F-117 Nighthawk | Stealth Attack Aircraft developed by Skunk Works

the F-117 Nighthawk a Marvel of stealth and beauty of American expertise and Ingenuity in Aeronautical Engineering developed by Lockheed Martin's secretive Skunk Works division was an aircraft to be feared as a true Predator it hid in the shadows until striking its prey with deadly precision number three and four spread out to the left side we'll line up in an Echelon Left Behind The Boom go ahead and just like five contact you look good sir I've been rooting now to get it to fly the Hopeless Diamond to fly that was that was a significant achievement you bet we all know it was a breakthrough technology it was an amazing breakthrough if you look at other Fighters that were deployed in the early to mid 80s the radar cross section wasn't even a consideration post F-117 no credible air combat design does not include low observability as a key performance parameter when you think about the F-117 Not only was it a game changer in terms of delivering this amazing capability but as transformative in terms of Technology it introduced stealth technology into Warfare since World War II Nations have relied on a radar to ward off attacks from the sky but now the United States has a weapon that flies through radar without detection then reeks destruction it is quiet precise and deadly we're at the height of the Cold War where our military really needs to step up its game and it was a fusion of a commitment to peace to strength but also to supporting and delivering the best America had in terms of innovation [Music] stealth began with the SR-71 Blackbird a spy plane built in the 60s by the Lockheed Corporation [Music] [Music] its only apparent defense was to fly higher and faster than the enemy [Music] but the plane had a secret advantage its streamlined shape was stealthy although the Blackbird is a large plane it looks small viewed head-on the way radar sees it [Music] the Blackbird was designed by the Skunk Works a division of Lockheed specializing in secret projects engineers at the Skunk Works were excited by the Blackbirds a low radar profile but in the days of the slide rule the thought of making a plane stealthy from top to bottom was laughable the equations were just too big to calculate by the 70s however computers had grown in speed and Power now it was possible to solve the puzzle of stealth in 1975 Lockheed built a computer program called echo1 now Lockheed had to prove their theory in the real world on a radar testing range we bait a small model with flat sides and we called it the Hopeless diamond and they we put it on the Range and the manager came to me and he says Mr Rich you know you you um you dropped the model I said I'll go on and I said well let's go look the end of the models are about half a mile downrange and so we looked no the model was there and all of a sudden this he says wait a minute I'm seeing it because he had turned the gain down to his maximum gain and all of a sudden a bird landed on the model and we he saw the bird and didn't see the model at the time echo1 could only calculate Radar's effect on flat shapes so Lockheed had to design a plane with no curved surfaces [Music] by 1977 they had built the first pure stealth aircraft the very small very stealthy have blue the Pentagon was stunned interesting thing about the half blue when it demonstrated is very low dog low radar cross section was it suddenly became an answer in search of a question you know we got this tremendously good capability and the the question then was well what's the best possible way to use it pretty much the first priority was could it be of a strategic capability and so the question was could this concept grow large enough to fill that particular Mission area and after doing model testing both aerodynamic and RCs it became evident to us that no it could not be done the risks became acceptable once you grew Beyond a certain size and the size kind of wasn't about what you see today on a ramp in the f-17 when she went beyond that there were certain areas in the airframe which probably classified but you just started to run into problems interestingly enough the basic concept worked it maintained signature it was an aerodynamic issue we suggested to the Air Force when we went to the F-117 that we should round off some of the edges and make it a better aerodynamic airplane they didn't want to do that because it was felt that some black magic about how we got this red low radar cross-section and we just didn't want to mess with it in this hangar in Burbank California Lockheed built the first F-117 workers were sworn to Absolute secrecy stealth technology had entered the black world the Pentagon declared it top secret [Music] in the late 70s Cold War tensions were running High so before a single plane was finished the Air Force had formed a squadron to fly it I first experience with what the aircraft looked like was actually at the Skunk Works yeah the initial look at the aircraft was actually a wooden mock-up of the fuselage of the airplane and if you look at the fuselage of the 117 you'll say it's not very aerodynamic looking with the high peak canopy and all that we looked at it we said we're not going to fly that thing that thing is it's impossible for that to fly so it was quite of a shock to first see it but then over time as as the aircraft went together and we began to see it on the production floor to begin to take shape took on a beauty of its own you know and then then we realized that we had something special that we were dealing with by June 18 1981 the first 117 was ready to fly this was not a prototype Lockheed didn't build one Hal Farley was at the controls of a full-size test plane the first day went well but one major bug was uncovered [Music] I was fortunate enough to be the first Chase on that airplane and he took off the time he broke ground I joined up on his wing and we were watching an airplane that kind of oscillated it was enough that we kept the flight pretty short put it on the ground the engineers went to work and said yeah we have a fin problem you know there just there's not enough tail on this airplane to keep it stable the 117's tail fins were quickly enlarged which got rid of the wobbling later the air force made another change they wanted the Nighthawk paint in Black had a requirement that the airplane should have low visibility as well as low radar cross-section redesigned it in Shades of Gray the Air Force felt that as the airplane flew at night it should be black and that in fact not the best color for flying at night it turns out but real men don't fly funny passed out airplanes [Music] foreign [Music] had to be in concert with its Mission which was stealth and precision very very difficult design Challenge on this day was the design and and development of the pedo probes we have four independent AirSpeed systems which not only measure the airspeed of the aircraft but they also measured through differential pressure the pitch angle and the yaw angle of