Boken har ISBN 0 7515 1503 5. Jeg kjøpte den i 1995 og koste meg. Leo Janos har også skrevet boken Yeager.
No, The F-117 Never Had Air-To-Air Capability, But One Did Get A Radar
The "Black Jet" never got the ability to shoot down other aircraft, but not due to a lack of creativity on behalf of the Skunk Works team.
After years of studying the history of the F-117 Nighthawk program and having written many articles about some of its most obscure elements, one topic that has continued to surface in various forms has to do with the stealth attack jet being used in the air-to-air role. Discussion of this surfaced briefly on the Fighter Pilot Podcast recently, which you can and should check out here. Comments from a veteran Nighthawk pilot resulted in speculation that this capability may have indeed existed in an operational sense. The hard truth is it absolutely did not, but Skunk Works and the Air Force did toy around with the idea of enabling the F-117 in the air-to-air arena and giving the jet a radar on multiple occasions during its first decade of existence.
THE MYSTERIOUS CASE OF THE F-117 NIGHTHAWK'S FLIP-DOWN
RADAR LOCATORSBy
Tyler RogowayPosted in THE WAR ZONE
THE STEALTHY F-117 NIGHTHAWK COULD HAVE EXECUTED NUCLEAR
STRIKES AGAINST THE SOVIET UNIONBy Tyler RogowayPosted in THE WAR ZONE
THE “TOXIC DEATH” PAINT SCHEME WAS THE F-117 NIGHTHAWK’S
MOST OUTRAGEOUSBy
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TEST PILOT RECOUNTS F-117'S WOBBLY FIRST FLIGHT AND
ENTERING INTO ITS TOP SECRET WORLDBy Tyler RogowayPosted in THE WAR ZONE
F-117 STEALTH JETS FLEW DIRECTLY OVER LOS ANGELES ON
ANOTHER MISSION OFF THE CALIFORNIA COAST (UPDATED)By Tyler RogowayPosted in THE WAR ZONE
It
is true that during the early 1980s, as the F-117 was marching towards an
operational state, Lockheed's Skunk Works and
the Air Force kicked around the idea of using the F-117 as a clear air
interceptor of sorts aimed at swatting down high-value Soviet assets. Years
before that, prior to the true limitations and strengths of the final design
becoming known, a more robust air-to-air capability was discussed. But these
were just conceptual ideas. Some limited testing, much of which was a byproduct
of trialing the stealth jet's radar signature against U.S. airborne early
warning and control aircraft and fighters, was done. That being said, we can
now get back to the notion that the air-to-air mission was actually within the
F-117's operational repertoire.
Here
is the relevant excerpt from the Fight Pilot Podcast podcast, as transcribed by The
Aviationist:
"Yes
its primary role was attack but having said that, it could actually carry every
munition in the inventory at the time of its insertion, with the exception of
the Sparrow missile which was radar-guided so we could carry air-to-air
missiles we could carry the full gamut of air-to-ground munitions and
everything. So the F-117 designation has long been rumored and then postulated
and many beers have gone down about why it was as such but I think it was
basically they just said – hey we don’t want to have anything really too
extraordinary out there at all – but yes in all reality it is an attack jet but
it did have a limited air-to-air capability."
...
"Our
secondary role was to shoot down the Soviet AWACS. So yeah, we were invisible
to their radar and we didn’t want them controlling their airspace so, either on
the way in or on the way out you could add a Soviet AWACS paint it to the side
of your aircraft”
The F-117's cockpit was state of the art at the
time of its introduction, but it didn't have a radar.
When
I heard this, I was a bit flabbergasted. I knew that this wasn't really the
case, at least how it may have sounded. The free-flowing nature of the podcast
really didn't delve into it too deeply, so it was entirely possible it just
came out a bit different than intended. So, our friends at the Fighter Pilot Podcast put us in touch with Robert
"Robson" Donaldson, their guest for the episode and a veteran F-117
pilot who flew the jet during an amazing time in its operational history,
between 1989 and 1992. We previously talked to him about the F-117's nuclear
strike role, which also came up briefly in the podcast. Donaldson
was happy to clarify his statements on the topic and to discuss the matter in a
bit more detail.
According
to the retired F-117 driver and commercial airline pilot, no, the Nighthawk
never actually had air-to-air combat as an operational mission. It wasn't
trained for by F-117 crews and the aircraft were not really configured for it
in any meaningful way. The concepts that had been passed around early in the
jet's existence included being able to sneak up on unsuspecting Soviet airborne
early warning and control aircraft and take them out before they could ever
alert prowling fighters as to the attacker's whereabouts. This would have been
done, at least notionally, by an F-117 toting a heat-seeking AIM-9L
Sidewinder missile, as the jet had no radar of any kind in
order to employ radar-guided missiles.
