The Lockheed F-117 Nighthawk Stealth Fighter

The United States currently possesses a combat asset with capabilities not matched by known weapons of any other country: the F-117 Nighthawk Stealth Fighter. This aircraft can perform precision strikes on heavily-protected targets with little chance of being detected. In many cases, the defender's first alert of an attack is bombs going off. Along with this capability comes an interesting design and an exotic history. This document provides a history and description of the F-117 Stealth fighter.

The F-117 was a "black", ultra-secret program for much of its life, only emerging into public view in the late 1980s. The secret development of the F-117, the rumors and myths that surrounded it as it went into operation, and its emergence from the shadows make for an interesting story.

The Origins Of Stealth

The development of radar during World War II immediately led to the development of technologies to defeat it. Early countermeasures were simple and crude, including "chaff", strips of foil designed to provide a false radar echo, and radio-frequency (RF) jamming, in which intense radio signals were broadcast to drown out the radio signals being used by radar transmitters.

Such techniques became more sophisticated after the war, but many wondered if there might be a more elegant approach: make aircraft that were invisible to radar, or in more formal terms, to minimize the "radar signature" or "radar cross section (RCS)" of the aircraft.

Radar reflections tend to occur where aircraft structural elements meet at a right angle, such as the junction of the wing and fuselage. An incoming radar signal can bounce off the fuselage, strike the wing, and reflect back to the radar receiver. Other radar reflectors include sharp points on the aircraft; antennas; external stores such as bombs, fuel tanks or electronic pods; and the fan blades of turbojet engines exposed through the air intakes, causing radar "glint" as they spin around, similar to the reflections of light of a rotating disco ball.

Designing an aircraft minimize such reflections is complicated enough. Worse, the reflectivity of these different elements tends to change, drastically, as radar frequency increases or the viewing angle changes. For decades after the war, there was no realistic way to calculate all these effects.

Another approach to reducing RCS was to cover the aircraft with "radar-absorbing material (RAM)" that absorbed RF energy, preventing a signal from being reflected back to the radar receiver. In fact, in late 1958 a Lockheed T-33 trainer was covered with flexible RAM material and tested under a program named "Passport Visa". The results were disappointing. While the modified T-33 did have a lowered RCS, its flight handling was very poor, and the test program was discontinued.

The Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird reconnaissance aircraft, developed in the early 1960s, did incorporate "stealth" features that gave it a lower RCS, but it also carried "electronic countermeasures (ECM)" and flew at very high altitude and great speed, reducing its chances of detection accordingly. High-altitude Ryan Firebee reconnaissance drones developed in the early 1960s had stealth features, including a screen over the air intake and blankets of RAM material on the sides of the fuselage.

However, strike aircraft didn't have the luxury of avoiding air defenses, and during the Vietnam war the US Air Force (USAF) found that improved surface-to-air missiles (SAMs), along with better radars that punched through countermeasures, made air defenses tougher to crack. Formations of fighter-bombers had to be accompanied by of ECM and "defense-suppression" attack aircraft to keep losses down. The growing effectiveness of SAMs was emphasized by the 1973 Yom Kippur War in the Mideast, when the Israelis suffered large air losses to the Soviet-made mobile SA-6 missile launchers operated by their Arab adversaries. It became clear to a faction in US military aviation community that something had to be done to counteract improved air defenses.

In 1974, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) initiated a program known as PROJECT HARVEY, after a well-known comedy about an invisible giant rabbit, that requested designs of an "experimental survivable testbed (XST)" aircraft with a low RCS. Lockheed was not among the companies contacted by DARPA with this request, but in 1975 Ben Rich, an engineer who had worked on the secret Lockheed U-2 and SR-71 reconnaissance aircraft, got wind of the project and lobbied the government successfully to have Lockheed included.

Rich had the services of two Lockheed employees, mathematician Bill Schroeder and computer scientist Denys Overholser, to work on the XST program. Schroeder realized that it would be much easier to compute RCS if the shape of an aircraft could be reduced to a set of flat surfaces, or "facets". Schroeder approached Overholser with the idea, and within five weeks Overholser had written a computer program named "Echo I" that could determine the RCS of a "faceted" aircraft. Armed with Echo I, Schroeder came up with an initial XST design that he called the "Hopeless Diamond", and handed Ben Rich a sketch of it in May 1975.

In response, Rich asked how big the RCS of a practical version of the Hopeless Diamond would be: As big as a T-33? A Piper Cub? A condor? An eagle? An owl? Schroeder shot back: "Ben, try as big as an eagle's eyeball."

Not everyone was impressed by the Hopeless Diamond. Lockheed's prestigious Kelly Johnson disliked it, likely on the traditional aircraft designer's belief that "no aircraft that looked that ugly could possibly be any good." Johnson favored a flying-saucer-like design, but nobody could figure out how to make a saucer shape fly very well, and Rich commented later: "The Martians wouldn't tell us."

To strengthen his case, Rich had a three meter (ten foot) sized mockup of the Hopeless Diamond built and tested against radar in September 1975. The RCS proved to be as small as predicted.