the aircraft and that's critical to the flight control system and in fact had we not been able to incorporate a a fully automatic flyby wire flight control system this aircraft wouldn't know to keep the pointy end into the wind [Applause] the 117 is neither fast nor agile but it doesn't have to be if it stays stealthy it stays safe even its twin engines are stealthy special grills cover their inlets air can come in but radar can't engine exhaust is channeled through a thin ledge of bricks in the back of the plane the exhaust is cooled then ducked it up past the tail fins to confuse heat-seeking missiles [Music] the 117 is coated with radar absorbent material but under its skin you'll find aluminum steel and titanium the stealth is not made out of any exotic materials in fact many of its parts were cannibalized from other planes the idea was to use proven systems so the 117 could be operational as soon as possible but the planes took time to build in the 80s Lockheed delivered an average of just six nine talks per year [Music] the planes were delivered here to the Tonopah test range a secluded base in the high Nevada desert in 1982 Tonopah changed from a Dusty airstrip to a high security Fortress the crew sent here were selected for the skill of maturity they had to be experienced they were breaking in a new strange aircraft with a high price tag it was a stressful assignment crews are separated from their families and worked 12-hour days they could never discuss their missions the 117 was America's Secret Weapon and it was critical to keep it a secret as long as possible stealth Pilots had to keep an even Keel and a low profile back when we were a secret program we would go to work on Mondays and come home on Fridays and the families were never allowed to to know where we were going what we were doing all they knew was we flew a7s I think they thought we were going to Hawaii for the week which would have been nice but we were going to the middle of a desert until 1989 Pilots were forbidden to tell anyone without clearance what they did for a living living in the black world is a very difficult thing for all of us because you don't like to tell your friends lies you can't tell them yes and you can't tell them no you know so yeah it's sometimes you just have to swallow hard and use the cover story that we used all those years you know that we're doing avionics testing or electronic testing with the A7 and that sort of thing and you just you have to do that I mean it's one of those things that protect the uh the value of the program it's something that you must do and we we overcame that over time we got used to having to have to do that particularly with your family I mean you go home and your your wife says what kind of day did you have today and you say I'm sorry dear I can't talk about that you know when I first heard about the aircraft I was actually stationed in Washington in the Pentagon at the time and I was about to change jobs to go up and work my job at which this airplane was embedded in uh and so when I got to the office and was settling in I was getting some initial briefings and uh some of my colleagues put a picture of this aircraft up and said have you ever seen this before and my response was no uh have you ever heard anything about a program called f-117s and I said no and so they said well it is true it is an aircraft in it they've already been in business for some time I said you got to be kidding me you know I didn't think we could keep anything in this country such as a program of this size a secret for that long after the Gulf War the veil of secrecy that clung around the Nighthawk was finally lifted stealth operations were moved from Tonopah to Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico [Music] stealth had entered the light but its Mystique remains intact [Music] Holloman Air Force Base New Mexico as of July 1992 the home of the f-17 Nighthawk unlike Tonopah test range Holloman is a fairly typical base security is tight here but now it's possible for a camera crew to follow the men and women who lurk in the shadows of stealth bcs2 had their own characteristics and had their own personalities each one fly definitely each one's built differently there isn't one jet that's alike out here they all basically look alike from a distance but we get up close to them look at the structural and uh everything it's different and the pods they have a fit sometimes they say one jet does this why did this just do this so well sir it's not that jet it's different foreign men are searching for rocks coins wires anything that could be sucked up into a delicate jet engine the base is filled with a kind of relaxed urgency [Music] now that 117s are in top secret they fly around the clock foreign [Music] Elias Torres is training as an air traffic controller a plane with a gear problem is coming in for you to re-enter and uh join up with cajun2 is on an eight mile base to Runway a 1-6 for possible emergency what we're going to plan to do is we're going to put him straight ahead on the runway let's just go with temporary two five out okay let's keep everybody going we'll hit him and get him off two controllers in F-117 is like any other plane it goes up it comes down it taxes away the controller's job is to make sure these things happen smoothly [Music] [Music] sir no need a film pack and I need an 82 please thank you this is the 415 Squadron flight operations desk stealth pilot Andy Pappas signing for the airplane he'll fly this evening sir okay I'll call back to you guys I don't I don't think it's gonna be bad light ups Pilots head into life support to collect their gear combat missions are stressful Pilots are encouraged to find outlets for tension all of us are our fighter pilots and so most of us are pretty good at pulling jeans and one way to help you do that is to to build up your leg muscles so you can prevent yourself from from g-locking what that does you know pool blood pools down your lower extremities and uh instead of being up in your brain where it needs to be it's down around your backside and your legs so by pumping up your legs you can squeeze them and keep the blood out there a little bit that'll give you advantage on the enemy so you know when he's graying out at about seven or eight or nine G's you're just getting warmed up and ready to kill them and that's that's what it's all about kind of hard to get time in here with these guys but we do you gotta hit them by thanks guys and this helps build up the the entire leg the leg group those those muscles down there and oh most of us old guys have a hard time with me that's what we do all right [Music] it was a pretty good time it's an older airplane but uh it's one you had to fly stick and Runner kind of helpful but this one's more you're more of an artist you know you really are it's pretty cool you go in there you pick out you're caring it and you just watch the bomb Rod hopefully you hit where you're you're supposed to hit if there's any jet you want to fly into a combat