But Ivry held off. Some on Ivry’s staff had serious doubts about whether eight F-15s could make the trip to Baghdad and back safely. For one thing, the F-15 engines had not proved reliable and had a high rate of mechanical failure and maintenance. Most damaging, the fighter did not have the range to fly round-trip without CFTs, special conformal fuel tanks that could be bolted to the sides of the fuselage above the wings, doubling the distance the plane could fly. The United States, under pressure from the Soviet union and Arab states to rein in Israel’s military and preserve the balance of power in the Middle East, refused to sell Israel the conformal tanks as part of its arms control cutback.
As the months went by, Ben-Nun grew more and more frustrated with what he considered Ivry’s foot-dragging. He argued that the Tel-Nof wing would have the CFTs by the time of the raid. Israel was already lobbying the U.S. Departments of State and Defense to amend the agreement and sell Israel the tanks. In addition, the Israeli defense industry had begun exploring the possibility of manufacturing its own external tanks. But Ivry worried about losing pilots, and the F-15 increased that risk.
Then, on February 1, 1979, events a thousand miles to the northeast literally changed Ivry’s world. A month after Jimmy Carter had toasted the shah of Iran, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, for maintaining an “island of stability” in his troubled corner of the world, the hollow-eyed, exiled Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini landed in Tehran with a chartered plane full of fanatical fundamentalist followers from Paris and proclaimed the Islamic revolution. Overnight the balance of power in the Middle East was reshuffled. For Ivry, it turned out to be a textbook example of the Law of Unintended Consequences.
Some weeks after the headlines had shaken statesmen and military planners from the Knesset to the Capitol, Defense Minister Ezer Weizman rang Ivry in his Tel Aviv headquarters. The U.S. Defense Department had just called, Weizman informed him. It seemed that the shah of Iran had negotiated a contract to purchase 160 of America’s new high-tech F-16 Fighting Falcon combat jets. The United States, not surprisingly, had canceled the contract following the revolution. General Dynamics Corporation, the plane’s San Diego–based manufacturer, was stuck with seventy-six of the aircraft scheduled for the production line, with the first eight already being assembled. Would Israel, Defense wanted to know, be interested in purchasing them?
Ivry could practically hear Weizman smiling to himself on the other end of the line.
“Ken!” Ivry said.
“Yes.” He would be happy to help the United States out. After all, what were friends for?
Conceived as a faster, smaller, lighter complement to the F-15, the single-engine F-16 went into experimental design and production at General Dynamics in 1975. The plane first flew in December 1976. Almost futuristic, designed for a single crewman, the fighter was the first aircraft to employ revolutionary space-age technology and manufacturing. Many of its parts were made of special composite materials that did not reflect radar beams and made tracking difficult, forerunners of the engineering that would eventually make possible the “invisible” stealth bomber.
Instead of the traditional mechanical control stick between the pilot’s legs, the F-16 operated by FBW, or fly by wire, a computerized control system guided by a pressure-sensitive handle on the right side of the plane that more resembled a Nintendo game stick. The handle sent electrical impulses from the control surfaces to a computer, which guided airspeed, lift, banking, sharp turns, dives—virtually all mechanical controls. A new computerized BITS, built-in test system, checked out the plane’s mechanical, electrical, navigational, communications, and weapons systems in seconds before takeoff—a process that would take techs and pilots in older fighters up to fifteen minutes, and still not cover a third of the internal mechanics BITS monitored.
The newly invented, Star Wars–like HUD, heads-up display, showed readouts on a see-through glass screen mounted at the pilot’s eye level so that during combat he could check G-loading, airspeed, mach number, altitude, and time- and distance-to-target readouts without ever having to take his eyes off the sky. He could also “click on” weapons icons to choose air-to-air missiles, machine guns, or bombs. The turning radius of the F-16 was one-half that of the F-4 and far better than any MiG’s. Such acute, radical turning tremendously increased the G forces pulling at the pilot. Fliers would normally black out at six or seven Gs, even wearing a pressurized G-suit. The cockpit seat in the F-16, however, was designed at a 30-degree tilt so that the pilot’s feet and buttocks were on the same level, making it harder for the pilot’s blood to leave the head and be pulled by negative Gs to the body’s extremities. The tilted seat allowed pilots to move with the plane and remain conscious at as much as nine Gs for short periods of time. And because the pilot sat in a glass bubble canopy nearly level with the fuselage (the origin of the plane’s derogatory nickname, the “glass coffin”), he could scan virtually 360 degrees and easily “check six,” that is, look all the way around for enemy planes on his tail.