F-16 Fighting Falcon Still Flying and Fighting at 50

Fifty years after it first took flight, the General Dynamics F-16 is still flying all over the world, after playing major roles in every conflict from Operation Desert Storm to NATO efforts in Bosnia and beyond.

As a fighter jet the Fighting Falcon, as it’s officially known (though all the pilots call it “The Viper”), was almost unsurpassed for generations in the skies. While the F-22 and F-35 may be able to outperform it today, the F-16 was the backbone of air superiority for half a century, with over 5000 of them still doing duty at air bases around the world, both American and allied powers.

To celebrate this milestone, the U.S. Air Force held the “F-16 First Flight 50th Anniversary Celebration” in Hangar 16 at Edwards Air Force Base in the California desert last week—and I got to go. Tallyho!

FALCON FLYBY

If you’ve never seen something like an F-16 in the air, let alone seen several of them up there at once right above you, your brain needs to be rearranged a little. I know mine was. Right after I parked my car in the parking lot just outside the hanger, as I was getting out and sort of wondering where I should go next, right then and with no warning whatsoever, the entire U.S. Air Force Thunderbirds buzzed the lot in greeting.

OMG.

Imagine this: The jet closest to me was maybe 150 feet off the ground but felt right on top of me. I could see all those titanium flaps that wrap around the afterburner, I could make out the Thunderbirds paint scheme in the shape of a bird with feathers, I could…

SKA-RAAAAMMMM-WHAM-SKREEEEM! It was upon me, over me, shaking my internal organs and hammering my ear drums, as it was for several hundred people around me who up till then had been just out walking around wondering if the local Starbucks was open when the entire might, technology, aerospace destructive force, and every screaming nut and bolt that goes into these things suddenly roared over us in one yowling and unavoidable message of modern technology at its finest.

At first you’re terrified, your monkey brain can’t grasp what’s happening. Then, just as quickly, that very same monkey realizes it will not be eaten by this thing and you instead look to the heavens and behold it in all its screaming, air-superiority glory and you raise your arms in triumph and howl as loud as you can like the primitive, howling simian you truly are.

“Woo-hoo!” you scream in one of the very few instances in our modern society (baseball home runs, roller coasters, the Lions getting into the Super Bowl) in which it is still appropriate to do so. “WOO-HOO!”

And just as quickly as it snuck up and did not kill you, the entire flight of F-16s, the epitome of a thousand years of technological advancement from the first bronze-age tool to the single 27,000-pound-thrust Pratt & Whitney/General Electric turbofan engine with which I was just bludgeoned, is gone, off over the desert somewhere else, bullseyeing womp rats in Beggar’s Canyon back home.

It is then that you hear the car alarms. Just as quickly as the F-16 Thunderbirds descended, the car alarms—hundreds of them—all started going off at once as if some mass catalytic converter theft had just been detected in thousands of parked crossover utility vehicles across every parking lot at Edwards.

Everybody in the parking lot, the same people who only seconds before had gone from the peak of monkey fear to the pinnacle of sports event jubilation, were now laughing out loud like they’d all been told the world’s funniest joke all at once. The MPs were laughing, the retired factory workers who had been invited to see the fruits of their lifetimes of labor were laughing, I was laughing. All of us howling at the transparent, hilarious absurdity of the giant emotional whoop-dee-doo through which we’d all just careened.

Ha ha, heh, heh, whooooooooo….

And that was just in the parking lot.

WHERE IT ALL STARTED

The first F-16 took its first flight way back in 1974, the result of efforts by the Department of Defense to come up with a Lightweight Fighter (LWF) to replace the heavier F-15 and the aging F-4 Phantom II and, in the fleets of our allies, all the old F-104 Starfighters and F-105 Thunderchiefs, the latter which were interceptors built to stop Soviet bombers and were never meant to act as fighter jets and had thus earned the nickname “Widowmaker” among those unlucky enough to be assigned to them.

The F-16 came about as a competition between General Dynamics (now Lockheed Martin) and McDonnell Douglas, which proposed a twin-engine, twin-tailed successor to the heavier F-14 and F-15. The Air Force liked the F-16 and the Navy liked the F-18. Everybody was happy.

“The F-16 Fighting Falcon is a compact, multi-role fighter aircraft,” the Air Force says. “It is highly maneuverable and has proven itself in air-to-air combat and air-to-surface attack. It provides a relatively low-cost, high-performance weapon system for the United States and allied nations.”

Flexible Flyer

It can handle a number of tasks.