Air Force retiring F-117 stealth fighters

Air Force retiring F-117 stealth fighters

Fifty-nine F-117s were made, and the first flight was in 1981.

DAYTON (AP) — The F-117 stealth fighter, which spent 27 years in the Air Force arsenal secretly slipping through hostile skies from Serbia to Iraq, is headed for storage and the history books.

The inky black, angular, radar-evading Nighthawks are being retired to Tonopah Test Range Airfield in Nevada.

Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, which manages the F-117 program, will have an informal, private retirement ceremony today with military leaders, base employees and representatives from Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico.

The last F-117s scheduled to fly will leave Holloman on April 21, stop in Palmdale, Calif., for another retirement ceremony, then arrive at Tonopah on April 22.

The government has no plans to bring the fighter out of retirement, but could do so if necessary.

“I’m happy to hear they are putting it in a place where they could bring it back if they ever needed it,” said Brig. Gen. Gregory Feest, the first person to fly an F-117 in combat, during the 1989 invasion of Panama that led to the capture of dictator Manuel Noriega.

The Air Force decided to accelerate the retirement of the F-117s to free up funding to modernize the rest of the fleet. The F-117 is being replaced by the F-22 Raptor, which also has stealth technology.

Fifty-nine F-117s were made; 10 were retired in December 2006 and 27 since then, the Air Force said. Seven of the planes have crashed, all but one in the United States. One F-117 crashed in Serbia in 1999.

Stealth technology used on the F-117 was developed in the 1970s to help evade enemy radar.

Other U.S. fighters used jamming devices or would fly with escort planes carrying more powerful jammers to combat the problem. Other jets would deploy chaff, a material designed to deflect radar signals.

But wind could make chaff unreliable, jammers weren’t very powerful, and using support planes to jam often required a great deal of them, said Dick Anderegg, director of Air Force history and museum programs at Air Force headquarters in Washington.

“We weren’t trying to do anything cosmic, except disappear on radar,” Anderegg said.

While not invisible to radar, the F-117’s shape and coating greatly reduced its detection.

The F-117 was produced at Lockheed’s Skunk Works, the company’s secretive advanced-projects division. The flight of the first plane occurred June 18, 1981, over the Tonopah test range. Existence of the aircraft was kept from the public until 1988, when the Air Force released a grainy photograph of the plane in flight.

“It stayed top secret for a long, long time,” Feest said. “Nobody spilled the beans. If someone knows you have a technology, they’re going to look for a way to defeat it.”

Feest, deputy director for force application at the Pentagon, first flew the F-117 in 1988. The shape of the aircraft shocked him.

“It isn’t aerodynamic,” he said. “It takes a computer to fly it. Without computers, it would drop like a rock.”

Feest said the F-117, a single-seat aircraft, handles like other jet fighters except it has no afterburner, which can produce high-gravitational pull and maneuvers that churn the stomach. The plane was designed to fly into heavily defended areas undetected and drop its payloads with surgical precision.

“It’s not a dogfighting machine; it’s a bomb-dropping machine. That’s what it was made for, and that’s what it did very well,” Feest said. “It was one mission, so the pilots who flew that aircraft were good at what they did.”

A total of 558 pilots have flown the F-117 since it went operational. They dub themselves “bandits,” with each given a “bandit number” after their first flight.

Feest, who is Bandit 261, also led the first stealth fighter mission into Iraq during Desert Storm in 1991.

He said the fire from surface-to-air missiles and anti-aircraft guns was so intense that he stopped looking at it to try to ease his fears.

“We knew stealth worked and it would take a lucky shot to hit us, but we knew a lucky shot could hit us at any time,” he said.

Incredibly, not one stealth was hit during those missions, he said.