By October 1975, the DARPA XST competition had been reduced to two finalists: one from Northrop, and a refined version of the Lockheed Hopeless Diamond. The Northrop entry was a delta with a faceted fuselage, with the jet engine mounted on the back and the intake above the cockpit. A fine mesh screen sealed the air intake from radar, while a pair of tilted fins hid the exhaust.

The Lockheed design had two wings with a sweep of 72.5 degrees and a pointed rear fuselage, giving the rear of the aircraft a "W" outline. Twin intakes were placed along the cockpit and covered with grilles, while the exhausts were arranged as long slots along the rear fuselage. Such "platypus nozzles" reduced the "infrared signature" of the exhaust, which was also concealed by twin inward-canted fins.

Since RCS is a function of viewing angle, both designs were optimized to have the lowest RCS from the bottom and front, the most probable viewing angle of adversary ground defenses. Northrop and Lockheed built one-third scale models in December 1975. The models were put through preliminary RCS tests, and full-scale models were tested the next year.

The Lockheed design had a tenth of the RCS of the Northrop design. It was so invisible to radar that a radar operator performing tests on the model at White Sands, New Mexico, thought it had fallen off the pole. Bird droppings increased the RCS by 50 percent, and so the model had to be regularly cleaned. Lockheed won the competition in April 1976. The Northrop team was heartbroken, even though their engineers admitted Lockheed had the better design. They returned to their calculations and would eventually catch up with Lockheed at the stealth game, with the B-2 Spirit bomber.

The Lockheed contract specified construction of a pair of XST aircraft for flight and RCS tests, with $32.6 million USD provided by DARPA and the USAF. Lockheed had to furnish $10.4 million USD more out of its own pocket, which was a big risk at the time, since Lockheed was in difficult financial circumstances.

The Have Blue Demonstrators

Interestingly, up to this time PROJECT HARVEY was not a secret program, and in fact had been mentioned in the aerospace press. When the Carter Administration took office in early 1977, Bill Perry, an influential defense undersecretary for research and engineering and later defense secretary in the Clinton Administration, learned of how dramatic the results of the model tests had been. Perry immediately saw to it that program became secret. Responsibility was transferred from the mostly-civilian DARPA to the USAF Special Projects Office, and funding was increased. Orders went out stating that the word "stealth" was not be used in unclassified documents, and the program was assigned a meaningless two-word codename: HAVE BLUE.

The first of the two HAVE BLUE demonstrators was intended for aerodynamic tests. Faceting had an interesting consequence: unlike almost every other aircraft ever built, HAVE BLUE's wings did not have a curved cross-section, being composed instead of flat planes. Its aerodynamics were suspicious, and in fact the machine was so unstable that it had to be controlled by a computerized fly-by-wire system. The first prototype was needed to ensure that the design could fly at all. The second would be a more finished product that would be used for stealth demonstrations.

The HAVE BLUE prototypes were 17.25 meters (38 feet) long, with a wingspan of 10.2 meters (22.5 feet) and a weight of 5.67 tonnes (12,500 pounds). Each was powered by a pair of General Electric J85-GE-4A engines with 13.1 kN (1,340 kgp / 2,950 lbf) each, obtained from Navy T-2B Buckeye trainers. Other scavenged equipment included the fly-by-wire system, modified from the F-16A fighter; and ejection seat, landing gear, and cockpit instrumentation taken from an F-5 fighter.

The HAVE BLUE prototypes had no provisions for weapons or inflight refueling. They were strictly demonstrators, with a flight endurance of only an hour. The two aircraft were assembled in a secure section of the Lockheed Burbank, California, plant. They were numbered "1001" and "1002".

HAVE BLUE 1001 was completed in November 1977, and put through initial static tests at the Burbank plant. Its wings were removed and the aircraft was sent by a C-5 Galaxy transport to the secret test facility at Groom Lake, Nevada, where it was reassembled.

HAVE BLUE 1001 was painted in a broken camouflage scheme of gray, black, and tan to confuse anyone who might be able to steal a glimpse of it. Extreme security measures accompanied the first flight of the aircraft on 1 December 1977. The ugly-looking little aircraft handled surprisingly well, and most of the deficiencies in handling were corrected by tweaking the fly-by-wire system software. Unfortunately, it was not so easy to correct the fact that the aircraft landed like a flatiron, and on its 37th flight, on 4 May 1978, HAVE BLUE 1001 hit the runway a little too hard and had to lift off for a another pass instead of going into a skid.

The hard landing had bent the right main gear strut. The landing gear had been retracted after the "touch and go", and now the right main gear leg wouldn't go back down again. Despite many attempts, there was no way to get the gear down. Critically low on fuel, Lockheed test pilot Bill Park decided to eject and let the aircraft crash into the desert. Park took a serious back injury in the attempt, ending his career as a test pilot. The smashed-up HAVE BLUE 1001 prototype was bulldozed under the desert, and it is said that now nobody knows exactly where it is. News of the crash leaked to the press, and some vague comments were made about the possible existence of "stealth" aircraft.

