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Model Forum / General / Models / March 2008Stealth Headed for Mothballs
hard to believe she is 27 years old. Now I feel old. Craig Air Force's stealth fighters making final flights STORY HIGHLIGHTS F-117 to have informal retirement ceremony Tuesday in Ohio Jets first flew in combat in 1989 in Panama F-117s being mothballed to free up money for F-22 Raptors DAYTON, Ohio (AP) -- The world's first attack aircraft to employ stealth technology is slipping quietly into history. Technicians service an F-117 stealth fighter after it arrived at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, on Monday. The inky black, angular, radar-evading F-117, which spent 27 years in the Air Force arsenal secretly patrolling hostile skies from Serbia to Iraq, will be put in mothballs next month in Nevada. Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, which manages the F-117 program, will have an informal, private retirement ceremony Tuesday with military leaders, base employees and representatives from Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico. The last F-117s scheduled to fly will leave Holloman on April 21, stop in Palmdale, California, for another retirement ceremony, then arrive on April 22 at their final destination: Tonopah Test Range Airfield in Nevada, where the jet made its first flight in 1981. The government has no plans to bring the fighter out of retirement, but could do so if necessary. "I'm happy to hear they are putting it in a place where they could bring it back if they ever needed it," said Brig. Gen. Gregory Feest, the first person to fly an F-117 in combat, during the 1989 invasion of Panama that led to the capture of dictator Manuel Noriega. The Air Force decided to accelerate the retirement of the F-117s to free up money to modernize the rest of the fleet. The F-117 is being replaced by the F-22 Raptor, which also has stealth technology. Fifty-nine F-117s were made; 10 were retired in December 2006 and 27 since then, the Air Force said. Seven of the planes have crashed, one in Serbia in 1999. Don't Miss Air Force worn out, generals say Stealth technology used on the F-117 was developed in the 1970s to help evade enemy radar. While not invisible to radar, the F-117's shape and coating greatly reduced its detection. The F-117, a single-seat aircraft, was designed to fly into heavily defended areas undetected and drop its payloads with surgical precision. A total of 558 pilots have flown the F-117 since it went operational. They dub themselves "bandits," with each given a "bandit number" after their first flight. Feest, who is Bandit 261, also led the first stealth fighter mission into Iraq during Desert Storm in 1991. He said the fire from surface- to-air missiles and anti-aircraft guns was so intense that he stopped looking at it to try to ease his fears. "We knew stealth worked and it would take a lucky shot to hit us, but we knew a lucky shot could hit us at any time," he said. Incredibly, not one stealth was hit during those missions, he said. I heard they are being mothballed at Tonopah. I guess they are something of a hazmat situation. Bill Banaszak, MFE Sr. >I heard they are being mothballed at Tonopah. I guess they are >something of a hazmat situation. > >Bill Banaszak, MFE Sr. they are being kept for emergencies, i guess. well, some anyway. > I heard they are being mothballed at Tonopah. I guess they are > something of a hazmat situation. > > Bill Banaszak, MFE Sr. A visiting Nighthawk crewman once told me that the folk that work around them have been bucking for hazardous duty pay since their introduction just for that reason - interesting jet, serious hunk of hazmat.  Signature- Rufus >> I heard they are being mothballed at Tonopah. I guess they are >> something of a hazmat situation. [quoted text clipped - 4 lines] >them have been bucking for hazardous duty pay since their introduction >just for that reason - interesting jet, serious hunk of hazmat. those tiles must be some serious sh.t. > >> I heard they are being mothballed at Tonopah. I guess they are > >> something of a hazmat situation. [quoted text clipped - 6 lines] > > > those tiles must be some serious sh.t. The folks who were working on them would go to the doctors but not be able to tell them what was causing their troubles. Lousy way to handle people's health. Yeah, I know, top secret project. Someone should have figured out how to get a health facility into the project just for the workers. Bill Banaszak, MFE Sr. > some...