Reenacting Bombing Missions in an F-117 Nighthawk

Ride along on a Microsoft Flight Simulator journey through history in the world's first top-secret stealth aircraft.

Patrick Chovanec

Monday, April 15, 2024 at 01:06 PM ET

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F-117 Nighthawk in Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020. [Courtesy: Patrick Chovanec]

Key Takeaways:

The F-117 Nighthawk stealth fighter, developed by Lockheed's Skunk Works in the 1970s, utilized a Soviet mathematician's insight that radar reflection depends on an object's shape, leading to its distinctive faceted design, internal weapons bay, and radar-absorbent coatings to minimize its radar signature.
Despite its "fighter" designation, the F-117 was a subsonic, aerodynamically unstable attack aircraft, reliant on fly-by-wire technology and optimized for covert night bombing missions using infrared targeting, as it lacked radar.
The F-117 achieved remarkable success in the 1991 Gulf War, completing numerous high-value missions with zero combat losses. Only one F-117 was ever shot down (in Kosovo in 1999) before its official retirement in 2006, though some are still reportedly used for training exercises.

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Today on Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020, I’m at Homey Airport (KXTA), also known as Groom Lake, aka “Area 51.” I’ve come here to the remote Nevada desert to fly one of the most iconic top secret aircraft of all time: the F-117 Nighthawk stealth fighter.

The story of the F-117 begins in 1964, when Soviet mathematician Pyotr Ufimtsev published the paper, Method of Edge Waves in the Physical Theory of Diffraction. It demonstrated that the radar return from an object depended more on its shape than size. Given the technology at the time, Ufimtsev’s insight was dismissed as impractical in Russia. But by the 1970s, given friendly aircraft losses to SAMs (surface-to-air missiles) in Vietnam and the Middle East, engineers at Lockheed’s “Skunk Works”—famous for designing cutting edge military planes like the P-38 Lighting, U-2 spy plane, and F-104 Starfighter—began taking the idea seriously.