HAVE BLUE 1002 was delivered in July 1978, making its first flight on 20 July. Unlike the first prototype, the second was painted light gray and was actually covered with RAM. Tests against friendly and adversary radar systems demonstrated phenomenal results: While HAVE BLUE was by no means completely invisible to radar, its RCS was far lower than that of a conventional aircraft. Most Soviet SAM radar systems could not detect the aircraft until it was right on top of them.

Achieving such results wasn't trivial. Before takeoff, doors and access panels were sealed off with metallic tape, and once the pilot was in the cockpit the edges of the canopy were sealed with RAM applied as paint. On one test, the plane proved to be far more visible to radar than it had been before. A close inspection revealed three screws that hadn't been tightened and were sticking up a millimeter or two.

HAVE BLUE 1002 was lost on its 52nd flight, on 11 July 1979, when a hydraulic leak set the aircraft on fire. The pilot, Lieutenant Colonel Ken Dyson, ejected safely, but the prototype was destroyed. Like its predecessor, it was buried under the desert.

The loss did not delay the stealth effort since the test program was almost over, with only one more flight scheduled. The secret of HAVE BLUE would be kept for over a decade. Although the code name would be published in AVIATION WEEK magazine in 1981 and the program would be acknowledged by the government in 1988, pictures of HAVE BLUE 1001 were only released in 1991. However, by the time the second HAVE BLUE prototype was lost, speculations on stealth were beginning to appear in the press, and in 1980 fuzzy reports on the technology appeared in publications such as AVIATION WEEK and THE WASHINGTON POST.

The reports were generally inaccurate, but they presented the Carter Administration with the choice of ignoring the reports; denying or obscuring them; or confirming them. Partly influenced by the damage to American prestige by the Iranian hostage crisis and the botched attempt to rescue the hostages, on 22 August 1980, the Carter Administration publicly acknowledged the existence of the stealth program, though no details were released. The announcement led to wild speculations in the press, and fingerpointing and accusations of "grandstanding" in the political arena. If the Carter Administration had hoped to enhance their credibility with the announcement, it didn't work, and when Ronald Reagan was elected and took office early the next year, the stealth program went totally black and invisible.

Senior Trend - almost an F-117

In the meantime, stealth was moving towards operational status. The Air Force was impressed by the flight tests of HAVE BLUE 1001, and in mid-1978 Lockheed suggested two designs for an actual weapons system: a medium bomber with four engines and a two-man crew, and a single-seat twin-engine strike fighter. The Air Force preferred the strike fighter concept, and issued a design contract to Lockheed for such an aircraft in November 1978. The aircraft was given the code name SENIOR TREND.

The SENIOR TREND aircraft was a direct outgrowth of the HAVE BLUE prototypes, with many changes to turn the design into a practical combat aircraft. HAVE BLUE's wings had a sharp sweep of 72.5 degrees, which gave it the flatiron flight characteristics that had led to the loss of the first prototype. As a result, the sweep of SENIOR TREND's wings was reduced to 67.5 degrees, and the wings were extended as far back as possible.

Another visible change was in the positioning of the tailfins. HAVE BLUE's tailfins had tilted inward in order to conceal the exhaust, but this had proved self-defeating, since the tailfins reflected heat back to the ground. SENIOR TREND's tailfins were tilted outward in a vee, or "butterfly", configuration. This improved the aircraft's controllability and did not compromise stealth.

SENIOR TREND was fitted with the systems required by an operational aircraft, including proper avionics and cockpit instrumentation; formation and anticollision lights; brake parachute and runway arresting hook; additional fuel tanks; an inflight refueling receptacle; and a long list of other items. To reduce the maintenance required to keep the aircraft stealthy, service access to aircraft subsystems was established through wheel wells and weapons bays, while all the avionics were consolidated in a single bay.

SENIOR TREND's teeth consisted of a pair of 900 kilogram (2,000-pound) laser guided bombs (LGBs), each in its own weapons bay. The bombs were loaded on a trapeze system that extended them out of the weapons bay for release. Matching a stealth strike aircraft to a precision munition like the LGB implied a new approach to bombing: instead of sending a formation of bombers to plaster a target, a single aircraft would attack a single target with a precision weapon and destroy the target in a single pass: "first shot first kill".

Since active sensors like radar advertised an aircraft's presence, the SENIOR TREND aircraft navigated with an internal inertial navigation system (INS). Long-range targeting was through a forward-looking infrared (FLIR) camera mounted in a turret in the nose, set in a well just in front of the cockpit and covered with a fine mesh. The mesh was heated to keep it from icing up in cold weather. A second downward-looking infrared (DLIR) camera, mated to a laser target designator, was mounted under the nose, also in a well covered with a mesh. The DLIR camera was used for close-range targeting. The FLIR and DLIR were "ganged" so they tracked the same scene, displaying their images in a head-up display (HUD) that the pilot could in principle switch from the FLIR to the DLIR as he approached the target.

