Author: Sharp blade smell knife
The sci-fi F-117 Nighthawk fighter-bomber is the world's first aircraft designed and manufactured entirely with stealth technology, and the first truly stealth fighter. Nearly 30 years after its maiden flight, the F-117 Nighthawk remains one of the best stealthy military aircraft in the world. As early as 2008, the U.S. military issued an order to retire all F-117 Nighthawks and sealed them at the Tonopah test site near Area 51. However, this type of fighter, which has been retired for 11 years, seems to have appeared frequently on the battlefield in recent years.
According to KLM magazine Scramble, several F-117 fighter jets carried small-caliber bombs in 2017 and participated in U.S. military operations against Syria and Afghanistan. On the 15th of this month, the US "Popular Machinery" website wrote that someone witnessed that a batch of F-117 "Nighthawk" fighter-bombers that should have been retired reappeared over the "Death Valley" in California, the United States, and these "Nighthawks" were replaced with a new type of stealth paint composed of white, gray, and black color blocks, and an unknown pod was installed under the wings of the F-15D aircraft that accompanied them.
The frequent appearance of the F-117 Nighthawk in recent years cannot help but make us wonder: Does the US military intend to make this stealth fighter "retired and rehired"?
The F-117 Nighthawk fighter-bomber is an aircraft that pursues the ultimate, and its unique aerodynamic shape and structural design are only designed for the best stealth performance, which can be said to have both achieved the F-117 and destroyed itself. The F-117 Nighthawk is 20.09 meters long, has a wingspan of 13.20 meters, a height of 3.78 meters, a wing area of 73 square meters, an empty weight of 13.3 tons, a load of about 23 tons, and is propelled by two General Electric F404-F1D2 turbofan engines, generating 2×48 kN of thrust.
The idea for the design of the machine actually came from a paper by a Soviet expert, and experts in Lockheed in the United States saw this paper and were inspired to develop the small plane stealth technology. The F-117's unique shape is designed to validate this technology: through the complex planar design of the fuselage, the radar reflected waves can be concentrated in a very short range of beams, making it difficult for the radar to capture the echo signal and achieve stealth. However, because of this design, the aerodynamic shape of the "Nighthawk" is very bad, although it is named "F", it does not reach the maneuverability of conventional fighters at all, and its cruise speed, load capacity, range and other indicators are greatly behind other fighters, which also lays the groundwork for its early retirement.
During the 1991 Gulf War, the F-117 Nighthawk shined with about 1,300 sorties and free access to Iraq's air defense zones, as if in no man's land. After attacking nearly 1,600 targets in Iraq, not a single F-117 was found or hit.
And the myth of the F-117's undefeated in the war of the US invasion of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was finally broken. What is even more shocking is that the F-117 fighter was destroyed by the ancient SAM-3 surface-to-air missile. The process of how the F-117 was destroyed by the SAM-3 has been divided, and there is no clear conclusion. However, the explosion of the "Nighthawk" shattered the incorruptible golden body of the stealth fighter, and also shattered the beautiful dream of the invincibility of the American stealth fighter.
It can be said that the F-117 "Nighthawk" is useless except for stealth performance, if there is technology that can crack its stealth coat, the flying is both slow and bulky F-117 Nighthawk is a living target in the air. When the F-22 Raptor, a new generation of stealth fighters of the US military, appeared, the F-117 Nighthawk was in a very awkward position in the Air Force.
The F-22's stealth performance is enough to cope with most combat environments, and its bomb load is similar to that of the F-117, but other technical indicators such as maneuverability, range and so on are far behind the F-117 Nighthawk. When performing high-intensity tasks, the F-22 is fully capable of completing the F-117's tasks and has a higher survival rate. When performing low-intensity tasks, the F-117 is not as good as the more stable and lower cost F-16. So even if the F-117's stealth performance is good, its fatal shortcomings make it difficult for it to find its foothold in the US Air Force.
However, the F-117s, which were retired early, were not placed in the desolate aircraft cemetery in Arizona, but were sealed in the Tonopah Test Site, where they were born, and reappeared in the sky from time to time. As with its superb stealth performance, it is unclear what mission the F-117 is still performing.