F-117 Stealth

Video from the channel Archangel Wolf 424 about Lockheed F-117 Nighthawk, linked on its Above Ten Thousand entry. Duration: 46:00. Language: Spanish. Video type: Documentary.

A 1990s TV documentary, dubbed into Spanish, about the Lockheed F-117 Nighthawk: its secret development, life at the bases that operated it, and its use in Panama and the Gulf War. Told by engineers, pilots, and commanders.

It traces the origin to Skunk Works, Lockheed's secret-projects division that had already designed the SR-71 Blackbird in the 1960s. In 1975 the company created the Echo 1 program, which showed that a diamond shape with flat surfaces deflected radar energy. A scale model, nicknamed the "Hopeless Diamond," proved almost invisible on a test range, and in 1977 the Have Blue demonstrator arrived.

The first F-117 flew on June 18, 1981, without any prior prototypes. That flight revealed an instability, attributed to the lack of vertical surface area, which was fixed by enlarging it. Through the 1980s Lockheed delivered an average of six aircraft a year to the secret base at Tonopah, Nevada. There, pilots and personnel worked under total secrecy that kept them from telling their families what they did. After the Gulf War, operations moved to Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico, home of the F-117 since July 1992.

59 aircraft were built at 42.6 million dollars each. The documentary follows the routine of the 415th squadron at Holloman: traffic control, survival gear, mission planning, and the data module that lets the aircraft fly automatically to the target area. It also explains the OCIP modernization, with new cockpits, color displays, and automatic attitude recovery, prompted by two fatal accidents caused by spatial disorientation in the mid-1980s.

Its first combat was Operation Just Cause in Panama, in December 1989. It proved controversial because the bombs had to land close to some barracks without hitting them. In the Gulf War, 24 aircraft were deployed to King Khalid Air Base in Saudi Arabia, and Major Feest dropped the campaign's first bomb, against a radar center. Over 43 days they flew about 1,300 missions and dropped more than 2,000 tons of bombs without a single aircraft being shot down, with a direct-hit rate of over 75%. The video includes the strike on a shelter with civilians inside, which according to those interviewed was a military communications center. Finally, it shows its gridded air intakes, the exhausts that cool the gases over the wing, and the infrared sensors.