situation this would be it there's no doubt in my mind the seat's uncomfortable but [ __ ] say brilliant you sure you want to get a set in here okay here's the route taking a look at the form 70 and photo packs before every flight Pilots attend a mass briefing that tells them what the night holds in store their missions require a great deal of planning much more than other military aircraft two comments actually when you're heading out there obviously if flight leads keep an eye out on the weather if it necessitates we'll skip on from point eight over to the Taos Target at Point 12 okay this of course is an exercise following Santa Fe you get into Albuquerque staying at 180 and you're taking the uh pretty large building on a row of buildings and a good ID point there is the building that's on an angle there at the end of the block okay so keep an eye out for that then on into red Rio you have two offsets you're running down the runway basically what I want you to do is Target the third aircraft and the rivets okay the picture shows a lot more airplanes than are out there there's about eight airplanes out there so take the third as your dimpy questions on the photos Okay slide [Music] major Andy Pap and his squadron commander Lieutenant Colonel Bruce kriegler are leaving for a night mission Pap carries a data transfer module in his flight pack it will be loaded into the 117's on-board computers the module contains Maps flight plans and other information that allows the plane to virtually fly itself into the battle area sure we got a flare screen huh yeah we're really looking for the cream of the crop and that's exactly what we did we went to the Personnel system and we said please give us the best that you have and they said you're going to destroy our Personnel system I mean we've got to allocate these guys around you know and we've got to watch their careers and all that we said this is very important we couldn't tell them why we wanted them and then word came down from on high that they needed to give us what we asked for and uh and they did thank you hello sir how you do good how you doing I'm hanging it flew code one first code good buy it you got a fresh screen last night no sir that squeeze trash like from last week but it's not as trash as the rest number but just a couple of strands I'll open this hopefully re-keeping that one yeah I'm your crew chief all right yes I am let's mentioned get your sir we tend to be a very very confident group we know our risks I tend to know our capabilities pretty well and you just know what you have to do and you're able to concentrate and block everything out except what you have to do concentrate on your mission and do whatever it takes I don't know if you call it a coolness I don't know if you call it a discipline I I really don't know what the word is but it's almost an aloofness where you just remove yourself from your environment just strictly concentrate on what you're doing I don't think it's peculiar to the stealth I think it's pretty widespread to almost any area a race car driver I think can do the same thing he's very aware of his environment he's got very good situational awareness and the same thing's true in a fighter I think it's true of all fighters if you're going to be a good fighter pilot you can be a good stealth pilot or good at 15 pilot or a good A-10 pilot or a good F-16 pilot you tie all the same factors together we just happen to do it at night in a black jet I'll go ahead and hit both the power in the air you go ahead and raise up the tracks okay [Music] when the guys come in the program uh initially of course we give them heavy academics heavy simulator training and then I basically talk to them and I I stress one point saying this is not any different an airplane than any fighter airplane that you've ever flown the only thing that you've got to remember is we don't fly this airplane during the daytime it's going to be flown at night and you've got to get comfortable with the Knight you've got to trust your instruments and of course up there uh on the Range there's not many uh city lights around so when you take off it's taken off like into the black hole and you've got to trust your instrument and Trust the airplane and uh by God you you know you have to do that or else you're going to become a statistic foreign flew is not the aircraft that flew in the Gulf War the new version is called the osip for offensive combat Improvement program [Music] existing 17s were refitted with new cockpits incorporating full color displays in an automatic flight recovery system a touch of a button will bring a tumbling aircraft back to straighten level flight this was a response to two fatal crashes in the mid-80s both accidents happen when a pilot lost their bearings at night [Music] back then in the wake of the Gulf War the F-117 was considered one of the most formidable weapons in the U.S Arsenal but for nearly 10 years the stealth fighter was an unknown quantity few knew the aircraft existed and those who did wondered if it would work as advertised the shroud of secrecy cast Over The 117 was so great that even the Air Force planners seemed unsure of the plane's capabilities [Music] on December 19 1989 117s were used for the first time in combat as a part of a U.S strike on Panama what the Bush Administration called operation just cause [Music] six aircraft were sent in to hit two separate targets but one mission was canceled and eventually just two planes were sent in to strike a Target that was changed at the last moment details of the mission are still Secret but the result was that the 117s dropped laser-guided bombs into a field next to a Panamanian army barracks foreign major Greg Feast was the mission flight lead I think that the press and and everyone couldn't believe that 1170s were sent since they can drop precise Munitions why they were dropped on fields and they figured we were supposed to hit the buildings when told that we weren't supposed to hit the buildings we were supposed to drop 50 meters short of the barracks it it is very difficult to train to drop in the middle of a field to put a triangle over a field on a picture and say hit that push is very difficult bad Communications between the Air Force and the Army resulted in accusations of incompetence some use Panama as the evidence that the F-117 program was just a six billion dollar failure what we learned from from Just Cause was that we needed to be careful in a way that we explain to to higher headquarters what our capability was to make sure that that they had Regional expectations about what we could do and what we were really good at what we really did well and what we eventually got a chance to demonstrate and Desert Storm was to find very small pinpoint Targets in urban areas and take them out with great precision thank you in August 1990 Operation Desert Storm began 24 stealth Fighters were sent to King Khalid Air Base in Southwestern Saudi Arabia [Music] I think a lot of senior officers saw the utility of the