SENIOR TREND was about twice as big as HAVE BLUE. It was 20 meters (65.9 feet) long, with a wingspan of 13.2 meters (43.25 feet), and an empty weight of 13.6 tonnes (30,000 pounds). The canopy was heavily framed and had poor visibility. The mid-air refueling receptacle was positioned behind the cockpit. The door over the receptacle had serrated edges to reduce radar reflection, as did the landing gear doors and canopy leading edge.

SENIOR TREND was mostly built out of aluminum, though titanium was used around the engines. It was powered by twin General Electric F404-GE-F1D2 turbofans, like those of the F/A-18 Hornet fighter but without afterburners, providing 48.1 kN (4,900 kgp / 10,800 lbf) thrust each. The intakes were covered by grilles, which were electrically heated to prevent them from icing up. The pilot could also activate lights on either side of the cockpit to allow him to check the intake grilles for icing.

Cockpit equipment, including HUD, multifunction & sensor displays, and hands-on-throttle-and-stick (HOTAS) controls, also came from the F/A-18. Sensor displays were borrowed from the OV-10D Bronco observation aircraft and the P-3C Orion ocean-patrol aircraft; the navigation system was obtained from the B-52; with other systems taken from the SR-71, C-130, L-1011, and F-104. The pilot sat in a standard ACES ejection seat, with the heavy canopy blown off by explosive rams before ejection.

The end result of all this work was an ugly aircraft. Among the nicknames assigned to it, "Cockroach" was one of the most descriptive. It was angular and flattened, resembling a chipped obsidian arrowhead. Four probes on the nose provided airspeed and other data, enhancing the aircraft's "buglike" appearance.

Like HAVE BLUE, SENIOR TREND was aerodynamically unstable. It would be referred to on occasion as the "Wobblin' Goblin", and as Lockheed test pilot Hal Farley later put it: "The only thing it doesn't do is tip back on its tail when parked." As with HAVE BLUE, it used a fly-by-wire system to maintain stability in flight. The fly-by-wire system was derived from that used on the F-16A, and had quadruple redundancy to ensure operational reliability.

A wooden mock-up of SENIOR TREND was completed in late 1979. In December of that year, Lockheed was awarded a contract to build five full scale development (FSD) test aircraft and fifteen production aircraft. First flight was set for July 1980. Development proved anything but easy, however, with technical problems compounded by the death of Ben Rich's wife from a heart attack. After much trouble, the first FSD aircraft, designated number 780, was secretly rolled out of the Burbank plant in the spring of 1981 and shipped to Groom Lake by a Lockheed C-5 Galaxy transport. The designation numbers, by the way, were assigned almost at random as a security measure.

Number 780 took to the air on 18 June 1981, and demonstrated unfriendly flight characteristics that led to changes in the fly-by-wire system and a 50% scale-up of the tailfins. In the meantime, the other four FSD systems were shipped out to Groom Lake, with the last arriving in early 1982. The first two of the five, numbers 780 and 781, were aerodynamic test aircraft, while the last three, numbers 782, 783, and 784, were fully-fitted production test aircraft. They were named the "Baja Scorpions".

Number 780 had originally been painted in a camouflage scheme somewhat like that used with HAVE BLUE 1001, while the other four aircraft were originally painted gray. Some were said to have had the Lockheed Skunk Works logo on the tail, while number 784 had a picture of "Pete's Dragon", a cartoon dragon from the Disney film of the same name. This was in honor of Colonel Pete Winter, the commanding officer at Groom Lake, with the inside joke that in the movie the hero Pete was the only one who could see the dragon. Ultimately all the FSD aircraft were painted black and given inconspicuous USAF markings.

Further flight tests of the FSD aircraft demonstrated more aerodynamic problems, as well as de-icing troubles. The dual FLIR-DLIR targeting system proved a particular nuisance, since it proved tricky to align the two turrets to boresight together, and the hand-off between the two imagers on the HUD suffered from a number of glitches. Lockheed engineers devised a new scheme for aligning the two turrets by rolling the aircraft up a ground ramp so the two turrets could be focused on the same target.

Other technical glitches were hunted down until the aircraft worked reliably. RCS tests demonstrated the aircraft's invisibility to radar. It had about the same RCS as a seagull. Despite the basic aerodynamic nastiness of the design, it flew well, though as it was a delta-wing design it had a long take-off run and landed "hot". The drag chute was used as a standard practice to reduce landing roll.

While the test pilots and engineers were working the bugs out of the FSD aircraft, the USAF was preparing an operational unit to make use of the new weapon. The 4450th Tactical Group was established in October 1979, but training activities did not start until June 1981, about the time the first FSD aircraft took to the sky. The 4450th initially consisted of a few dozen pilots and ground crew. At first, training was conducted on cockpit mock-ups. The pilots were presently given Vought A-7D "SLUF" strike aircraft to provide a cover story, allow them to keep their flight skills from rusting, and for use as chase aircraft. The 4450th, officially, was a technical evaluation unit.

