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To meet the needs of the U.S. Navy on an aircraft carrier, the Vought 1600 was significantly larger than the original Fighting Falcon, stretching the airframe by some three feet, with a 33-foot 3-inch wingspan that was a full two feet broader than the Air Force's version of the fighter.
Because the F-16’s design wouldn’t accommodate an all-weather missile system without extensive modifications, the Vought 1600 may have been able to manage carrier operations, but still wouldn’t meet the exacting needs of the branch.
The F-16 has been the US Air Force's workhorse fighter for more than 40 years. A carrier-capable F-16 almost did the same for the US Navy.
Vought 1600: The Plan To Put the F-16 on America’s Carriers It seems counterintuitive today, with the F-16 so expertly filling the role of an attack aircraft as well as a fighter, but the original concept behind the F-16 was to create a no-frills fighter built to do nothing but dominate the skies. The F-16 Fighting Falcon has been the U.S. Air Force’s workhorse fighter for more than forty years, and at one point, it looked like a carrier-capable version would do the same for the U.S. Navy. More than 4,600 F-16s have rolled out off the assembly line since it first took to the sky in 1974, ...