F-19 Stealth Fighter: The Most Questionable (and Beautiful) Aircraft of the Cold War | Aviation

John Andrews and the F-19 Myth: Connecting the Dots of Stealth.

The F-19 Stealth Fighter is a fictional aircraft, that became quite popular in the 1980s, thanks to the model kits from companies like Testors and Italeri, as well as by video games. It emerged from rumors and speculative designs about secret U.S. stealth technology before the actual stealth aircraft, the F-117 Nighthawk, was publicly revealed.

I had the privilege of writing the Preface to a new book on the F-19, “The Stealth Fighter” by Francesco Cotti, “a thrilling story of espionage, innovation, and passion, that reveals how a hobbyist’s dream became a reality and describes the incredible engineering adventure that led to the construction of the F-117 and the genesis of the most iconic model kit ever through one of the Cold War least known episodes, belonging to the years of great tension between the Soviet Union and the United States. A story inspired by actual events.”

When Francesco asked me to write the preface of his book I accepted for various reasons. Among them, the fact that the F-19 was one of the iconic aircraft of my youth. Born in 1975, my interest in aviation exploded in the mid-80s, a time when access to information was far more limited than…