In the meantime, the Air Force was building a base for the black aircraft, the Tonopah Test Range (TTR), in Nevada north of Groom Lake. Security was tight from the start. Living facilities were at first very austere, but later better accommodations were provided. Rooms had black-out curtains to let pilots and crew sleep during the day, since the SENIOR TREND aircraft were to operate at night to help keep the secret.

The first production aircraft, number 785, was delivered to Groom Lake in the spring of 1982. It crashed and was destroyed on take-off on 20 April, badly injuring the pilot, Bob Ridenauer of Lockheed, who never flew again. The accident was traced to reversed wiring in the flight control system. Number 786 was delivered to Groom Lake in June and used for flight testing.

SENIOR TREND 787 was the first of the black aircraft to be flown by the 4450th, making its first operational flight on 15 October 1982. By Christmas, several more SENIOR TRENDs had been delivered to TTR, and the F-117A Nighthawk, as the aircraft had been formally named, was in business.

F-117 Nighthawk Stealth Fighter - flying In The Dark

As the F-117s trickled into Tonopah, operations evolved into a schedule. Flight crews were shuttled there each Monday afternoon on a chartered airliner from Nellis Air Force Base, after spending the weekend home with their families. On arriving at Tonopah, they would be given a briefing on the night's mission.

Hangar doors were not opened until an hour after dark. For the first year of operations, flight operations were restricted to the Nellis range. Permission to perform off-range operations had to be given by the President himself. Flight routes were defined to avoid populated areas, and some routes were not used if the Moon was more than 50% full. Pilot communications and transponder signals were defined so that the aircraft mimicked an A-7.

Training flights were conducted in two waves, one early and one late in the night. The missions simulated precision strikes on local targets, such as the crossroads of two dirt roads or a shanty in the wilderness. The missions ended before sunrise, since it was found that a pilot found it hard to go to sleep if he went to bed after sunrise.

A pilot might fly up to a dozen missions each month in the F-117, along with a half-dozen A-7D flights. Each week was grueling, and by the time the pilots were shuttled back to Nellis on Friday afternoon, to be forced back into a day-night cycle for the weekend, they were wrecks, a factor that would have lethal consequences. The week-long absence from home and the fact that the crews could not tell their families anything about what they were doing contributed to the stress.

In compensation, the pilots found it challenging and exciting to break new ground in air combat tactics. As air defenses had improved over the decades, strike aircraft had learned to hug the terrain, but the F-117 could fly into enemy airspace at altitude and drop its LGBs in a relatively leisurely and highly accurate fashion.

The enthusiasm for the F-117 grew to the point where the Air Force wanted more of them. The original plan had been for a single squadron of 18 aircraft, organized for special operations, but the plan was expanded to an entire wing, with three 18-aircraft squadrons. Lockheed would build a total of 59 production F-117s, with the second squadron activated in July 1983, and the third going into operation in October 1985. A total of over $6 billion USD would be spent building the F-117s.

The pilots doubted that an entire wing of F-117s was practical unless the secrecy was ended. As long as the aircraft was a secret, it could not be used in major training exercises, and the logistics of maintaining secrecy for an entire wing would be expensive.

Despite this, the F-117 remained "black", helped by the fact that it was kept out of action. A handful of F-117s were apparently committed to a strike on terrorist targets in southern Lebanon in response to the devastating car-bomb attack on the US Marines barracks in Beruit on 23 October 1983, but the mission was called off at the last moment.

Similarly, the F-117 was considered for use in OPERATION EL DORADO CANYON, the air strike on Libya in retaliation for the bombing of a Berlin discotheque on 5 April 1986. Once again, the use of the F-117 was called off at the last moment, and the raid was performed by conventional Air Force and Navy strike aircraft on 15 April 1986, which hit five targets with the loss of one F-111 bomber.

Despite the security around the F-117, there were leaks. Articles on the rumored stealth aircraft appeared in the aerospace press, and by 1983 mostly inaccurate artist's concepts of the aircraft, referred to as the "F-19", were published. These reports had little public impact until 1986, when Testors Corporation released a model kit of the F-19. While Testors had no specific information on the F-117, their model design was based on company research on RCS, and in fact Testors performed RCS tests on their models. The kit was very popular, and was even featured in Congressional hearings that were convened to discuss security leaks.

A speculative model based on no specific details didn't really constitute solid evidence of a secret program. Then, not long after the release of the model, undeniable evidence of the existence of a secret aircraft program was provided by accident.

The F-117 pilots had so far tolerated the stressful conditions under which they flew the secret aircraft, but over time the probability of a mishap crept upwards. In the early hours of 11 July 1986, Major Ross Mulhare took off from TTR on a training mission to California. A family group at a rest stop near Bakersfield observed an unusual-looking aircraft flying in the dark at low altitude. They took pictures of it until it disappeared over a hill, and then heard two violent explosions.

The Air Force quickly sealed off the area and confiscated the pictures. Mulhare's F-117 had been almost entirely destroyed and Mulhare had been killed instantly. Investigators determined that the probable cause of the accident had been what the military calls "Controlled Flight Into Terrain (CFIT)". In simpler terms, the fatigued Mulhare had flown straight into the ground.