F-117 but when it came to actually using it in combat I had some doubts now I believed all the test data the test data said that it would be able to go in there and get the job done and not get shot down but on the other hand when you're actually ordering uh 50 sorties a night or so into the most heavily defended Target in the world you can't help but wonder if it can make it Panama had raised doubt but the F-117 Pilots were determined that this war would be fought their way with planning and precision I picked my Pilots for Just Cause And major Greg Feast was my number one choice because he was my best shooter in the aftermath he had to sit there and read all that press about how he couldn't hit anything with a 46.2 million dollar airplane you know he aired here he made this mistake he made that mistake and throughout all that period where you know he was taken taken all that press and and rolling around in his mind he was still my number one shooter and on the 15th of January when I made my final cut on who was going to be the first 117 guy to drop a bomb there was no doubt my military mind that it was going to be major Greg Feast because he was and still is the best [Music] code words for the start of the air campaign I think was execute wolf pack H hour was zero one zero zero Z which is three o'clock in the morning Baghdad time and we had a saying at that time that the quickest way home was through Baghdad and we we knew that once we started it it'd be over fairly shortly we hoped foreign [Music] at 11 PM on January 16th the first wave of stealth Fighters left for Iraq the Allied Command Staff had pinned their hopes on the 117. they sent the plane to destroy Iraq's heavily fortified air defense system if stealth worked it would open up the sky for thousands of Allied planes if it failed this would be a long brutal War [Music] foreign at 2 51 am Greg Feast dropped the first bomb of Operation Desert Storm [Music] appropriately his Target was a radar operations center I had two Targets I dropped in the first one without being shot at and I had a wingman a minute behind me and I thought I'd look back and watch his bomb hit and when I looked back I saw tracers I wasn't sure what they were I had never seen them before and at first I thought it was some kind of I had hit something that was shooting off fireworks or something and then I figured out they were shooting at me so I looked out in front of me and thought boy I'm glad I don't have to fly into that however then I looked out about 100 miles in front of me at my second Target and that again looked like the fireworks at Disneyland [Music] if you're familiar with the Big Sky Theory which is you know this guy is huge and therefore there must be enough room for me whatever other airplane or whatever the threat is so the Big Sky through will protect me as I look back on on what Baghdad looked like especially early on we had this feeling that maybe the Big Sky theory was was wrong because Baghdad was the city of three million people and they had it lit up from one end to another [Music] foreign trust me you're always uncomfortable with people shooting at you you didn't seem Invincible anymore you became maybe less nervous less fearful but then again something would happen and it would scare the pants off you and your eyes would get real wide again and you'd get your caution back not nobody I don't think ever lost the caution lost the edge loss of concern because all it takes is one shot you know one gold in BB and that could come from anywhere so I don't think guys got complacent guys got tired but not complacent [Music] the toughest were I think the first six days because we didn't have enough Pilots at the time and we were busy we were Mission planning the missions were changed we were flying we were supervising we were in this what we call the goat rope uh going around and until the other airplanes and uh the rest of the pilots and we got an additional 12 Pilots around the 24th of January it got a little bit easier we could take a breather and but it would wasn't much of a breather because we actually stepped up how many missions we would fly a night and you know there were a couple times where we flew 64 missions a night foreign [Music] the 43 days of the Gulf War stealth Pilots flew 1 300 missions dropping more than 2 000 tons of bombs [Music] and despite the intensity of Iraq's defenses not a single Nighthawk was shot down [Music] on contract with my Pilots was that we train them and it was kind of my report card either they all came home and I passed or I lost one guy I failed all I could think of at the time was that well if I made it through uh how was I going to talk to these guys wives and what was I going to tell their wives when they didn't make it I was responsible for their safety I felt personally responsible for their safety they're all tremendously talented Pilots tremendously disciplined the guys that maintenance guys had gotten the Jets ready the weapons loaders had gotten all that squared away and we needed it all to come together and it did and the Iraqis just plain missed [Music] foreign Baghdad exclusively for the 117th centama missiles we did that for several reasons first of all primarily is because of the intensity of the defenses around Baghdad we could have used other airplanes in there but we would have incurred losses and we'd also had to do a great deal of Defense suppression and if you saw on television they had guns and Sam sites throughout the city on top of hospitals and government buildings and all sorts of defenses that we would have to take down so that meant we would have had widespread damage throughout the city we'd incurred a lot of Civilian casualties and a lot of things that were just we just morally or not right and there was no reason to do them because we had the advantage of the F-117 stealth Fighters destroyed nuclear weapons plants command bunkers scud missile sites chemical warfare plants ammunition dumps and anything else considered too difficult for normal planes to hit [Music] in this strike 117s were sent to destroy a squadron of cargo planes reportedly loaded with chemical weapons the planes were gassed up and waiting on a Baghdad Runway foreign [Music] really good for us because we do we only carry two bombs and somebody I think it was General gloss and said we were kind of like a little ball peen hammer you know we'd go over and we would hit something right on the head uh whereas like a B-52 was kind of like taking a broom out there and sweeping out every and so even though you dropped a 2 000 pound bomb if you hit the wrong building in a complex because the Intel has told you that this was the building to hit when it should have hit the other building you know it was a miss that just meant that somebody else have to go back there and do the job the stealth Fighter's average of direct hits was better than 75 percent considered a breakthrough in Precision bombing but that leaves a sizable number of bombs that landed in the wrong place it's undeniable