Retirement moved up to '08
The black jets that revolutionized air warfare with their radar-evading technology and ability to drop precision-guided bombs at night are to be discarded in 2008, 20 years after the Air Force acknowledged the stealth fighters' existence, officials said.
Capt. Michelle Lai, an Air Force spokeswoman at the Pentagon, said Wednesday that "right now the overall plan is being worked out," but most if not all of the nation's 52 F-117A Nighthawks are expected to go to "the boneyard": Davis-Monthan Air Force Base near Tucson, Ariz., where rows upon rows of scrapped planes cover acres of desert.
The Nighthawks are priced at $45 million apiece, not counting costs for research and development, according to an Air Force fact sheet.
Some of the stealth jets could be sold to U.S. allies, Lai said. "But I wouldn't say that's the plan," she added.
"I think they'll probably put at least one in a museum," she said. "But are the first ones going to the museums or the yard? All those details are still being worked out."
Fifty of the Nighthawks are based in the 49th Fighter Wing at Holloman Air Force Base in Alamogordo, N.M. The other two are assigned to test squadrons, including one in a tenant unit at Nellis Air Force Base. That plane, tail No. 835, belongs to the 53rd Wing at Eglin Air Force Base, Fla.
The reason for pushing up the retirement date from 2011 to 2008 as called for in the Bush administration's proposed budget is because the F-117A has gotten too expensive and difficult to maintain, officials said.
Better replacements are available: the F-22A Raptor stealth attack jet and the unmanned Global Hawk high-altitude reconnaissance plane, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. T. Michael Moseley told the Review-Journal on Friday during a visit to Nellis.
Tom Fuller, spokesman for the Nighthawks wing at Holloman, said that the F-117 is old.
"This is a good time for the Air Force to start investing in the future ... and not spending taxpayers' dollars because its time may have passed," he said.
"The aircraft was made with off-the-shelf parts: the landing gear from an F-15, the engines are from F-18s, and the controls F-16 and on and on. Some of those parts might not even be manufactured now because some of those aircraft have been retired from the fleet," Fuller said.
Moseley said, "The F-22 can carry eight bombs, eight small-diameter bombs or pair of big bombs plus the missiles. The 117 can still only carry two bombs." And, he added, "it has a very labor-intensive maintenance package on it."
"It is still a good airplane right now. But when you look 10 years from now or 15 years from now when you have F-22s and Joint Strike Fighters that have the same, low-observable characteristics and can carry more than two internal weapons, it's time to start looking at a transition," Moseley said.
His trip coincided with a Red Flag air combat training exercise at Nellis that runs through Saturday. Eight F-117A Nighthawks from the 9th Fighter Squadron at Holloman are participating in the exercise.
The return of the Nighthawks to Nevada marked a return to their roots. Much of the testing and development of the nation's first stealth aircraft took place at a classified installation, known as Area 51 along the dry Groom Lake bed three decades ago, sources who worked there have said. The first war-fighting F-117s were based at the Tonopah Test Range.
News that the F-117A was destined for retirement in the next two years surprised and disappointed Clark County Public Works spokesman Bobby Shelton.
As an Air Force spokesman in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Shelton played a role in lifting the veil of secrecy about the program when the Nighthawks were based at the Tonopah range.
"I'm a little set back," Shelton said Wednesday. "I had no idea they were looking at retirement. I thought it would stay around for many, many years kind of like the old B-52s did."
The B-52's first flight was in April 1952, and an upgraded version of it is expected to continue to be used by the Air Force beyond the year 2030, according to the Air Force's Web site.
The Lockheed F-117A was developed under a tightly guarded program in the 1970s and early 1980s. It was designed to bomb targets without detection by enemy radar systems, which is why the planes were tested at Groom Lake, 90 miles north of Las Vegas and 35 miles west of Alamo, sources close to the project have said.
The F-117 fighter-attack jet made its first flight on June 18, 1981. After the stealth program was declassified in November 1988, the first warplanes were deployed in combat over Panama in December 1989. It blazed the trail for today's more advanced stealth aircraft, the B-2 Spirit bomber and the F-22A Raptor.
Shelton was the F-117s' public information officer between 1989 and 1992, assigned first to the 4450th Tactical Group and later the 37th Tactical Fighter Wing.
"I was one of those people basically hired to bring it out. ... It was in the 'black' world in the late-1979 time frame to when the Air Force first acknowledged it in November 1988," he said.
He remembered when the first F-117A was put out for public display at Nellis.
"Prior to April 21, 1990, nobody could get close to those airplanes. We had it cordoned off with a 50-foot cord and had a mini-open house at Nellis. We had about 350 media types from around the world in addition to tens of thousands of people from the Las Vegas area," Shelton said. "For some, it was probably the ugliest airplane that anybody had ever seen."
In the Persian Gulf War in 1991, 36 F-117As bolstered the allied effort against Iraq by bombing targets in Baghdad, Iraq.
The original stealth fighter wing at Tonopah on the Nellis range was relocated to Holloman after the Persian Gulf War. The first plane arrived at Holloman in May 1992.
Fifty-nine production models were made with the last rolling off the line at Lockheed's Palmdale, Calif., plant on July 12, 1990. Seven were destroyed in crashes, including one that was lost in combat over Yugoslavia on March 27, 1999, in the Kosovo war effort.
Fuller, spokesman for the Nighthawks wing at Holloman, said a pair of F-117As led the charge at the onset of Operation Iraqi Freedom in March 2003.
"The president authorized the mission. Two flew in unescorted over Baghdad and dropped two bombs per aircraft," he said, describing the attack on Dora Farms, where intelligence sources thought Iraq leader Saddam Hussein was hiding.
Stealth Jets Bound For 'Boneyard'
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