Final flight for Nighthawk

[CommunityEditor]

One of the Air Force’s most mystifying jets, the F-117A Nighthawk stealth attack aircraft, will be feted March 11 with a ceremony and flyover.

The Nighthawk — known for its black, bat-like design — is being replaced by the latest stealth aircraft, the F-22 Raptor fighter jet.

The last Nighthawks of the original 59 created since 1981 will be formally retired after another ceremony in late April at Holloman Air Force Base, New Mexico.

The Nighthawk’s retirement has been accelerated to shore up money for more Raptors.

“With aging aircraft fleets and infrastructure, senior Air Force leadership has made hard choices to pay for modernization,” said Diana Filliman, director of the 650th Aeronautical Systems Squadron, in an Air Force release.

The Nighthawk, which secretly flew for seven years before its public acknowledgement in 1988, first entered combat when two jets struck Panamanian targets in advance of Army Rangers’ 1989 assault.

It played a more crucial role in Operation Desert Storm in 1991. Nighthawks routinely took out anti-aircraft guns and surface-to-air missile launchers in and around Baghdad.

The pre-retirement ceremony at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base is open to base employees, retirees and others with base access, but not the general public. It begins at 10 a.m. inside an operations hangar and concludes with a flyover.


Article: http://www.airforcetimes.com/news/20...hthawk_030708/

[CommunityEditor]

It has Darth Vader aesthetics and a ninja’s reputation. Tracing a finger along its wing, the feel is blade-like: sharp and nearly thin enough to slice lamb.

In sunlight, it resembles an arrowhead cut from black marble. On enemy radar screens, it resembles a flock of sparrows.

Behold the magnificently weird F-117A Nighthawk one last time.

Soon the desert skies over Holloman Air Force Base, Air Force Base, an outpost in southern New Mexico’s barren dust basin, will belong to the Air Force’s new baby: the F-22 Raptor. Like the Nighthawk, it is stealthy. Unlike the Nighthawk, the Raptor is a lethal gymnast capable of supersonic maneuvers and advanced counterattacks.

It is newer and faster and stronger — and it has nudged the Nighthawk into early retirement. Holloman’s 49th Fighter Wing, home of the Nighthawk, will replace its F-117As with Raptors this summer.
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After an April 21 farewell ceremony at Holloman Air Force Base, the last Nighthawks will fly to Nevada’s isolated and heavily fortified Tonopah Test Site. Maintenance crews will detach the wings and America’s original stealth fighters will retire in climate-controlled storage bays.

In mid-March at Holloman, Capt. Michael “Dirty” Driscoll readied a Nighthawk for one of its final flights.

As a teenager, Driscoll tacked a glossy Nighthawk poster to his bedroom wall. Now he’s among the last to pilot the jet over this fighter pilot playground, a baking pit of dirt where the most visible signs of life are shrubs baked stiff in the sun.

Driscoll, about to fly his fifth-to-last sortie, mounts a roll-away staircase and eases into the cockpit. Plumes of exhaust cough out the rear grill. The Nighthawk’s tail fins quiver. Staring beyond the jet out the hangar’s rear door, dust particles and fuel exhaust form a haze so thick the horizon appears to melt.

Go time is noon. And Driscoll has a control tower to bomb.

Building a mystery
The Vietnam War was the last great American dogfighting conflict, pitting U.S. fighter pilots against their Soviet counterparts over Southeast Asia. Still, Russian-made MiG fighter aircraft weren’t the number-one plane killers. That distinction belonged to ground-fired flak and surface-to-air missiles.

In 1974, one year before the conflict ceased, the U.S. Air Force was already considering an attack jet that could subtract anti-aircraft threats from the equation.

Lockheed’s legendary “Skunk Works” team, the California defense firm’s chief innovators, picked up the charge. Partly inspired by an obscure Russian technical paper, Skunk Works set out to produce an airframe eliminating all right angles because those bounce back strong radar signals.

A spear-shaped prototype codenamed “Have Blue” flew in late 1977. The next year, Congress secretly launched the “Senior Trend” development phase, which led to enhanced stealth avionics and anti-radar paint the color of midnight.

In part to mislead outsiders expecting the designation “F-19” for the next-generation jet, the Air Force chose the name “F-117A Nighthawk.” Its first operational test flight took place in 1981 and, in 1982, it was first flown as intended: under cover of dark.

Test flights had taken place at the secret Skunk Works lab in Burbank, Calif., and the Air Force’s Area 51 complex in Nevada. But as 1983 closed, and the F-117As further transitioned from test jets to a secret stealth force, they began settling into their first long-term home: the remote Tonopah Test Range in Nevada’s desert.