that the 117 was vastly more accurate than the so-called Precision bombers of the past I was in in Britain during World War II and it was very frightening to go from conventional Air Raids to having the V2 rocket come pouring in and the first you know about it is the house across the street gets blown up you know you don't have any the being supersonic the sound comes after the the rocket and that was very scary that put a very different view on the civilian population and this is very similar because the F-117 goes in virtually undetected and the first thing anybody knows is something blows up [Music] the psychological effect of the F-117 is interesting it's uh first of all you couldn't have gotten a better more sort of hideous airplane out of Central Casting that looks like Darth Vader's helmet to strike Terror into people's hearts and you sort of wonder whether it could be something that was used as aircraft carriers have been also a sort of station aircraft carrier off you know just sort of as a show of U.S resolve well in this case would be fly the f-117s anywhere wherever the F-117 goes that's an indication of what the US's political political will is and a lot of this probably depends upon the you know this this the still maintaining vulnerability of the airplane so uh you know if their f-117s start being regularly shot down they would lose a lot of this uh a lot of this uh aura that that they have obviously for every measure there's a countermeasure uh the 117 is preeminent today but tomorrow there'll be some way to counter it and I'm sure people are working hard at that it's morning at Holloman Air Force Base weapon Specialists are mounting laser guided bombs on the F-117 foreign [Music] this is just a drill but at a moment's notice these practice bombs can become real bombs [Music] foreign [Music] my name is Harold Carlson Farley Jr and I was raised under the name of Carlson when my wife gets serious she calls me Carlson but everybody else calls me Al and I got that from the military as being Herald to hell Skunk Works back in 1943 I believe it was the United States Air Force realized that the Germans were Fielding a new jet airplane called the me262 a twin-engine jet that was capable of reaching our long-range bombers the b-17s so they felt that they needed a jet airplane we needed a jet airplane for the Air Force and so they contacted Lockheed for the job I'm not sure exactly if what their motivation was to come to Lockheed but Kelly Johnson was a pretty well-known airplane designer and had been instrumental in the P-38 which was a first front line fighter in the in the war anyway they came and they said we need an airplane in five months a jet airplane in five months and Kelly Johnson who was a well thought of young engineer who had a very strong personality and a great amount of leadership capability and and very strong very strong man he um he said I'll take on the job it has to be done by my rules he had 14 basic sets of rules I can't name all 14 of them but two or three of them are important one he gets to select the very best people he has in the whole company number two he reports directly to the company president three nobody else interferes with the project at all it's his project and he's the boss and the rest of the people in the Skunk Works are workers so anyway that's the rules that he set up for taking on that project and it took the Air Force a month to deliver the proposal but in the meantime he'd already started working on the airplane no end full well he was going to be doing it and they managed to deliver the airplane in an uh 143 days that comes out a bit shorter than five months four months and some days which was pretty phenomenal when you think about it and it was a pretty Advanced airplane it was the xp80 and made its first flight in 1943 and the pilot it controls was a fellow by the name of Milo Burcham who was later killed in an accident that was how the Skunk Works got its start and its reputation of being able to do a job quickly on time and under cost well the name Skunk Works was from the little Abner comic strip where I can't remember the character but he was up in the woods and he would Brew up this kickaboo joy juice some white lightning I guess and it smelled bad and there was some odors that were in the hangar area of Burbank there and so one day one of the engineers answered the phone and and said the Skunk Works which was spelled s-k-o-n-k and uh everybody started calling Skunk Works but the creator of little Abner said no you can't use that and he and went to court over I guess we probably conceded I don't remember if there's any details of that but we changed from Skunk Works to Skunk Works and that's stuck and we've always had the emblem of a skunk on the tail of the airplanes the year I joined the Skunk Works was 1978. and the I joined by because I had been working with a fellow Dr Ken Stewart had a PhD in plasma physics and he and I had been working on a new head up display for the F-14 I was working for Grumman at that time and uh my notes to me was also assigned to the head-up display for the new stealth fighter that was being developed at the Skunk Works I read in the newspaper in the Los Angeles Times a very short paragraph that said a pilot had been injured in the desert his name was Bill Park William Park and there was no details in that little thing that little clip and I always remember reading that and realizing or thinking that's very unusual there was there's something going on up in the desert that that they're not telling anything about but they had to say something about the accident it wasn't my future boss who was in that accident and he needed a pilot because he had injured himself pretty bad he had asked some people around and Ken Stewart recommended me he called me one day he was very abrupt on the telephone he said my name is Bill Park he said or would you be interested in the job at Lockheed and I said why you'd have to tell me something about it well he said it's at the Skunk Works you know the Skunk Works is a magic word among pilots and uh I was immediately interested when he said that I said uh yeah I I would be interested if you could tell me something about it he said well I'll call you back and that was the end of that conversation for about three weeks I figured it went away and wouldn't wasn't coming back but he did call me back and he said have you thought about it I said yeah I said I would be interested and he he said all right he said I'd like for you to come down for an interview he said but I don't want you to come to the company I want you to come to my house and so I said okay he gave me the address and it was down in Westwood and it the house was on the golf course and uh in Westwood down in the high high rent district of L.A and it was a gorgeous home and I mean it was there was a beautiful home and there was nobody there his wife wasn't there she was somewhere else and he greeted me and I came in and we had our chat when I left um I said man those