@some.domain wrote: > [quoted text clipped - 16 lines] > > Bill Banaszak, MFE Sr. Yeah, just like the workers at Bethlehem Steel who were exposed to uranium during the Mahatten Project. My late brother-in-law told me once that some of those sites are still "hot".... > those tiles must be some serious sh.t. > The RAM is supposed to be toxic if burned, but that shouldn't be much of a hazmat problem if you just ground it up and buried it. I wonder if they put some sort of isotopes in the RAM paint to ionize the air around the aircraft and cut its RCS that way. The Russians are working on that technology, using plasma emitters. That would account for the need to refinish the aircraft from time-to-time as the isotopes decayed. Pat > some...@some.domain wrote: > > those tiles must be some serious sh.t. [quoted text clipped - 8 lines] > > Pat Actually carbon fiber is a problem when burned. It creates a pure carbon ash/smoke that can coat insulators on electronic equipment and knock it out of operation. There are rumors of folks working on "carbon bombs". Any crash of a plane with significant amounts of carbon fiber structure is a hazard to surrounding power lines, transformers, radio and radar antennas, etc. > Actually carbon fiber is a problem when burned. It creates a pure > carbon ash/smoke that can coat insulators on electronic equipment and [quoted text clipped - 3 lines] > transformers, radio and radar antennas, etc. > We used something along the lines of "carbon bombs" during the first Gulf War. Drones were launched into Iraq where they circled over power plants and substations unwinding carbon fibers that fell into the electric lines, shorting them out and disabling the electric grid (I don't remember if they used Chukar drones or cruise missiles for this mission). The fibers are hardly visible to the naked eye, and that makes finding and removing them very difficult for the enemy, disabling their power stations for a considerable amount of time as they shift around every time the wind comes up, causing new shorts. Pat >> some...@some.domain wrote: >>> those tiles must be some serious sh.t. [quoted text clipped - 14 lines] > carbon fiber structure is a hazard to surrounding power lines, > transformers, radio and radar antennas, etc. Yeah...nasty stuff in an of itself. And if the composite also has any boron in it (like some Eagle parts) stand WAY back. Signature- Rufus >> those tiles must be some serious sh.t. >> [quoted text clipped - 8 lines] > > Pat I think it more a problem with the dust that comes from just maintaining the aircraft. And the surface finish compounds. If you ever do get a chance to see one up close, one of the things you'll notice is that there aren't the usual maintenance access panels all over it. So you can figure what that means for yourself... Signature- Rufus > I think it more a problem with the dust that comes from just > maintaining the aircraft. And the surface finish compounds. If you > ever do get a chance to see one up close, one of the things you'll > notice is that there aren't the usual maintenance access panels all > over it. So you can figure what that means for yourself... I have walked around one from around ten feet away, and as you say, there aren't many access openings in the body at all. Where things are screwed onto the body (like the screen covering over the upper nose FLIR/laser designator turret) the screwheads are covered with some sort of RAM caulking compound. Apparently, Lockheed had to come up with odd screw head slot designs, as the conventional Phillips' head screw reflected radar. Pat >> I think it more a problem with the dust that comes from just >> maintaining the aircraft. And the surface finish compounds. If you [quoted text clipped - 11 lines] > > Pat Yeah - nothing with corners. Corners are BAD. If you remember, even the seal hooks for the canopy latches are conical in shape, with blunt-round ends. Signature- Rufus >> Apparently, Lockheed had to come up with odd screw head slot >> designs, as the conventional Phillips' head screw reflected radar. [quoted text clipped - 4 lines] > the seal hooks for the canopy latches are conical in shape, with > blunt-round ends. That's the second time they ran into a fastener problem; on the A-12/SR-71 they couldn't use Dzus fasteners because their springs would detemper from the heat of Mach 3 flight. I've never seen any design info on it, but Lockheed once tried to design a all-plastic