F117 cockpit sim series#

F117 cockpit sim series#

The technique they came up with was known as faceting, in which the ordinarily smooth surface of the airframe is broken up into a series of trapezoidal or triangular flat surfaces arranged in such a way that the vast majority of the radar incident on the air craft from a source will be scattered away from the aircraft at odd angles, leaving very little to be reflected directly back into the receiver. During 1975, Skunk Works engineers began working on an aircraft which would have a greatly reduced radar cross section that would make it all but invisible to enemy radar, but would nevertheless still be able to fly and carry out its combat mission. The Lockheed Advanced Development Company (better known as the 'Skunk Works' began working on Stealth as far back as the late 1950s, and low radar observability had played a role in the design of the A-12/YF-12/SR-71 series of Mach 3+ aircraft. The F-117A was the first warplane to be specifically designed from the outset for low radar observability. When Lockheed printed up the Dash 1 flight manuals, they printed F-117A on the front cover. The pilots of the Senior Trend aircraft logged in the next in sequence, the YF-117A for a lack of an unclassified designator. These flights where logged in the pilot's logs as YF-110, YF-113, YF-114, etc.

These included the Red Squadron - a squadron of Soviet aircraft that the US government had 'acquired'. The F-117A number was designated in sequence with other aircraft operating at Groom. Although the Lockheed F-117A stealth fighter is almost certainly NOT in the original fighter sequence of designations, the end of this particular sequence is perhaps most apt for a discussion of this unusual warplane, most of the details of which are still highly classified.