Pat Flannery wrote:
The F-117 team had a total of 240 people on it between Lockheed and the
Air Force personnel; over 2,000 Air Force personnel showed up at
Northrop's Palmdale plant to make sure that everything was on the
up-and-up with its design and costs... these 2,000 generated an average
of over _1,000,000_ pages of paperwork _per day_ while working on the
project, according to Ben Rich in his book "Skunk Works".

Ben Rich doesn't like supervision much, and tends to exaggerate. If
find it hard to credit that any individual could create 500 pages a
day.

Someone suggested that _all_ the paperwork should be made declassified,
as no one was ever going to find the important stuff in that forest of
wood pulp. Stamping "classified" on something simply attracted attention
to it.
So....was the program's security compromised?
Well, that Sukhoi Su-25 Frogfoot looked a lot like the Northrop A-9; the
design that lost to the Fairchild A-10... and so this little Russian
aircraft design shouldn't come as much of a surprise, either.
Comrade! Behold mighty M-67 LK-M stealth aircraft:
http://www.ussr-airspace.com/catalog...8/12155757.jpg
http://www.ussr-airspace.com/catalog...8/12155808.jpg
http://www.ussr-airspace.com/catalog...8/12155821.jpg
Is triumph of Russian aerodynamic genius!

Given the number of other design convergences, in aircraft as well as
other fields. One shouldn't be surprised.

Given that the site you cite is a drooling fanboy site which features
a repainted Orion
(http://www.ussr-airspace.com/catalog...ucts_id=18 56)
and a repainted U2
(http://www.ussr-airspace.com/catalog...ucts_id=15 10)

D.
--
Touch-twice life. Eat. Drink. Laugh.

-Resolved: To be more temperate in my postings.
Oct 5th, 2004 JDL