guys must pay a lot of money turns out that bill and his wife were really good at real estate but that was how I got introduced to uh the Skunk Works it took about three months to get a clearance I had a secret clearance from Grumman but this was secret special access required which is a couple of levels above secret to be able to access this program so I was placed in The Penalty Box they called it until the clearance came through and then when it came through they then would could introduce me to what it was we were going to fly and and I remember Alan Brown was one of the senior engineers and he took me into a room and the drawings were up on the on the wall regular blue blueprint drawings and he said what do you think of that and if you as you know it's a very unusual looking airplane and it's very highly swept angles and my first thought was the darn thing must be a re-entry vehicle it had to be something like that and then he explained it to me what it was for that it was to evade radar and I really didn't pick up on how important that was at the time I I thought that was okay good it's evade radar how well does it fly is it a real fighter can we shoot things down with it you know with what a pilot wants to do is be able to maneuver his airplane well and and it turns out the airplane is pretty you know uh low performance relatively speaking to the current day Fighters and so um that's how I was introduced to the airplane and then I was assigned to the weapon system to work on the displays with my old friend Ken from Grumman who was working down there at Lockheed and at Grandma at the same time the first prototype was on the floor what was available was the wooden mock-up they had a complete wooden mock-up full-scale wood mock-up they were using to to do the wire runs in this is really crude you know manufacturing process quite a few years ago but they were using this wooden mock-up to to place displays in the cockpit to locate boxes and you know see if they would fit and we also had offices right alongside that and we had people that were working on the displays and and and I was assigned to the to the cockpit and uh displays and we had two other Pilots that were working on other aspects of the airplane as well with the engineers I think it was for two reasons one I had been a test pilot in industry for a number of years the other fellas had come directly from the military it isn't that you can fly any better it's just that how do you deal with engineering and and the company uh and I was I think better prepared to do that than the Air Force guys that were and another Navy guy that came in I think that was one of the reasons and the other reason is I worked like the devil I worked hard because I wanted to be the project pilot on it and I was selected that that's what I think was the reason in order to be able to be the project pilot and the First Flight pilot on the competition for that is is intense you want to be the guy that gets the job and uh and you work hard that's that's that you work with engineering you work with uh and you and you're flying we are flying at the time we were flying airplanes like t-38s and uh so you're being evaluated by the boss and then and also the customer it is something that uh uh I don't know how to describe it any other way it's an intense process the the secrecy the classification of the program was at the same level as the Manhattan Project that was how how secret it was and it was very successful if you recall we spent many years working and actually having the airplane and operational Readiness and not many people knew anything about it and uh so it was a highly classified remotely developed a lot of time away from family we spent usually six day weeks and we would leave home and come back after Friday or Saturday night and then turn around and go back out Monday morning for well I guess probably the first year and a half was that we were separated that much my wife knew I was flying I mean that was my job but that was all I could tell her I couldn't tell her what I was flying where we were we had a special Arrangement by secure telephones so we could call home through the office fairly regularly and and not have to worry you know just to check in and see how everything's going as as the hot water heater broken down or whatever but uh yeah it was it was pretty strenuous on the family life people that I associated with knew that know about the Skunk Works they know you're going to say I can't tell you there's nothing I can I can tell you about it I can tell you I can say this the Air Force were flying a7s as a cover airplane they had a squadron of them at Nellis Air Force Base which were supposedly working on some Advanced system and they were they were kind of secret but that's where the Air Force was they used the A7 as their cover story our cover story was just simply we just didn't talk about it the security that was established within the Skunk Works the security or the classification culture of the Skunk Works was developed by Kelly Johnson again and and back to the a little bit about that initial airplane that he built the xb80 that started this [ __ ] works one of the requirements was it had to be top secret and one of the reasons for that is it keeps other people out that was one of the tools to keep other people from becoming involved with the program from becoming a bureaucracy so the Skunk Works security is was established out of common sense for example if you put a guard out in front of a place somebody's going to know something's inside they didn't put any guards out if you put secret or confidential on it on a drawing of an airplane you're going to know it's a secret something's going on if somebody gets a hold of it they didn't they didn't they didn't stamp any of the things classified at all they didn't have any guards outside they made it as as normal as possible so as to not attract attention they went so far way back when the satellites were first coming out and uh they took all the names off of the parking places because they could find out who was working there the the enemy could find out who was working there the Enemy being in the Cold War in Russia the Skunk Works operated out of Burbank and has operated out of Burbank all the way back to the P-38 to the U2 to the SR-71 to F-117 all of them have been built there and down in beautiful downtown Burbank inside a big old World War II Hangar the airplanes were assembled there then they were the wings were taken off of them and in the case of the F-117 they flew a C5 which is the Air Force's huge cargo airplane they'd fly in in the middle of night and they would take the phone calls for the noise abatement because there's always somebody in the neighborhood didn't like the noise but it only happened every now and then so we kind of disregarded it but anyway they would make a box frame out of wood two by fours and drape a tarp over it so it would not show any part of the shape of the airplane whatsoever and they put it on Wheels and they