The Soviet Beriev A-50 Mainstay airborne early
warning and control aircraft was coming online just as the F-117 became
operational.
This sounds pretty cool, but in
reality, it wasn't plausible. The F-117 would have no way to look for an
airborne target beyond what could be seen outside the cockpit windows, which
were notoriously obscured. Its pilot was shut off from the outside world when
the aircraft was in a stealth configuration, too. In other words, data-links
and radio calls were really not an option, and relying on them alone at the
time was far from ideal, especially for such a dangerous mission.
If the F-117 was able to somehow find
its target and could navigate within around four miles or so of it to be in a
position to launch its AIM-9L, the missile would have to be extended into the
slipstream with the F-117's bay door open in order to even attempt to obtain a
lock. Once again, that is only if the jet and the missile's seeker were pointed
directly at the target in the first place. The hard fact here is that opening
the bay doors and extending the AIM-9 into the slipstream while trying to lock
up the target would give away the F-117's presence and its position.
Considering it was a subsonic attack aircraft, running away at high speed
wouldn't have been a good option after a shot was taken, nor would it have been
the stealthiest aspect of the aircraft to present to your enemies after they
already knew you were present.
In other words, this was totally
implausible operationally speaking and it never became a reality for good
reason.
USN
A Navy Hornet firing an AIM-9L/M Sidewinder from
its wingtip rail. Lock-on after launch (LOAL), which is ideal for stealth
aircraft with weapons bays, has only become a reality recently for the
Sidewinder family of missiles.
What if the F-117 had its own
air-to-air radar? It sounds intriguing, but making it happen, especially in the
1980s, was far harder than it sounds. Just using a traditional fighter's fire
control radar, assuming you could even mount it somehow and still have it be
effective without compromising the jet's radar signature, would give away the
aircraft's position via its radio frequency emissions. This would have negated
the whole stealth technology thing and the F-117 was never designed to
accommodate such a large piece of kit in its nose in the first place.
Robert Donaldson told The War Zone that Ben Rich himself, head of the Skunk
Works during the F-117's ascendency, a man that is largely credited with giving
birth to stealth technology as we know it today, told him about one concept his
team was looking into while meeting with the aviation legend at the original
Lockheed Skunk Works headquarters in Burbank. Rich described the concept as a
radar that would fit into the existing nose of the F-117 and was housed behind
a sliding door when not in use.
F-117 with its FLIR visible. The turret sat behind
a radar reflective screen.
The
idea was that the Nighthawk pilot would be able to activate the radar to take a
'snapshot' of the airspace in front of them, with the door snapping open and
closed similar to a shutter on a camera so as to only disrupt the jet's
stealthy signature for a very short amount of time. This was similar to the
aborted flip-down Radar Locating System (RLS) that never made it onto the
production F-117. You can read all about the RLS and its weird backstory
in this past piece of ours.
In retrospect, the RLS system might have been effective when it came to
locating and attacking enemy airborne early warning aircraft and they used a
similar pop open and closed concept of operations, but that's beside the
point.
By taking one quick radar sweep of the
area, enemy sensors would have been challenged to home in on the radar's
emissions and identify the F-117's general position. With the radar picture in
hand, the pilot could target an aircraft in the distance and make a run on it,
only taking quick radar snapshots as they closed in, providing just enough
information to get the Nighthawk lined up for a quick Sidewinder shot.
It's
an interesting idea, but as far as we know, it was just that, an idea. Still,
Rich clearly was interested in it considering he shared it with the newly
minted F-117 pilot. It certainly would have solved a lot of problems without
heavily eroding the F-117's inherent advantages. This was also an era where
low-probability of intercept (LPI) radar technology was still fairly new,
having first been tested in relation to a stealth aircraft on Northrop's Tacit Blue
demonstrator, and Lockheed was working on its own advanced LPI
capabilities for the Advanced Tactical
Fighter (ATF) program that would eventually give birth to the
F-22 Raptor.
F-22 and F-117.
In
fact, the active electronically
scanned array (AESA) radar technology that was set to be a
fixture in the ATF program would have likely been necessary for Rich's
radar-enabled F-117 concept, as there would be no place to put a mechanically
scanned array behind a flat faceted door as it was described. The place for
such a radar would have likely been where the forward-looking infrared turret
exists in the F-117's nose. This would have provided a way to largely retain
the F-117's outer mold line while still giving the jet a limited air-to-air
radar capability. It wouldn't have been able to scan an azimuth as wide as a
traditional fighter radome would have allowed, but a small AESA could have
provided a usable cone-like scan volume very quickly so as to give the pilot
some situational awareness as to what lay in front of the jet. LPI radar modes would
have helped keep the F-117 safe from the enemy's passive radio frequency
detection capabilities.
