Air Force's stealth fighters making final flights

[rack'm]

Air Force's stealth fighters making final flights - CNN.com

DAYTON, Ohio (AP) -- The world's first attack aircraft to employ stealth technology is slipping quietly into history.

The inky black, angular, radar-evading F-117, which spent 27 years in the Air Force arsenal secretly patrolling hostile skies from Serbia to Iraq, will be put in mothballs next month in Nevada.

 

[huntr1]

Air Force's stealth fighters making final flights - CNN.com

DAYTON, Ohio (AP) -- The world's first attack aircraft to employ stealth technology is slipping quietly into history.

The inky black, angular, radar-evading F-117, which spent 27 years in the Air Force arsenal secretly patrolling hostile skies from Serbia to Iraq, will be put in mothballs next month in Nevada.

I didn't know they were sactive for that long.

 

[Larry Gude]

Little...

I didn't know they were sactive for that long.

...difference between when they went into service and when they were acknowledged, ain't there?

Just imagine what's up and running right now that we'll find out about in 10 years and will be retired 20 years after that, celebrated for a 30 year service life!

 

[huntr1]

...difference between when they went into service and when they were acknowledged, ain't there?

Just imagine what's up and running right now that we'll find out about in 10 years and will be retired 20 years after that, celebrated for a 30 year service life!

Does anybody REALLY believe the SR71 was replaced by satellites and the U-2?

 

[Larry Gude]

It may...

Does anybody REALLY believe the SR71 was replaced by satellites and the U-2?

...have been 'replaced', but not by things you can't ride across country in under an hour. Good Lord, imagine it's real replacement?

From wiki;

A defensive feature of the aircraft (SR-71) was its high speed and operating altitude, whereby, if a surface-to-air missile launch were detected, standard evasive action was simply to accelerate.

Oh, hell yeah.

 

[huntr1]

...have been 'replaced', but not by things you can't ride across country in under an hour. Good Lord, imagine it's real replacement?

From wiki;



Oh, hell yeah.

Ed Zachary.

 

[RadioPatrol]

Did you know the Stealth Fighter was designed using a Russian Technical paper ? From Skunkworks by Ben Rich:

....(the math formula) was found buried in a long dense technical paper on radar written by one of Russia's leading experts and published in Moscow 9 years earlier.
The paper was a sleeper in more ways the one: called "Method of Edge Waves in the Physical Theory of Diffraction," if had only recently been translated by the Air Force Foreign Technology Division from the original Russian language. The author was Pyotr Ufimtsev, chief scientist at the Moscow Institute of Radio Engineering. As Denys admitted, the paper was so obtuse and impenetrable that only a nerd's nerd would have waded through it all - Underlining yet! The nuggets Denys unearthed were found near the end of the forty pages. As he explained it, Ufimstev had revisited a century-old set of formulas derived by Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell and later refined by German electromagnetics expert Arnold Johannes Somerfeld. These calculations predicted the manner in which a give geometric configuration would reflect electromagnetic radiation. Ufimtsev had taken this early work a step further. "Ben, this guy has shown us how to accurately calculate radar cross sections across the surface of the wing and at the edge of the wing and put together these two calculations for an accurate total."

Denys saw my blank stare. Radar cross section calculations were a branch of medieval alchemy as far as the non initiated were concerned.


...... Ufimtsev had provided us with an "industrial-strength" theory that made it possible to to accurately calculate the lowest possible radar cross section and achieve levels of stealthiness never before imagined.

"Ufimtsev has shown us how to create computer software to accurately calculate the radar cross section of a given configuration as long as its in two dimension." Denys told me. "We can break down an airplane into thousands of flat triangular shapes, add up their individual radar signatures, and get a precise total of the radar cross section.

....

The skunk works would be the first to try to design an airplane composed entirely of flat, angular surfaces.

This book is great reading if you want to know the story of the SR-71, the U2 and Stealth Fighter ......

Most of the book covers the SR-71 and how the Skunk Works just invented not technologies out of thin air .....

 

[glhs837]

I remember, mid-late 80s, I was stationed at Moffett Field, CA, its at the bottom of the SF bay. Anyway, there was a crash out near Bakersfield somewhere, it was odd, becuase the A/F claimed it was a regular aircraft that crashed, but then sealed off a ridiculous amount of area. Like 200 square miles. There was speculation that it was some sort of prototype, but of course it was years before anyone knew what it really was.

 

[ylexot]

Really, the F-117 isn't all that useful any more. For start-of-the-war bombing, the B-2 is probably just as stealthy or more stealthy and can carry a much larger payload. After the start of combat, it has a pitiful payload, so it can't go after many targets per sortie. For fighting, despite having the "fighter" designator, it can't carry any air-to-air weapons, so it really isn't a fighter. It was a cool tech demo, but that's about it.

 

[RadioPatrol]

for being designed on old mainframes like :

PDP-11 - Introduction

the PDP series .... 4k of memory, systems that had no "PCB" or processor Chip, but several boards of wire wrapped connectivity .... and either Q Bus or Uni Bus

I'd say they well ......... designing a Plane with the Radar Cross Section of a Pin Ball ..... it was a nice 1st Strike Weapon ... sneak in knock out the SAM Sites ...