. Air Force stopped buying the Fighting Falcon in 2005 to focus on accelerating development of the F-35 at a current price tag of $82 million a copy.
If you go: Public unveiling of restored YF-16
The Fort Worth Aviation Museum, 3300 Ross Ave., also will host a public unveiling of the restored YF-16 1 p.m. Saturday, June 1. The program will include a presentation on the history of the F-16. Tickets are $10 for adults; $8 for those 65 and over and for veterans; $5 for ages 4-16; and free for 3 and under.
Workers, pilots remember F-16’s early days
Although the F-16 no longer rolls out of the city’s westside aircraft plant, emotional ties between the fighter and those whose lives it touched still run deep in Fort Worth, now the nation’s 12th largest city. Many residents, from top aircraft executives to pilots to assembly line workers whose livelihoods turned on the ups and downs of F-16 production, have stories about their involvement with the aircraft. A growing number are in their 70s or 80s and older.
The F-16 is just one of a long litany of aircraft that rolled out of what many local residents know as “the bomber plant,” which opened at the outset of World War II to produce B-24 bombers. B.R. Day, now 93, dropped out of high school when he was 18 and went to work at the plant in 1949, ultimately staying until 1995. He was laid off 13 times when production ebbed and returned to work when production flowed.
Day’s paychecks alternately came from Consolidated Vultee Aircraft, General Dynamics, Lockheed Corporation and Lockheed Martin as he worked on a progression of aircraft that included the B-36, the B-58, the F-111 and the F-16. In Day’s view, the F-16 unquestionably tops the list.
“I think it was the best plane they ever made, the best ever. Period,” he said. “It could do marvelous things. My gosh, it could go straight up, just straight into the air. It was out of this world.”
North, Lockheed Martin’s vice president for customer requirements, essentially echoes the same sentiments, only from a much higher perspective. Of his total 4,700 flying hours, 3,700 came in F-16s.
“I can remember my first flight in the F-16 like it was yesterday,” he said. “It’s not a surprise to those of us who’ve had the privilege to be a part of the F-16 community that it’s still out there doing this job. I flew 3,700 hours in the airplane and it brought me home in peacetime and combat.”
North’s downing of the Soviet-made MiG-25 “Foxbat” that had wrongfully penetrated a U.N.-designated “no fly zone” not only marked the first combat victory for a U.S. F-16, it also marked the first kill for an AIM-120 AMRAAM air-to-air missile, which became operational the previous year. According to published accounts of the mission, North was leading a flight of four F-16s when he destroyed the enemy aircraft while it was trying to escape.
“I was blocking his exit,” he said. “And so we effectively trapped him in airspace he was not supposed to be in.”
Military aircraft have been identified by generations based on technological advances and aerial capabilities since the first primitive jets, such as Nazi Germany’s ME-262, took flight as generation one fighters at the end of World War II. The F-16 is ranked as an advanced generation four warplane, while newer fighters such as Lockheed Martin’s F-22 Raptor and F-35 Lightning II and Russia’s Su57 — all equipped with radar-evading stealth capabilities — occupy the latest generation, No. 5.
Development of the F-16 stemmed from Pentagon and Air Force efforts in the late 1960s to create a new lightweight multi-role fighter while the U.S. was still engaged in the Cold War against the Soviet Union.
Widely described as the first digital fighter, the F-16 introduced a computerized “fly-by-wire” control system that replaced mechanical linkages.
Other distinctive features include its bubble canopy that greatly expands the field of vision for pilots, a side-mounted control stick to improve maneuverability, and its ability to withstand nine Gs — nine times the force of gravity and well above that of peer aircraft. Later features included advanced radar and an automatic collision avoidance system designed to save the lives of pilots if they black out or become incapacitated.
Former union leader Pat Lane, president of Local 776 of the International Association of Machinists until his retirement in 2006, went to work at Lockheed in 1966 after moving to Fort Worth with his wife and three children. The emergence of the F-16, he recalled, revived the plant from a debilitating production slump and brought new hopes to workers.
“Everybody thought that it was going to be maybe a 15-year contract,” Lane, 82, recalled, “and it’s gone on for 50 years now.”
