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 1964 Soviet mathematical paper, was the world's first operational stealth aircraft, featuring a faceted design, internal weapon bays, and special coatings to minimize radar and heat signatures.
Kept secret through the 1980s, the F-117 proved remarkably successful in the 1991 Gulf War, leading initial strikes against high-value targets with zero combat losses, solidifying its reputation as a technological marvel.
Despite its advanced stealth capabilities, the F-117 recorded only one combat loss throughout its operational history, when a Serbian surface-to-air missile unit shot down an aircraft during NATO operations in Yugoslavia in 1999.
Officially retired in 2006 and replaced by newer stealth platforms, some F-117s are still reportedly flown for training purposes, aiding in the development of tactics against stealth aircraft.

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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.