F-117 Final Flights, Palmdale, Calif.
Topics:
Posted by saguarowestphotography Wed Apr 23, 2008 15:08:23 PDT
Viewed 1877 times
0 responses 1 comment
F-117 Nighthawk ‘Final Four’ participate in retirement ceremonies. Holloman AFB and USAF Plant 42, Palmdale, Calif. April 21-22, 2008
Text & photography by Brian Emch
From ‘Have Blue’, ‘Senior Trend’, and ‘Wobbly Goblin’,
to ‘The Black Jet’, ‘Gray Dragon’, & ‘Nighthawk’
The end of an era began April 21st at Holloman AFB in Alamogordo, New Mexico. Following a morning ceremony at the base, the final four operational Lockheed F-117A Nighthawks took off and headed west, towards Palmdale, California’s famous Lockheed Skunk Works facility, for one last ceremony before they are officially retired to their ‘ancestral’ home at the Tonopah Test Range in Nevada, near the mysterious Groom Lake airfield. At Tonopah, their wings will be removed and they will go into storage. Due to their sensitive nature, they will not be coming to the ‘Boneyard’ in Tucson, Arizona. One aircraft will remain in use with the 410th FLTS at Plant 42, and it will be retired in the fall of this year. The USAF sped up the retirement of the Nighthawk in order to free up funds for the F-22 Raptor and F-35 Lightning II programs.
For the final flight ceremonies, the formation arrived over Palmdale’s USAF Plant 42 at eleven am on the 21st of April, 2008. Aircraft serial numbers included #80-0843 which wore the American flag on its belly and was the final F-117 delivered to the Air Force; #84-0809,wearing the 9th FS ‘Iron Knights’ colors; #82-0800 sporting the 8th FS ‘Black Sheep’ colors; and #84-0824, which wore the 49th OG colors. Aircraft #843 and #809 are Desert Storm veterans, with #843 being known by its maintainers as ‘Affectionately Christine’, after the Stephen King movie depicting a Plymouth Fury that had a life of its own. On Tuesday, April 22nd, there was one last ceremony near the Skunk Works, before the aircraft headed for Tonopah. With crowds of spectators and photojournalists watching from various areas off and on-base, the four Nighthawks did one last flyover, in fingertip formation, southeast over Plant 42, before they turned back to the northeast and headed into the history books.
The F-117, which was known as the ‘Have Blue’ project early in its development, first flew in late 1977. When it became “Senior Trend”, that first flight was in spring of 1981. Its first combat missions were over Panama in 1989. The type saw action over Kosovo during ‘Operation Allied Force’, where one aircraft was lost. It has been deployed to South Korea; saw action again in ‘Operation Desert Storm’ in 1991; has participated in several Red Flag exercises at Nellis AFB, and of course has been used most recently in ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’. Despite its radically faceted and super-secret stealth design, it is a fly-by-wire aircraft, and many off the shelf parts were used in its construction, despite the radical and super-secret design.
Because of its “F” designation, airshow fans throughout the world know the aircraft as the “stealth fighter”, and indeed it does look like a fighter, however the airplane is actually a bomber / attack aircraft, carrying only two precision guided bombs. A popular comment about the F-117 is that it is invisible to radar. In truth, it simply has a very small radar signature, approximately the size of a small bird - thanks to its radically faceted design and radar absorbent material, or RAM. Part of its design includes a very narrow an slightly hidden exhaust. Another ‘myth’ is that all of the Nighthawks were painted black. Not so. Several of them were painted gray, one or two were white, and I was lucky enough to be able to photograph a silver one and a green one. I would assume that these last two were simply being prepped for new paint, as opposed to wearing new paint schemes.
Out of the fifty-nine aircraft built by Lockheed, there are currently four Nighthawks on permanent static display - one at Nellis AFB (YF-117A #79-10780), one at the National Air Force Museum at Wright-Patterson AFB (YF-117A #79-10781), one at Palmdale’s Joe Davies Heritage Airpark (YF-117A #79-10783 - one of several to have been painted gray for daylight testing), and the most recent, #85-0816, is now on display at Holloman’s Heritage Park.
| Send to a Friend | Report a Violation |
