The F-117 Retired

The F-117 Retired

Peoples and military pilots, get ready for a very good laugh... the reason Is a simple : F-117 It didn’t looks right, although it looks like a tent, its design looks incorrectly.

Look this:

It was a very lean aircraft. It had engines, airframe, and weapons bay, no ISR gathering systems, no radar, no fancy communications gear. It could carry 2 weapons, and only 2 bombs of 2000 lb bombs.

Another problem. One unfortunate is those angular panels for F-117 have to be welded using very exotic technology and they don’t always come out precisely the same. So no two F117’s have the exact same aerodynamics... Can you imagine it..! And no two handle the same way which means that pilots and airplanes are not interchangeable.

That is not a plane a self respecting US Air Force fighter pilot could love. Fighter pilots live and love to dogfight, not driving bomb dumpers like F-117.

History :

It entered service in 1983. The F-117 was originally designed to penetrate deep into Soviet air space and take out strategic targets in the Soviet rear. The plane’s stealthy features were designed to allow it to strike heavily-defended targets without fear of being shot down. In 1999, an F-117 was shot down over Serbia. Although the US military brushed it off as a fluke, but by 2004 it had become clear that Russia and China had developed radars capable of at least tracking the aircraft,It can even be dropped easily, the F-117’s slow speed and lack of maneuverability meant that it would stand little chance in the event that it was intercepted by fighter jets guided to it by ground-based radars.However, by 2008 it was clear that the F-117 was no longer capable of performing that mission.

Replacement :

Defense planners began to lean on the B-2 to perform many of the missions of the F-117. The B-2 is a far stealthier aircraft than the F-117; it can carry a larger payload, and it has a longer range, allowing it to penetrate further into enemy air space. Although the B-2 was originally conceived as a nuclear bomber, the advent of the JDAM allowed it to be used as a highly accurate and effective conventional bomber.

 Development:

Unfortunately with the end of the cold war, large military budgets morphed into not so large military budgets. Suddenly purpose built weapon systems were in danger, The JSF program was a deep dark hole that swallowed money, The air force tried to feed the sustainment money for the A-10 fleet to the JSF program, year after year to no avail. So budgets are getting tight, and decisions must be made.

So the decision was made. Retire the F-117, Did we lose anything by retiring the F-117? Sure we did. We lost 59 aircraft that can do the penetrating strike mission, and added that burden to a small fleet of F-22s that was already straining to fulfill its own air dominance mission given the numbers we had. But the risk appeared manageable, given the likelihood of needing a large fleet of stealth strike aircraft in the short term. The F-22 would just have to fill the role until, after the F-35 into service to take it over for good. And honestly, it looks like it was the right call. We got through the time period of the F-22 being our primary stealth strike aircraft without having to call it to task for this mission often at all. And now we have the F-35s in service.