Simple weariness had now become a deadly problem, and pilots were increasingly monitored for signs of fatigue. Unfortunately, the night-shift operations of the 4450th were inherently tiring, and on the night of 14 October 1987, another F-117 pilot, Major Michael C. Stewart, was lost in an F-117. Major Stewart crashed into the desert on the Nellis range, creating a crater in the dirt. He never attempted to eject, and his death was also attributed to CFIT.

The press got word of the accident, and interest increased when a week later an A-7D piloted by a 4450th officer crashed into the lobby of a hotel near Indianapolis, Indiana. The pilot ejected, but nine people were killed in the hotel. The press speculated that the stealth fighter was a modified A-7D, or that A-7Ds were being used as adversaries in stealth fighter training operations. The pressure to take the F-117 program out of the black was increasing. Daylight operations would greatly reduce pilot fatigue and slow down the accident rate, and besides, the aircraft would be much more useful if it could participate in training exercises with conventional military forces.

In the meantime, leaks accelerated. Rumors about faceting began to surface in 1986, and in September 1987, Testors released a model kit of a hypothetical Soviet stealth aircraft, the "MiG-37B", that featured faceting. In early 1988, a military journal correctly revealed that the American stealth aircraft was designated the F-117 Nighthawk.

Finally, on 10 November 1988, the Pentagon formally issued a press release that outlined the history of the F-117, providing a very ambiguous photograph of the aircraft along with the release. No technical details were announced. The aircraft would not be put on public display until April 1990, when a pair of F-117s put on a show for the press. After that time, F-117s began to appear at airshows. When operating in civilian airspace, the aircraft is fitted with a radar reflector to allow commercial air-control radars to spot it!

The F-117s began flying daylight missions and were observed on several instances by the public. With no need to maintain a cover story, the A-7Ds, which were expensive to operate, were retired, and replaced by T-38 Talon trainers to act as chase planes and to allow the pilots to keep up their flight hours. The 4450th Tactical Fighter Group was renamed the 37th Tactical Fighter Wing in October 1989. Now the only thing left to do was put the black aircraft to use.

Lockheed F-117 Nighthawk Stealth Fighter In Action

The F-117 saw its first combat in December 1989, in OPERATION JUST CAUSE, the American invasion of Panama. Antagonism between the Americans and Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega had led US President George Bush to order that Noriega be removed from power by force. F-117s were assigned to perform pinpoint bombing strikes as diversions to ground operations. Since the Panamanians had no serious air defenses, the selection of the F-117 for the mission was based on its precision bombing capability, not stealth. The primary mission was for two F-117s to drop laser-guided bombs near Panamanian Defense Forces barracks in order to stun and confuse the defenders. Two others were to be on hand to back up an attempt to capture General Noriega, and two more came along as spares.

The six aircraft left Tonopah on the evening of 19 December and flew to Panama with the help of mid-air refueling. The attempt to capture Noriega didn't come off, and in the end only the two F-117s assigned to the primary target actually performed strikes. There was some confusion at the last moment and the aircraft missed their aim points, though the effect was as desired. In any case, US military forces proved well-organized and efficient, and by the next day Panama was in American hands.

The use of the F-117 in the operation seemed to many as overkill, and public criticism of what appeared to be a Pentagon publicity stunt was loud and strident. It was not a very impressive combat introduction. Something more challenging was needed.

In the early morning hours of 2 August 1990, three Iraqi armored divisions invaded the neighboring country of Kuwait. Kuwait fell quickly, and Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was then in a position to move into Saudi Arabia and assert control over the world's oil supplies. He stayed where he was, however, and within days American forces began to flow into Saudi Arabia.

On 20 August, F-117s left Tonopah to fly across the Atlantic to King Khaled Air Base in Saudi Arabia, arriving the next day. Their new home was at the southern tip of Saudi Arabia, well out of range of Iraqi Scud tactical ballistic missiles, and was well-equipped with hardened shelters. It became known as "Tonopah East", with the similarities in environment possibly being a factor in the selection of the name. The F-117 pilots soon began an intensive training program, since few of the pilots had combat experience in any sort of aircraft.

In the meantime, the confrontation with the Iraqis settled into a sitting war, with both sides trading propaganda and jockeying for political position. On 12 January 1991, the US Congress voted to allow the use of force to remove the Iraqis from Kuwait, in support of a UN resolution demanding that Saddam pull out of the country. On 15 January, the deadline specified by the UN resolution expired. The next day, F-117 pilots were briefed for their strikes. They would be among the leading elements in the air war, knocking out air-defense centers and other vital elements in the Iraqi war machine to allow conventional strike aircraft to make further raids unharmed. Baghdad, the capital of Iraq, was a prime target, and was defended by about 4,000 anti-aircraft guns and SAM launchers. The targets were at long range for the F-117, and the pilots would have to perform several inflight refuelings for each mission.

