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03/11/2008: "Bon Voyage, Night Hawk"

It's hard to believe, but the F-117A Night Hawk - the so-called "Stealth Fighter" - is being retired. The last of the fleet is being flown home to Tonopah Test Range where they'll be placed in mothballs.

All funny angles and jagged edges, the Night Hawk represented the first generation of stealth technology and was revolutionary when it was first developed. The project dated to the 1960's, when it was first discovered that using the correct angles could deflect radar beams in a fashion that would prevent them from being returned to the source, rendering the object "invisible" to the radar. Throughout the 80's, mysterious prototypes flew around the Nevada skies at night, leading to many of the Area 51 UFO "sightings". The wraps finally came off the Stealth Fighter in 1989 when the plane was used for precision bombing during the capture of Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega. The plane's legend was forged over the skies of Bagdad in 1991, when it flew with impunity through some of the most heavily defended skies on the planet to deliver precision munitions.

Only one Night Hawk was ever lost in action, over Serbia in 1999. That incident shows in some ways the dangers of relying on technology over common sense. The Serbs couldn't track the F-117 on radar, but they found that they could get an occasional blip using a very long frequency beam. Comparing those blips to ground sightings, they discovered that the American pilots had become so confident in the relative invisibility of the Night Hawk that they had lapsed into using the same paths to approach targets. The Serbs set up their anti aircraft weapons along those paths and waited until a pair of planes came into sight before firing. They were able to destroy one fighter and badly damage the other. Goes to show you what happens when you get a little too arrogant ...

The Night Hawk's replacement is the F-22 Raptor, which like all new fighters leverages the stealth technology of the F-117 and B-2 and takes it to a whole new level. No matter how successful it becomes, it's hard to believe it'll ever achieve the legacy of the original "stealth fighter", the F-117A Night Hawk.