would wheel it out put it in the C5 and then they would fly it off to where we would test the airplane and was reassembled and then tested at a remote location and that was done in fact back in the SR-71 days they didn't have a c5a to transport that around so they developed a false front if you will for a Truck Line Lockheed had a trucking company that was named some weird name and it was on the back of those trucks that they hauled the the SR-71 fuselage and wings to the to the test location the first flight was a success I'll say that because we took off and we landed but uh there were some problems that we encountered and some some things we discovered that needed to be fixed um but let me go back just a little bit the airplane is unstable in pitching yaw it can't be flown without the assistance of computers at the lower speeds it's about neutrally stable which is almost flyable one of the bits of information that goes to the computers to help fly that airplane is the air data that goes in the probes on the front of the airplane and the engineers were afraid that the vibration of those probes on takeoff and in turbulent air might send vibrations to the flight controls and cause them to oscillate and so therefore they did not want to use the air data on the initial takeoff so what we did was we put a bunch of lead in the front of the airplane and made it positively stable thinking that I could manage the airplane it was still not real stable but it was stable enough that we felt that I could fly the airplane satisfactorily up to ten thousand feet and then turn on the air data information to the computer so that if it did cause a problem there would be plenty of room between me and the ground to get those things turned off again and bring the airplane back that was the plan and that's what we did we took off ballasted with lead in the nose so that it was slightly stable on takeoff which was fine the rotation and everything was good in Pitch it was that the fact that the airplane started to yaw and it went out I I believe it was six degrees to the left and then I tried the rudder to to stop it and it didn't respond right away and then it slowly came back the other way and went out to around 12 or 13 degrees the other way and that's very uncomfortable on an airplane to feel like you're skidding sideways and uh so I realized that this this thing wasn't acting the way we expected to act based on the wind tunnel and simulation that we'd done actually I had three switches for pitch roll and yaw over on the left-hand console and the off switch I had had extended because that was the most critical one and I turned on the air data so that it would come to the through the probes and go to the flight control computer to help me fly the airplane and it did it worked fine there was no there were no vibrations or anything like that but they got turned on a lot quicker than we planned to do because we were going to go to 10 000 feet and to turn them on based on that information we realized that the fins on the airplane the tail fins on the airplane were considerably too small the wind tunnel data I don't know how it was a mistake was made somehow I believe I heard that it they didn't take into full account the sting that the the pole that you put an airplane and a wind tunnel on contributes to stability and I'm not sure that's the case at any rate they came up with a figure that they were they said we were going to be more stable than we really were so the fins were too small and that was the big discovery on the on the first flight and we flew the airplane six more times in a very limited flight envelope while they were building a new set of fins 50 percent bigger that were put on the airplane and from that point on we had the proper amount of stability those that was the big thing learned on the airplane the the minor problems that we occurred are not minor really we had overheat in the tailpipes because the tailpipes were rectangular and in the corners heat builds up and they reached they they were reaching limited temperatures and we also had the canopy unlock light that came on and that was of concern because if the canopy had come off you get a face full of wind and it was marginal about whether you could land the airplane or not and the other thing was that we heard a big thump and that was the blow-in doors which were spring-loaded and activated so that it gave enough air for the airplane on the ground enough air to the engines to run properly and then as you accelerated more air came in the inlets and then the doors would spring load shut making the airplane stealthy because you can't have openings in the airplane and be stealthy and when they slammed shut there was two very pronounced thumps that I hadn't anticipated scared the heck out of me and but there was no indication in the control station nor on my instruments so we continued on with the flight the flight was only 15 minutes limited by the temperature in the tailpipe and that was that was basically the first light yeah no I've never had a UFO sighting okay that's good how we work together at the Skunk Works and with our customer was absolutely critical to the success of that of that airplane the airplane was a huge success the program was a huge success in the world of flight tests in the last 30 40 50 years there's always been a aura of competition between the company pilots and the customer Pilots the Air Force pilot or the Navy pilot that's going to be getting the airplane ever since I started the testing business I was a Navy test pilot for a long time and then I became a civilian test pilot for Grumman flying F-14 and a6s and it was always Us and Them battle you know we felt like we could do it better as company Pilots than they could it was it was just kind of I know testosterone ego whatever you want to call it it was always a scrap and and I learned from this experience that cooperation Works a whole lot better than adversarial relationships Kelly Johnson's one of his basic rules was we need to be allowed to test our product otherwise we will never be able to you know Advance our products in the future so he felt like he needed a corporate knowledge in the in the form of pilot experience in the airplanes that he built and the Air Force has always felt that they wanted to do all the flying it's always been a compromise if you have a combined task force typically the company does fly the first flight of the airplane and does flutter and does structural and does all that stuff but the operational aspects are done by the customer which I think is a good way to do it but there's always a little bit of a conflict but we had a very unique individual in the Air Force a guy by the name of skip Anderson who was running the Air Force side of the test Force he had a very unique way of calming us company Pilots down he he provided great leadership and he worked well with Ben rich the head of the Skunk Works and they got along great and we saw that and we all followed suit and I give skip a lot of