‘All of this was done on a shoestring’
Two men who ultimately served as president of the aeronautics company — Gordon England and Dain Hancock — were both deeply involved in the F-16’s development as young engineers during the plane’s early days. Hancock, now 82, remembers a number of close calls and engine problems when General Dynamics was testing the prototype models in its bid to win the production contract.
“You talk about a few propulsion engineers who learned how to run fast,” Hancock said recently in recalling some of those white knuckle experiences. “All of this was done on a shoestring. We just didn’t have a lot of testing that we could afford to do.”
Hancock was present for the unexpected first flight at Edwards Air Force Base on Jan. 20, 1974, when test pilot Phil Oestricher was at the controls of a YF-16 in what was supposed to be only a high-speed taxi. Instead, a missile on the wingtip scraped the ground, causing the aircraft to veer off the runway. Oestricher then opted to lift off and become airborne to avoid a crash.
Hancock, then a 32-year-old propulsion engineer, was engaged in the project and was stationed in a block house near the runway when someone rushed inside, shouting, “He’s flying, he’s flying.”
Fifty years later, he still has the scuffed missile fin that scraped the runway during the take-off that wasn’t supposed to happen, officially dubbed as “Flight Zero.”
The incident, said Hancock, caused “a lot of nervous tension” within the company before General Dynamics later completed what is ranked as its first official supersonic flight of a YF-16 prototype on Feb. 2, 1974, with Oestricher again at the controls.
“We weren’t sure we were even going to be in the competition any more if we didn’t get that sorted out,” he said of Flight Zero. “But we did and it flew well. We had a lot of little issues along the way but worked most of them out.”
Hancock was with the company for nearly 40 years before retiring as president of Lockheed Martin’s Aeronautics Company in January 2005.
“Every time I look back, I say, ‘Wow,’” he said of his four decades at the center of transformational growth in the military aircraft industry.
General Dynamics landed the F-16 production contract on Jan. 13, 1975, when the Air Force secretary announced it as the winner in the prototype competition against Northrop, setting the stage for Air Force plans to acquire at least 650 F-16s to complement the McDonnell Douglas F-15A Eagle. The first production F-16A rolled out of the GD plant in a ceremonial beginning on Aug. 18, 1978.
The F-16 program was launched as part of an unprecedented international consortium in which Belgium and the Netherlands joined the United States in building F-16s while two other NATO countries, Denmark and Norway, participated in the coalition by manufacturing parts and sub-assemblies. Turkey and South Korea were later authorized to build the jet fighter.
After serving as an engineer on the Gemini space program in Florida, England joined General Dynamics in 1966 and would become director of the trailblazing avionics team that developed key functions such as computers, fire control, navigation and electronics, what England calls “a large part of the airplane.”
England, who would later become Navy secretary and deputy defense secretary during President George W. Bush’s administration, describes the aircraft “as probably the most capable airplane per dollar ever produced,” with the possible exception of World War II airplanes.
“For any program to be successful, the stars have to be aligned. You have to have the right people in government, the right people in the military, the right people in business,” he said. “That was the case with the F-16.”
Political leaders backed F-16, in good times and bad
The three Fort Worth members of Congress who collectively represented the 12th Congressional District for almost 70 years — Jim Wright (1955-1989), Pete Geren (1989-1997) and Kay Granger (1997 until the present) — succeeded each other in Washington and unswervingly made the F-16 one of their top priorities, both in good times and bad.
A particularly low point came in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the Cold War ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of the Soviet Union, leading to deep defense cuts that hammered F-16 production. Adding to the misery was a new round of base closures in the early 1990s that shuttered Fort Worth’s Carswell Air Force Base, which had been an economic driver across from the bomber plant since the 1940s.
Geren, a future Army secretary who was then in Congress, joined with Granger, who was then serving as Fort Worth mayor, to try to stem the hemorrhaging. Granger, a 27-year House member who is leaving Congress when her current term ends next January, recalls that General Dynamics was planning on laying off 6,000 people while the closure of Carswell threatened an additional 20,000 job losses.
“It really took a dire toll on the region,” added Geren, who is now president and CEO of Fort Worth’s Sid W. Richardson Foundation.