Club Tonopah
Invitation to join Tonopah’s top-secret flight and maintenance crews often went like this:

“We’d like to send you to Nellis Air Force Base in Las Vegas for a highly classified mission. You will seldom see your family. You can’t tell a soul about your assignment. And you have five minutes to decide.

“Interested?”

Capt. Greg Meland, at the time maintaining F-15s at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia, got the talk in 1988. “One day out of the blue, my commander asked if I’d be interested in the job,” he said. “I was really taken by that ... the fact that he’d even think about me.”

Leaving his wife behind in Virginia, Meland moved into a nondescript apartment complex outside Nellis’ gate. He was soon introduced to the top-secret Nighthawk and his real destination, Tonopah Test Range. He’d be with the 4450th Maintenance Squadron and, if anyone asked, he worked A-7 light attack jets.

Meland also adopted the Tonopah commute: boarding a packed 727 passenger jet on Monday mornings on the Nellis tarmac, flying to Tonopah and living in dorms until the Thursday night return flight.

As a counterweight to the clandestine, nocturnal existence the project demanded, leadership tried to comfort the airmen working there with slick facilities. It offered comfy, single-person dorm rooms, a recreation center complete with on-site bar, volleyball courts where pilots whiled away afternoons and “The Wild Horse Café,” one of the Air Force’s finest chow halls ever.

“They fed us to death up there,” said Wayne Paddock, formerly with the site’s 4450th Tactical Group and now chief of planning and inspection for the 49th Fighter Wing. “Anything you wanted to eat, you could eat.”

The Tonopah assignment was equally defined by extreme isolation. In its earlier years, airmen could only place outside calls during family emergencies. They were later allowed to phone spouses but couldn’t even discuss the weather, which might lend clues about the site’s location. A non-disclosure stipulation threatened prison and crushing fines for revealing details of the assignment.

Once Meland’s wife joined him in Las Vegas, his mysterious job strained their relationship. “It became difficult,” he said. “I can’t talk about my work. She feels like I’m keeping secrets.” Though the Melands got through it, other relationships crumbled. Paddock remembers Tonopah contributing to more than one divorce.

Still, for crews stationed at Tonopah, the quarantine bred ironclad camaraderie. “You can’t imagine the pride,” Meland said. “In most Air Force outfits working on, say, the F-15, you go home after the day’s done and forget about the guys at work. But we were so close knit, living with each other ... I was in hog heaven.”

Meland, a maintenance officer in charge of 23 Nighthawks, was issued a nightly schedule noting the times Soviet satellites were orbiting over Nevada. As these 15-minute windows approached, jets were rushed into hangars or a cave-like structure near the tarmac to thwart photography from space.

Tonopah crews skated several close calls, nights when F-117As would land screaming and quickly taxi out of sight to dodge the Russian satellites. “There were times when we had to scramble like crazy,” Paddock said. This was compounded by ongoing technical foul-ups. Sometimes, Meland said, the Nighthawk’s tires would “smolder like a charcoal briquette. We’d send the plane out and the whole back end would be glowing red when it got back.”

In October 1988, Meland’s unit got a heads up: The F-117A’s existence would soon be divulged by the Pentagon. Though Air Force leaders initially delayed the announcement for fears of swaying the election, Assistant Secretary of Defense J. Daniel Howard held up a grainy photo on Nov. 10 of the Nighthawk in flight.

That day, Meland went home and revealed his second life.

“It was a little anticlimactic,” he said. “She was never that into the military environment ... it wasn’t like telling a 12-year-old boy. She was a little impressed, I guess, and relieved.”

Meland, who later returned to Air Combat Command and left the service in 1996, now works for defense firm Northrop Grumman. No job, he said, will ever match his Nighthawk assignment.

“It was the first job I ever had where I liked going to work,” Meland said. “It’s still in my heart.”

Operation just cause
The Nighthawk tip-toed into combat in 1989, striking Panama after dictator Manuel Noriega survived a failed coup .

It was a low-stakes mission for the Nighthawk, chosen for its precision bombing but not its evasion of radar networks, which Panamanian forces lacked. On Dec. 19, eight Nighthawks departed Tonopah to strike a field near barracks housing Noriega’s most elite fighters, disorienting them as U.S. Army Rangers led an assault. However, the Panamanian Defense Forces were tipped off, targets were changed at the last minute and the bombings were not as effective as hoped. A handful of Rangers died before Panama was pinned down.