Donaldson's account is highly
intriguing. It really does point to a concept of taking the advances made for
the looming ATF program in terms of radar tech and injecting them into the
already existing F-117, and thus giving it new capabilities and missions. But
why do you need a relatively anemic performing F-117 with limited radar
capabilities when you could have an F-22? Well, the latter aircraft wouldn't be
operational for many years, so using even early forms of its sensor tech with
the operational F-117 may have proven to be attractive for Rich and his
Skunks.
Ben Rich and the F-117.
The thing is, Rich's concept as
relayed to Robertson would have been at least a second try to realize a
radar-toting F-117 if it had ever been put into practice. Shortly after the
F-117 was operational, a program aimed to turn the stealth jet into an all-weather
attack aircraft via the addition of a radar. Multiple sources have described
this offshoot of the program to me over the years, including a senior officer
that was intimately familiar with the F-117 program during the period in
question.
An F-117 is said to have been modified
to house a radar set that was a cousin of the AN/APQ-164 passive electronically
scanned array (PESA) radar that would eventually find itself in the B-1B
bomber. The B-1B had a reduced radar signature and its radar required LPI modes,
so that capability aspect may have already been baked into the radar set at the
time of the F-117 tests, or at least it was deep in development.
The radar's ability to take detailed
synthetic aperture radar (SAR) maps of what was ahead allowed for relatively
precise targeting in all weather. It could also detect moving targets on the
ground and its downward-angled face provided a reduced radar signature for the
aircraft that was carrying it. Since it was possible to electronically steer
its beam, it would have been probably the best candidate available to fit
within the odd shaping limitations of even a modified F-117 nose. A
mechanically scanned dish would have created a variable radar signature that
could potentially compromise the stealthy jet.
The AN/APQ-164 PESA on the B-1B
One
of the developmental F-117s, tail #794 according to Have Blue and the
F-117A:
Evolution of the "Stealth Fighter," received
the radar in 1984 at the Skunk Works' Burbank plant and began flight testing
out of Groom Lake after the modifications were complete. The installation was
unique, with a specially built selective frequency 'evanescent' radome covering
the PESA antenna that allowed for the radar to work while also maintaining a
high degree of low-observability. This radome technology was absolutely
cutting-edge at the time and eventually found itself utilized on the F-22
Raptor.
It isn't clear exactly how the tests
went, but as I understand it the entire concept would have been very costly to
achieve in a scaled manner. Also, the F-117 was an extremely precise strike
asset via its infrared targeting and navigation system and laser-guided bombs.
While the F-117 may have been able to find its target in bad weather with the
radar, it would not have been able to deliver its two bombs with anywhere near
the accuracy as what laser guidance provided by just using the radar
alone.
It turns out that it would be exactly
two decades after the radar tests that the F-117 finally got all-weather strike
capability via the GPS-guided Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM)—no radar
needed.
F-117 during JDAM trials in the early 2000s.
As for what the F-117 looked like with
such a radar installed, that remains a mystery. We have inquired with Lockheed
and the Air Force in an attempt to get a photo of the unique configuration, but
have come up empty-handed, which isn't all the surprising considering elements
of the F-117 program remain remarkably murky. It's also possible that this radar-equipped
F-117 was tested against aerial targets if the radar had an air-to-air a mode
at the time, but we don't know that for sure.
In some ways, the whole idea of an
F-117 with an air-to-air mission was too ahead of its time. Today, low
observable aircraft can stay connected to critical networks without sacrificing
stealth and radars have become more compact and powerful, with AESA arrays
being commonplace today. LPI modes on those radars have become ever more wily
and harder to detect, as well.
So, even without a radar, in this
current age in which combat aircraft and the missiles they fire themselves are
networked, an upgraded F-117 could rely entirely on off-board targeting
information when attacking an enemy aircraft from beyond visual range. Even its
own electronic surveillance suite would be sensitive enough to geolocate an
enemy aircraft via its own emissions and to prosecute an attack based on that
information. But this is now, not three decades ago. At that time, this simply
wasn't possible.
In the end, it's safe to say that the
F-117 never had an air-to-air role, but it certainly wasn't due to a lack of
imagination on the part of the Skunk Works. Still, not a single air-to-air
missile was ever fired by an F-117, not even in basic testing.
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