The defense downturn, he said, accompanied other economic blows from a drop in oil prices, a banking collapse, and a savings and loan crisis. The fallout was particularly evident on the city’s west side near the aerospace plant, officially known as Air Force Plant 4.
The F-16 had been at “a high rate of production for at least a decade or so” and “much of the economic vitality of the western side of Tarrant County was connected to that program,” Geren recalled. But after the cutbacks, he said, “employment dropped and you had empty apartments, empty houses.”
England, who was president of the aircraft plant under both General Dynamics and Lockheed from 1991 to 1995, said the company “endured very hard times” during that period as employment during his tenure dropped from just north of 26,000 to about 11,500 when he left.
“When the Wall came down, production came down dramatically,” England recalled. “By the time I’d become president, the F-16 had gone through its peak and was on its decline. When the Wall came down, that was during its declining years. So my job was to keep the company alive for the next program.”
The rebound started taking shape when Geren, as a member of Congress, helped engineer a reincarnation of the shuttered air base with the creation of the Naval Air Station Joint Reserve Base Fort Worth, which opened in 1994 as the nation’s first joint reserve base. The installation includes more than 40 commands and 10,000 military and civilian employees.
Granger, then mayor, helped initiate city-led retraining programs and lobbied the federal government for retraining funds, as well as continued defense production in Fort Worth. Her stewardship of the F-16, as well as the F-35 and other Texas defense priorities, has continued and expanded during her 27 years in Congress, particularly during her terms as chair and ranking member of the House Appropriations Committee.
How F-16 production left Fort Worth for South Carolina
Lockheed Martin became the prime contractor of the F-35 joint strike fighter in 2001, and most of its current 19,300-employee workforce at the Fort Worth plant is focused on producing the fifth-generation stealth fighter. Expansion of F-35 production to well over 100 each year prompted Lockheed Martin to phase out F-16 production in Fort Worth and shift its assembly to the Greenville plant.
“We ran out of room,” said Eric Fox, who served as Lockheed Martin’s senior director for government relations for 25 years until retiring in April. “F-35 was taking up every inch of that factory.”
The last F-16 produced at the westside plant rolled out on Nov. 14, 2017, for delivery to the Iraqi Air Force, becoming the 4,588th F-16 produced worldwide, including those built at the overseas manufacturing facilities. American F-16 production then halted for about two years as truck after truck hauled parts and materials from Fort Worth to Greenville.
Production resumed in 2019 as South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster, state lawmakers and business leaders welcomed the arrival of F-16s as a big economic boost for the state and a major expansion to the 276-acre Lockheed Martin facility that has been in operation since 1984. The Greenville aircraft plant, now observing its 40th anniversary, employs about 1,800 workers, most of whom will likely be engaged in F-16 production.
Since the transition, said Lockheed Martin’s Greenville spokesman Alex Curry, “we’ve seen the increase in demand skyrocket from around the world” as the plant deals with a backlog of orders for 131 F-16s for six countries — Bahrain, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Taiwan, Jordan and one undisclosed country. The orders are for advanced Block 70-72 models that offer nearly a 50% increase in service life.
“It’s considered the most advanced fourth-generation fighter that’s ever built,” said Curry. “We expect these jets to be able to fly till 2060 and beyond.”
Nearly 1,000 miles to the west, the F-16’s lasting contributions are evident in a vibrant North Texas defense industry and continued municipal growth nurtured by the celebrated fighter during its 50 years of Fort Worth production.
Texas economic analyst Ray Perryman of Waco said the F-16 was “a mainstay of the Fort Worth economy for decades” and generated about $4.7 billion to the regional Fort Worth-Arlington economy during its heyday in the mid-1980s, about $13.2 billion measured in today’s dollars.
“It’s a phenomenal airplane that has served the U.S. and its allies incredibly well,” said former Fort Worth Mayor Kenneth Barr, who served four terms from 1996 to 2003. “Building the F-16 in Fort Worth was a major benefit to our community. It brought thousands of jobs — tens of thousands of jobs — to Fort Worth. And kept them here.”
Dave Montgomery is a freelance reporter for the Fort Worth Report.
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