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, developed by Lockheed's Skunk Works based on a Soviet mathematician's theory, pioneered revolutionary stealth technology through its angular airframe, internal weapons bay, and specialized materials designed to minimize radar and heat signatures.
Initially a top-secret "black project" tested at Area 51, the subsonic F-117 served as a covert attack aircraft, achieving remarkable combat success in its early deployments, particularly during the First Gulf War.
Despite its groundbreaking capabilities, only one F-117 was ever shot down in combat (during the 1999 Kosovo War). The aircraft was retired by 2006, superseded by newer stealth designs, though some are reportedly still active for training purposes.

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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.