At 2:35 AM that following morning, Iraqi flak guns began firing into the skies over Baghdad, despite the fact that the air attacks hadn't begun yet. At 2:39 AM, US Army Apache helicopter gunships fired the first shots in the air war by knocking out early warning radars near the Iraqi border. By this time, eight F-117s were moving into Iraqi airspace, along with F-15E Strike Eagles that were assigned to destroy Scud missile launch sites in Iraq. At 2:51 AM, one of the F-117s dropped a laser-guided bomb on a bunker that contained an air-defense control center. The hardened bomb blew off the bunker's doors.

At 2:56 AM, the aimless firing from Baghdad went silent. There had been nothing to shoot at, though ironically the stealth fighters were just approaching the city, completely undetected. Moments later they hit communications centers; Iraqi Air Force Headquarters; an air-defense center; and one of Saddam Hussein's palaces. The Baghdad air defenses opened up again, while F-117s that still had bombs went on to hit secondary objectives. Minutes later, starting at 3:06 AM, a wave of Tomahawk cruise missiles began to hit leadership targets, such as the Iraqi Baath Party headquarters. Tomahawks armed with warheads that spewed out spools of conductive fibers shorted out power stations, knocking out the power grid.

At 3:30 AM, Iraqi air defenses picked up a huge attack force heading toward Baghdad. In reality it was a fleet of decoy drones, backed up by conventional strike aircraft carrying high-speed antiradiation missiles, or HARMs. As the air-defense radars locked onto the drones, the HARMs knocked out the radars.

At 4:00 AM, the second wave of F-117s hit Baghdad. Approach to the city was a fearsome experience. From 150 kilometers (95 miles) away, one pilot described it as looking like "a charcoal grill on the fourth of July", glowing with the fire of massed anti-aircraft guns. The Nighthawks hit some of the same targets bombed in the first wave, as well as air bases and command-and-control sites all over Iraq. The first two waves dropped 33 LGBs and scored 23 hits. A third and final wave came in just before dawn to hit chemical and biological weapons bunkers. It was felt that sunlight would help kill anthrax spores scattered from the bioweapons sites. Unfortunately, cloudy weather made targeting difficult, and of 16 LGBs dropped, only five scored hits.

The F-117s returned to their Saudi Arabian base, their pilots feeling washed out and exhausted, glad to be alive. Much to their surprise, all of them came back. Despite worries, stealth worked. The F-117s had attacked one of the most heavily defended target areas on the planet with complete impunity.

Over the next few days the F-117s returned to Iraq with confident pilots. The Iraqis poured anti-aircraft fire into the night sky over Baghdad, almost at random and without effect. One pilot simply lowered his seat so he couldn't be distracted by the fireworks, allowing him to concentrate on his target run.

A daylight attempt to attack Baghdad with conventional strike aircraft on 19 January failed, causing little damage to the target and the loss of two F-16s. From that point on, only F-117s or Tomahawks were used to attack the city. The F-117s continued the assaults on command-and-control centers, chemical-biological weapons dumps, and other targets. On 21 January, the Nighthawks hit and crippled a nuclear research facility in Baghdad, putting it out of operation. The Iraqis didn't know an attack was in progress until the bombs detonated.

The next night, F-117s followed up daylight raids by F-111 strike aircraft to hit Iraqi Air Force hardened aircraft shelters. The strikes were made with conventional LGBs, however, and failed to dent the shelters. The Iraqis began to hide more of their aircraft away in the shelters. The night after that, the F-117s destroyed a set of Iraqi bombers that intelligence indicated were being loaded for a chemical attack, but the aircraft in the shelters remained safe for the moment.

The USAF realized the error and re-armed the F-117s with hardened penetrator bombs. On the night of 24 January, they struck the shelters again, scoring 20 hits that punched into the shelters and gutted them. Two days later, the Iraqi Air Force began to flee to Iran, where the aircraft were interned and repainted with Iranian markings. F-117 strikes on the shelters were stepped up to destroy as many Iraqi aircraft as possible before they could fly out of reach.

On 27 January, General Norman Schwarzkopf, head of Coalition forces, shifted most of the air assets from attacks on Iraq to strikes on Iraqi forces in Kuwait. Only the F-117s and F-111s continued attacks on Iraq itself. On 5 February, the F-111s were shifted to attacks on Kuwait, leaving Iraq to the F-117s. For the following weeks, the F-117s continued their strikes, while the Iraqis poured antiaircraft fire into the sky in a vain hope of hitting one of them. They never scratched them, justifying the nickname the Saudis had given the aircraft: "shaba", Arabic for "ghost".

Then, in the early morning hours of 13 February two F-117s hit a command bunker in Baghdad. This bunker happened to also be housing a number of the families of the Iraqi elite, and the Iraqi press loudly denounced the slaughter, claiming that the bunker was really an "air-raid shelter" and had been deliberately targeted to kill civilians. The result was that General Schwarzkopf declared leadership targets off-limits and halted strikes on Baghdad.

The F-117s kept busy anyway, hitting Iraqi chemical, biological, and nuclear warfare centers in the rest of the country. Bad weather dogged the strikes, reducing visibility and bombing effectiveness, though when the skies were clear the results of the attacks were devastating. The Nighthawks were also assigned to other well-defended targets as opportunities arose.