recon plane that radar would pass through rather than reflect off of. This would work fine except that there was no way to hide the engine inside it from the radar. The Lockheed B-2 competitor was a interesting design, looking like the original Northrop B-2 design with a boom-mounted butterfly tail on it: http://www.dreamlandresort.com/black_projects/senior_peg.html Going by that photo, the intakes must be belly mounted. Pat > The Lockheed B-2 competitor was a interesting design, looking like the > original Northrop B-2 design with a boom-mounted butterfly tail on it: > http://www.dreamlandresort.com/black_projects/senior_peg.html > Going by that photo, the intakes must be belly mounted. They were indeed on the bottom; here's a photo of a RCS pole model: http://atsmedia.cachefly.net/uploads/ats36762_SENIOR_PEG.jpg Pat >> The Lockheed B-2 competitor was a interesting design, looking like the >> original Northrop B-2 design with a boom-mounted butterfly tail on it: [quoted text clipped - 4 lines] > http://atsmedia.cachefly.net/uploads/ats36762_SENIOR_PEG.jpg > Pat I think that turned into this - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-47A Signature- Rufus > I think that turned into this - > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-47A Want to see something funny? Here's the original Lockheed "Hopeless Diamond": http://www.geocities.com/unicraftmodels/on/hd/hd.htm ...that led to the XST and F-117. And here's the Northrop X-47A: http://www.air-attack.com/MIL/_EXP/x47/x47_header.jpg Someone's getting even here. "Oh yeah? You needed a tail on the finished aircraft. We didn't. Screw you." The new version is probably better as far as fuel use for range goes, but one has to admire rubbing Lockheed's nose in it. :-) Pat >> I think that turned into this - >> [quoted text clipped - 15 lines] > > Pat I saw a plot of the real theoretical "hopeless diamond" that this class of jets was developed to once - tried to Google it, but all I get is pictures of this funky paper airplane. It's not as squashed as the airplanes are...I thought I saw it on the web someplace, but I can't find it. Signature- Rufus > I saw a plot of the real theoretical "hopeless diamond" that this > class of jets was developed to once - tried to Google it, but all I > get is pictures of this funky paper airplane. It's not as squashed as > the airplanes are...I thought I saw it on the web someplace, but I > can't find it. There's one here from the original Lockheed patent: http://www.hitechweb.genezis.eu/stealth2.files/image006.jpg The design evolution is over here: http://www.f117reunion.org/f117_history.htm Interesting stealth patent drawings here: http://www.dreamlandresort.com/black_projects/patent.htm Pat >> I saw a plot of the real theoretical "hopeless diamond" that this >> class of jets was developed to once - tried to Google it, but all I [quoted text clipped - 10 lines] > > Pat None of those are what I was thinking of...what I'm thinking of was a purely theoretical mathematical plot of the shape that falls out if you require zero (or near zero...) return of a radar reflection along some selected set of axes. A probability density type plot, I think...it was actually a sort of dual-diamond. It arose from a theoretical study, and was dubbed the "hopeless diamond" when someone first speculated on the "hopelessness" of the possibility of building an airplane based on such a shape. I thought I'd seen it on the web someplace, but I can't find it. Anyway, it was the starting point for what followed. Signature- Rufus > None of those are what I was thinking of...what I'm thinking of was a > purely theoretical mathematical plot of the shape that falls out if you [quoted text clipped - 7 lines] > the web someplace, but I can't find it. Anyway, it was the starting > point for what followed. This? http://www.f-117a.com/images/XST/Hopelesshistory.jpg http://www.f-117a.com/XST.html Cheers, >> None of those are what I was thinking of...what I'm thinking of was a >> purely theoretical mathematical plot of the shape that falls out if [quoted text clipped - 14 lines] > > Cheers, No - I'm not thinking of an airplane or drawing of an airplane. I'm thinking of a plot of a mathematical solution to a set of constrained equations. The plot resulted in a large diamond with a smaller diamond stuck on the end of it. But the result such plots was what inspired the aircraft configurations the keep coming up. Signature- Rufus > None of those are what I was thinking