credit for that uh we got along very well John Beasley was one of the Air Force guys and he was just one of the team we were all teammates one of the criteria for working at our remote location is you had to get along if anybody didn't get along you were out of there so teamwork and cooperation were fundamental to the success of the of the program what does it take to make a good test ballot I think one of the things is you the basic flying skills need to be above average I think that responsibility to the company and to the product are fundamental to being a good test pilot I think involvement with the design and development of the airplane is critical to being a good test pilot I think an engineering degree or Advanced degree is in this this day and age the kids that go off to the test pilot schools they arrive there with master's degrees and a lot of them go away with phds you know they're they're way above me I only had a bachelor's degree but it's hard for me to say I'm telling you about what I think I am you know am I an above average pilot yeah I am I I can say that honestly am I one of those great stick and Rudder guys like Bob Hoover who was a phenomenal pilot is a phenomenal pilot I'm not one of those but do I get involved with the project I do I get very involved with the project or did when I was working well first of all if I were talking to my grandson who they're all growing up my great grandsons I would say first thing is honesty be totally honest if you can't be honest then you're going to tell somebody something that you did that you didn't do and I learned that really early in test piloting game several people had made a mistake it was a simple mistake they left a switch in the wrong place and if you took off an afterburner you were dumping Fuel and it would light up and you'd leave this big long torch behind the airplane and I did that and I came back and I convinced myself that that switch was in the right place and that I didn't switch it but I did and so I I was embarrassed by that I got caught with my hand in the cookie jar and that was my real lesson in in honesty I you have to be honest as a test pilot you can't you know if you made a mistake man you got to tell them because otherwise they might blame it on the airplane or they might you know the manufacturing process may be changed or the Engineering Process I learned as I mentioned in the last uh bit of discussion that to work with people you have to respect them you have to respect their ideas and you have to present yourself as their co-equal honesty integrity care for other people in the world of test piloting once a guy gets to be the chief test pilot it is normal for the chief test pilot to to go out and fly all the good stuff and that was the way it was at Grumman there was a man by the name of Corky Meyer for years was the chief test pilot and anytime a goodie came up a first flight or a bonus flight you know we got extra pay if it was hazardous the lead guy the chief pilot would end up going out and doing it there was a fellow there worked at at the Grumman and I won't mention his name became the chief pilot and he did everything and the rest of us were doing the dog work and I said you know if I ever get to be Chief pilot I'm gonna share the load a little bit and uh and those guys I got to be the First Flight pilot there's two other guys I got were very lucky that I got to be the First Flight pilot in the f-117. because I said if I got to be Chief pilot as I said I would just I would share and uh I had two guys working for me that were we were very close Dave Ferguson and Tom Morganfield Dave was an Air Force Guy Tom was a Navy guy when it came time for the F-22 to come along I had plans I was dreaming about sailing around the world and I thought and I was getting to be you know closer to 55 and so I I said I'm going to do what I said I was going to do and I gave Dave Ferguson the project pilot job I was the chief pilot and director of flight Ops but he was the project pilot and would be fine the first flight on the F-22 the day he went out and flew that first flight I was out there watching it and then I was saying man I wish I had made had made that promise but I was very envious of the day he got to fly I would have been able to fly the airplane if I had just exercised my rights as the chief pilot and then the the next airplane the F-35 that came along Tom Morganfield got to fly the first flight so each one of us got a first flight and I'm kind of proud of that we had t-38 Talons we had a7s we had f4s all of which we could fly anytime we wanted to and that was just a that was like the astronauts had you know they had their airplanes were out there anytime you wanted to go fly you you can go fly and it was good it maintained proficiency it wasn't just a good deal and we did a lot of air-to-air stuff and we'd go out and fight each other that was very good for confidence and very good for uh proficiency the F-14 flies like a small airplane it's a big airplane but it flies well flies flies small I enjoyed the A4 the A4 is a little sports car you know it's got uh 270 degree per second roll rate put the stick over in your through two 360 degree rolls about that quick and of course the F-117 which turns out to be we tailored the flight control system so well that it's very easy to fly I mean it feels just like a normal airplane and one of the best normal of the normal airplanes like an F-15 is very easy to fly very easy to land very easy to take off and a excellent flying qualities the reason that the F-117 was retired was because of the F-22 the F-22 as as a high performance airplane it can do what the F-117 can do it carries its weapons internally it can deliver air to ground it can deliver air to air it can go supersonic it can Cruise Supersonic and it's it's aerodynamically shaped you notice it has curved surfaces and the F-117 has flat surfaces and the reason was when we designed and built the F-117 the original program was not nearly as sophisticated as the programs that are using now to predict and develop stealth shapes and so we had to deal with flat surfaces flat and angles so that's where they they differ that's just and the money required and then there's rumor around who was mentioned the other day about a friend of mine talking about Aviation week had an article that they've seen an F-117 flying and that would really make me feel good

Channel: DroneScapes

Views: 638,898

Keywords: f117a stealth fighter, f117a nighthawk, skunk works f 117, f 117 stealth fighter, f 117, F 117 nighthawk, f-117 nighthawk, f 117 documentary, skunk works aircraft, f117 explained, skunk works documentary, f117a stealth fighter documentary, f117 top secret, skunk works, skunk works history, AdKey:3-Xg6wP8wBnrop, hal farley, top secret, kelly johnson, stealth program, area 51, have blue, aviation history, f 117 pilot interview, f117 secrets, f117 nighthawk, stealth plane

Id: Tdh69Zgm33E

Length: 73min 54sec (4434 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 15 2022