Still, the strike would foreshadow the precedent-setting career of Capt. Greg “Beast” Feest, one of Tonopah’s most skilled Nighthawk pilots. Feest, who led the mission in Panama, would fly the same F-117A during the first wave of Operation Desert Storm jet strikes over Iraq in 1991 — the Nighthawk’s true proving grounds.

Bombs over Baghdad
It was moonless over Iraq.

Feest, piloting his Nighthawk through the black, had retracted his communication antenna and killed the beacon lights. The bay beneath his feet contained Operation Desert Storm’s first bombs, which weapons crews had decorated with personal messages to then-dictator Saddam Hussein.

Feest and the 30 or so Nighthawk pilots slipping into Iraq on Jan. 16, 1991, doubted they’d return intact to King Khalid Air Base in Saudi Arabia. “I thought my chances of making it out of there were slim,’” said Feest, now a major general select. “I anticipated being shot, maybe having to jump out.”

To read the rest of the article, please go here ---> http://www.airforcetimes.com/news/20...k_f117_041408/


Interactive multimedia: http://www.militarytimes.com/project...tealth_sunset/

[Proud Mom]

That's sad.
Ok, maybe not for some but the F117 is why my Crew Chief husband was at Holloman in the first place. They transferred him from F-16's to them. They are a beautiful and sleek machine and I watched them fly over the base everyday. got my picture taken in the hangar with them, and thrilled my father to no end when it was arranged for him to get up close to one.
My hats off to the men and women who worked on her and flew her.

The F-117A Night Hawk with its laser guided bombs is the most precise platform the USAF has in the inventory.

Unfortunately, the USAF will be left without a small low observable attack aircraft capable of carrying 2,000 lbs bombs internally until the F-35 Lightning II is deployed almost a decade from today. (See Fall 2006 Air & Space Power Journal "Filling the Stealth Gap...")

It is a premature end of an era brought on by the enormous cost of fleet recapatalization and the large cost of the extremely capable F-22 Raptor. (Which is needed in air to air and emerging roles.)

Long live the Black Jet - the last product of the Burbank, Ca Lockheed Skunk Works.

F-117A: The Black Jet Website
www.f-117a.com

[hwkdrvr]

It's a sad day int eh Air Force. The F-117 is being retired and the F-22 is taking it place. What a great bird and what a service it performed.

[Kuch]

Farewell old friend,

I'm proud to have known you and proud to have worked with you! I spent six years supporting F-117 missions around the globe as a Stealth Mission Planner and EWO. I entered the AF the day of the F-117's first flight back in 1981 and ended my AF career in the F-117 Operational Test community. Though I missed out on the heyday of the F-117 during DESERT STORM and life at the TTR, I'm glad to have been a part of the Holloman contingent.

God speed to all of my Nighthawk brethren!

Kuch, EWO #27

[CommunityEditor]

Update: Colonels pilot Nighthawks into the sunset (http://www.militarytimes.com/news/20...flight_042208/)


Four colonels with ties to the F-117A Nighthawk piloted the final four operational jets out of Holloman Air Force Base, N.M., at an April 21 retirement ceremony for the world’s original stealth fighter.

The jets’ departure was the final event of a three-day ceremony dubbed “Sunset Stealth.” In attendance were many of the former pilots with the once-mysterious 4450th Tactical Group, which operated the jet when its existence was classified through much of the 1980s, and the 49th Fighter Wing, which claimed the jets in the early 1990s.

William Perry, a former Secretary of Defense who pushed the Pentagon to develop the Nighthawk and other cutting-edge weapons during the Cold War, also spoke at the ceremony.

Col. Jack “Ripper” Forsythe, the 49th Fighter Wing Operations Group commander, flew a Nighthawk emblazoned with an American flag pattern on its belly. Lt. Col. Todd “Meat” Flesch, Lt. Col. Ken “Tot” Tatum and Lt. Col. Mark “Drink” Drinkard flew the other three Nighthawks.

They stopped briefly at the jet’s birthing grounds, the defense firm Lockheed Martin’s experimental “Skunk Works” facility in Palmdale, Calif., and then to the final resting place, the heavily guarded Tonopah Test Range in Nevada’s desert.

[Ozzie99]

So long old friend.

Oz

[briankelly1966]

I do not believe they should be disassambed. They should be stored intact, and be ready to fly within 30 days, should they be needed for any reason.

[newvalor]

Good bye to the piece of junk. 1 year is enough to work on that junk so 6 yrs was too much damage to my health.