of...what I'm thinking of was a > purely theoretical mathematical plot of the shape that falls out if [quoted text clipped - 7 lines] > I'd seen it on the web someplace, but I can't find it. Anyway, it was > the starting point for what followed. If you want to do the perfect stealth design, make a aircraft that has no flat surfaces on it whatsoever, and indeed has every exterior surface convex so that any incoming radar wave gets reflected back in multiple directions and dissipated on striking it. That was Kelly Johnson's concept for the Have Blue.... a perfect flying saucer, like the dual-convex lens of a magnifying glass with no straight edges on it anywhere. That would defeat the bistatic radar threat to stealth as well. Pat >> None of those are what I was thinking of...what I'm thinking of was a >> purely theoretical mathematical plot of the shape that falls out if [quoted text clipped - 18 lines] > > Pat Problem is that none of that stuff really totally "defeats" radar - it only minimizes the return and not "eliminate" it. And even then only under specific conditions, and once those become apparent it's back to the drawing board. ...and it was probably that last bit that got that one Nighthawk shot down. Signature- Rufus >>> Apparently, Lockheed had to come up with odd screw head slot >>> designs, as the conventional Phillips' head screw reflected radar. [quoted text clipped - 18 lines] > > Pat That's one of the many reasons I can think of for stealth being "highly overrated". It only works to a point, and just like any other tech it has it's limitations. Problem is that the signal to noise to cost ratio on the tech is about the biggest detractor when it comes to employing it with any level of repeatable and sustainable success on a fighter aircraft. I think it's far more suited to applications with smaller vehicles like UCAVs. Signature- Rufus >I've never seen any design info on it, but Lockheed once tried to design >a all-plastic recon plane that radar would pass through rather than >reflect off of. This would work fine except that there was no way to >hide the engine inside it from the radar. The Spy Glider! Of course, developing the high-altitude, supersonic tow plane might take a while. The Space Shuttle shows that a rocket launch can give quite the range, dunno about maneuverability. Signature-Jack > The Spy Glider! Of course, developing the high-altitude, > supersonic tow plane might take a while. The Space Shuttle shows > that a rocket launch can give quite the range, dunno about > maneuverability. > You know, they weren't using their brains there; seal the whole engine in a flat-walled diamond profile container (a rectangular box rotated forty-five degrees) and all the radar waves get reflected away from the emitter. The Lockheed flying-wing U-2 replacement under the "Gusto 2" program looked like something that came straight out of Nazi Germany circa January 1945. :-) The all-time winner is of course the Navy rubber inflatable Mach 3 ramjet powered spyplane that headed up into the sky under the huge Skyhook balloon in competition with the Kingfish and A-11. Haven't even ever seen a artist's conception of what that thing would have looked like. Pat >>> I heard they are being mothballed at Tonopah. I guess they are >>> something of a hazmat situation. [quoted text clipped - 5 lines] >> > those tiles must be some serious sh.t. That, and the stuff they paint them with. Said they limit personnel exposure by limiting the length of tour that anyone could work around them and that was what was keeping them from getting hazard pay. We had one come in here with an emergency a couple years back - bleed air leak - one evening, and the pilot just shut it down on the runway, egressed, and vanished. They wanted some of my guys to go out and at least tow it clear of the runway and they all refused - made the USAF send up a crew from Edwards to do it. And get it the hell off our line...I forget where it was actually from. HO, more than likely. Signature- Rufus >>>> I heard they are being mothballed at Tonopah. I guess they are >>>> something of a hazmat situation. [quoted text clipped - 10 lines] > exposure by limiting the length of tour that anyone could work around > them and that was what was keeping them from getting hazard pay. From what I've heard, the only "tiles" are back on the lower exit nozzles of the engine exhaust to keep the underbelly of the tail from heating up and making it a IR target. These are supposed to be