Posted on 04/22/2008 11:08:48 AM PDT by jazusamo
The Air Force and Lockheed Martin are giving a secret retirement send-off to the world's first radar-evading fighter.
They were born shrouded in mystery in a windowless building in Burbank. They flew combat missions over Serbia and Iraq virtually invisible to enemy radar. And today, the black, bat-like F-117A Night Hawks will fly quietly into the night as stealthily as they came.
The last four of the world's first stealth fighters will make their final flights from Palmdale to a secret desert base in Nevada, where they will be locked up indefinitely in a secure concrete hangar.
But unlike the passing of other notable planes, there will be no public fanfare or farewell for these mysterious aircraft that revolutionized aerial warfare. The F-117 is still so cloaked in secrecy that only employees and retirees who worked on the program can attend its retirement ceremony at Lockheed Martin Corp.'s Skunk Works plant in Palmdale. A few aerospace reporters have been invited, but they had to be U.S. citizens.
"Some aspects of the plane are still classified," said Dianne Knippel, spokeswoman for Lockheed, whose legendary Skunk Works design house, formerly in Burbank and now in Palmdale, developed and built the aircraft.
The hushed send-off is no surprise to aviation buffs and historians who have followed one of the nation's most secretive aircraft programs since the Pentagon covertly launched it more than 30 years ago.
"It reflects a hyper-security culture that has accompanied this thing since the beginning," said John Pike, a defense policy analyst with . "It's the nation's first stealth technology, and as a result you might imagine all the caution with security."
The single-seat F-117 was the first plane that could evade radar detection; it was designed to fly into heavily defended areas to knock out radar installations and anti-aircraft missile...
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
That’s cool. Do you happen to have a hi res of that one?
A design like that probably couldn't have flown in the 1960’s. It was only because of subsequent improvements in the speed and data storage of on-board flight control computers that it was able to fly beginning in the late70’s/early 80’s. There is a great book by Ben Rich on Lockheed's Skunk Works and the development of the SR-71, F-117, etc.
...but ya have to put the (RET) behind your name.
lol
That’s a valid point but all they’d have to display is a shell and by the time they’d get one probably nothing would be classified.
The AF museum at Wright Patterson has either a great mock-up or one of the prototypes there if I am not mistaken.
Yep, freep me your email and I will Fwd: it to you.
That’s a great pic, I just ripped it off with your permission. :)
Wright-Patterson Museum already has one (F-117), plus a B-2 and an F-22.
I’d like to see them go to Israel.
She could put them to good use.
Last four? Only four left, or the last four to go into storage?
I’m very surprised by that.
I was just there last fall, still trying to figure how they shoe-horned the B-52 into that building....
They sure could, preferably like tomorrow.
I thought the same thing when I read it, I’m sure they’re the last four to go to storage.
Who the heck knows, may be they already have loaned a few out to them. Wouldn’t put it past Cheney to do something like that.
You mean the B-36?
They parked it on the concrete and then put up the building around it.
Irony.
It took a much more sophisticated computer to enable the F-117 (and others) to even FLY, than it took for the Apollo capsules to get to the moon.
BTW, the Habu is my favorite.
Ever noticed that from the front, they look like a STAR WARS POD RACER?
I’m sure his approving the F-117 was an accident. LOL!
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