It was not until the night of 27 February 1991 that the F-117s returned to Baghdad, going "downtown" with two waves of strikes that did particular damage to the Baath Party Headquarters. A third wave was called off, and a short time later a cease-fire was announced. The Gulf War was over. The 40 F-117s assigned to the conflict had flown more than 1,270 missions and had dropped 30% of all the precision-guided munitions used in the war.

Lockheed F-117 Nighthawk Stealth Fighter after The Gulf War

The F-117s began to return to Tonopah on 1 April and began to relocate to Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico, where the pilots did not have to be separated from their families, nor shuttled at expense to and from the desert. The transfer required the setup of new facilities at Holloman, including a RAM spray facility. By early July, the Black Jets had a new home and a new name, the 49th Tactical Fighter Wing.

The F-117 crews now performed their training flights in a more comfortable environment, although one aircraft was lost on 4 August 1991, when it caught on fire after takeoff. The pilot ejected safely, but the aircraft was completely destroyed.

A detachment of F-117s had remained in Saudi Arabia at Tonopah East after the end of the Gulf War to help enforce sanctions against Iraq. After numerous violations of the cease-fire agreement, on 13 January 1991, six of the Nighthawks performed strikes on air-defense targets in southern Iraq. Results were mixed, due to bad weather, but overall the strikes achieved their goals.

The F-117 was also used to some unknown extent during the occasional confrontations between the USAF and Iraqi air-defense systems during the 1990s. In some cases, F-117s were armed with AGM-88 HARM anti-radar missiles. F-16Cs would fly at a standoff distance from the area where air-defense sites were believed to be operating, while F-117s flew over the area. When an air-defense radar lit up, an F-117 would hit it with a HARM.

F-117s played a role in the opening phases of the American invasion of Iraq in the spring of 2003. They were used on quick-reaction strikes in attempts to kill Saddam Hussein and other Iraqi leadership by bombing bunkers with deep-penetration bombs. However, Saddam Hussein was always careful to move around a lot in an unpredictable fashion. He would be captured by occupation forces later and his two sons killed in a firefight.

Three more F-117s have been lost. One crashed into the Zuni Tribal Reservation on 5 April 1995. It was apparently another case of CFIT, and the pilot was killed.

Another F-117 broke up during an airshow near Baltimore, Maryland, on 14 September 1997, with the pilot ejecting safely. The crash was partly caught on video and occurred during a series of other accidents involving Air Force planes, giving it a high public profile. The 53 surviving F-117s were grounded while the problem was investigated. It turned out to be due to the failure of a control surface.

The third loss was the first combat casualty for the F-117. The Nighthawk returned to active combat in the spring of 1999, when it participated in air attacks on Serbia and Kosovo as part of OPERATION ALLIED FORCE, the NATO response to Serbian aggressions in Kosovo. In the early morning hours of 28 March 1999, an F-117 was shot down by Serbian air defenses. US defense experts eventually concluded the shoot-down was the result of poor mission planning, which plotted the same flight path over enemy territory four times in a row, and left the stealth aircraft unprotected by electronic countermeasures aircraft. The Serbs figured out the pattern and shot it down more or less by "Mark 1 Eyeball". The pilot was quickly rescued. However, in another embarrassment, the wreckage of the F-117 was not promptly bombed, and the Serbs invited their Russian allies to inspect the remains.

The USAF has an ambivalent attitude towards the F-117. After the Gulf War, the US Congress opposed the Air Force's effort to buy 72 new F-16 fighters, citing claims that the F-117 was "eight times more effective" than the F-16, and so the service could buy a much smaller number of F-117s to obtain the same effect.

This was not a story that USAF brass liked to hear. The F-117 was designed as a specialized aircraft, more or less a covert operations weapon, and for the majority of missions an F-16 could do the job much better and more cheaply. The F-117 lacked range, munitions capacity, flexibility, and was relatively expensive to operate. The service strongly opposed restarting production of the F-117, and no more Nighthawks were built.

However, for the missions for which the F-117 was designed, nothing else can touch it, and it remains one of the USAF's most valuable combat aircraft. Flight duty in the type is regarded as an elite job, and pilots tend to be very experienced in other types of combat aircraft.

The aircraft poses challenges. Visibility from the faceted cockpit is poor, and is believed to have contributed to the CFIT accidents. F-117s tend to fly together in a tandem configuration because of the the limited visibility, rather than wingtip-to-wingtip as in, say, an F-16.

The fact that the pilot must both fly and perform attacks by himself is another test of skill. The pilot must juggle multiple roles, allowing the autopilot system to direct him on final attack run to the target while he drops the bomb and guides it to its target.

Despite, or maybe because of, such challenges, one pilot calls it "a marvel to fly" and "more cerebral" than other fighters. Its pilots praise ability to perform extremely accurate strikes. They often simulate bombing "a guy's toolshed in his backyard, or something that small, just for practice."

Author: Greg Goebel