fairly similar to the Shuttle's silica belly tiles, but tougher. Overall structure of the aircraft is supposed to be primarily standard aluminum alloy with some composites, and with a sprayed-on RAM coating, rather than sheets of RAM being glued to it. One thing that was very noticeable on the one that was shot down in Serbia was how lightweight the wing structure was; video of the crash site showed two guys picking up a very large section of one wing and carrying it away. On the one I saw close-up all the junction points of the facets had some sort of black RAM tape over them, looking for all the world like black duct tape. Pat Call me cynical, but retired or not, they're still a pit that plenty of money will be dropped into (secretly of course, like any other aspect of the project) because they're still a viable weapon. That means pilot training, maintenance and training thereof, parts inventory, etc, etc, "just in case". Our/my tax dollars at work. I'd rather spend my excess tax dollars on modeling, or maybe even being able to keep my own plane flying? Avgas ain't gettin any cheaper. -- Message posted using http://www.talkaboutcrafting.com/group/rec.models.scale/ More information at http://www.talkaboutcrafting.com/faq.html > Call me cynical, but retired or not, they're still a pit that plenty of > money will be dropped into (secretly of course, like any other aspect of [quoted text clipped - 7 lines] > Message posted using http://www.talkaboutcrafting.com/group/rec.models.scale/ > More information at http://www.talkaboutcrafting.com/faq.html The parts inventory should be pretty cheap, seeing as they were mostly constructed using existing hardware - ex: F/A-18 displays, F-15 gear, etc. Signature- Rufus > The parts inventory should be pretty cheap, seeing as they were mostly > constructed using existing hardware - ex: F/A-18 displays, F-15 gear, > etc. The one I could never figure out was what the C-130 air conditioning system was all about. Pat >> The parts inventory should be pretty cheap, seeing as they were mostly >> constructed using existing hardware - ex: F/A-18 displays, F-15 gear, [quoted text clipped - 4 lines] > > Pat Hmmnnn...all depends on what parts of it you're talking about, but I'd suspect that portions of the chillers would have been used to cool the FLIRs. Signature- Rufus Pardon my ignorance but I would have thought the USAF needed every stealth type it could get its hands on for the forthcoming action against Iran? (kim) > Pardon my ignorance but I would have thought the USAF needed every > stealth type it could get its hands on for the forthcoming action > against Iran? MIRV warheads don't need stealth. SignatureEnzo I wear the cheese. It does not wear me. > hard to believe she is 27 years old. Now I feel old. > > Craig > I heard that. It seems like only yesterday that I first saw one inside a hanger at Kirtland AFB, Albuquerque during an open house. All roped off and a dozen armed guards around it so you couldn't get closer than maybe 40'. Time is fun when you're having flies said the bullfrog. Grandpa John >> hard to believe she is 27 years old. Now I feel old. >> [quoted text clipped - 6 lines] > maybe 40'. Time is fun when you're having flies said the bullfrog. > Grandpa John We had a flight of four of them come in for some activity a number of years back - got to pretty much do a crew walk around on each of them and chat with the guards before they got completely unpacked and the ropes went up. Then we had some fun... Guard: "Ok. I gotta go to work now. If you're on that side of the rope, look all you want. But if ya lean over the rope, or step past the rope, I'm gonna have to shoot ya. Got it? Ok?" They were on the schedule for a couple weeks and I think the whole joint quit work just to watch the man ups and launches. Interesting airplane. Signature- Rufus > They were on the schedule for a couple weeks and I think the whole > joint quit work just to watch the man ups and launches. Interesting > airplane. Ever see the ones with the black braking chute on them? Nice touch. :-) Pat >> They were on the schedule for a couple weeks and I think the whole >> joint quit work just to watch the man ups and launches. Interesting [quoted text clipped - 3 lines] > > Pat You know, as I recall they didn't use their chutes going in and out of here. Probably because they weren't loaded and just plain didn't need to use them for our field length. Signature- Rufus |
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