F-117 retirement

How do you know what "I think"?

:roll:

Nobody here has been drinking F-117 Kool-Aid. AFAIK, it did what is was designed to, albeit not without glitches. Which applies to pretty much anything else we ever created.

 

You are aware that JDAMs don't travel hundreds of miles?
Regular JDAMs have a range of about 24 miles and even the extended range Diamondbacks only range about 40 miles.
Quite a lot for an aerial bomb but far from the hundreds of miles you are talking about.

Maybe they bounced?

I haven't heard of this. I imagine they got it from Al Jazeera or some such equally reliable source.

 

cause its a fighter bomber. F-117 is like a fighter that bombs , but without dog fighting. Its a stealth bomber. Fighter pilots wouldnt touch anything they thought was a bomber.

 

Dunno just said it landed in Kasikstan (sp!) or something. Still could be pilot error (probably just a bad source)

F-18 is a fighter bomber. It can carry air-to-air ordinance. the F-117 can't carry air-to-air ordinace. Come to think of it I don't think the A-10 does either (probably can if it had to) The Nighthawk is a ground attack aircraft. The reason behind the F designation I heard was because the military was more interested in a fighter and didn't want a ground attack.

 

They probably were too expensive to operate. But they were effective.

 

A10 regularly carries a pair of 'winders on the outer pylon on one wing and chaff/ jammer pod on the opposite pylon. Self defence only though!

 

So, every morning the pilots gather on the flightline and choose which aircraft they would like to fly that day? Sorry, doesn't work that way.
At the end of flight school pilots are assigned the type of aircraft they will be flying (usually for their entire career). The top man in the class is given his choice but everyone else takes what they are assigned.
That is how pilots gets assigned to fly fighters or attack aircraft or transposrt aircraft or surveillance aircraft etc.

In reality flying the F-117 which was designed for covert operations was considered an elite job and there was never a shortage of willing pilots. Almost all were aviators with considerable experience in other combat aircraft.

 

Grieg:
Yup, my understanding is that a posting to an F-117 outfit was considered an acknowledgement of "elite" status.

They were all very proud to drive those big, ugly, black rascals. A clear example of form following function, but doubtful it will ever be a bird considered a "Beauty-Queen." And probably with the glide characteristics of a mishapened rock.
No insult intended of course. The look of the F-117 is menacing, though not in the same way as an A-10 Thunderbolt. Both aircraft look very "purpose-built" and deadly.

Tim

 

The F-117 has the stealth and the advanced weapons capability but, unfortunately, due to its strange shape it is extremely un-aerodynamic... It does not carry AA ordiance for one simple reaon; it can barely out maneuver a helicopter For that reason it is purely useful a bomber, and now that the F-22 has proven that stealth need not come at the price of performance, the F-117 really has no place in the USAF... The F-22 (and soon the F-35 JSF) can do everything the F-117 can do and it can do it better...

I wonder, will we be seeing the USAF selling its F-117's to other countries? Maybe the US would be reluctant to sell its stealth technology, but we're talking about a design that is almost 30 years old, plus it might fetch a fair price...

 

Experienced fighter pilots, no dought. I heard this from the designers and military officials who oversaw the program for the nighthawk, but what would they know ?

 

So Canadian schoolchildren rub shoulders with Lockheed skunkworks top secret aviation designers and Air Force pilots? And they pass on their knowledge to you?

 

Yes it does come at the price of performance...the price of less stealth as the F-117 was/is much more stealthy than the F-22/35.

 

Raptor loses it's stealth characteristics when carrying external ordinance.

 

First of all, Im 18, and secondly I saw it on a program on the discovery channel and they interviewed the people behind the Nighthawk and those had some relation or another with it.

 

The stealth difference between F-117 and F-22/35 is close to two decades. Modern signal processing made F-117 stealth less effective in the mid 90's, but the fact that pretty much none of the (US) OPFOR platforms will never use that technology at large scale at the timespan of F-117s lifespan, is what kept them still flying.

edit: there's also the thing that the F-117 is the product of the computing power of the seventies. F-22/35 and their curved features are the far more demanding to reproduce with the computers and finesse, than jagged edges, but they produce far better "all around stealthiness" than jagged ones.

 

F-117 may be a product of the computing powers of the 70ties but the F-22 is the product of computing powers of the 80ties and we know how good those were!The difference of the F-117 and F-22/35 lies in it's main requirement!
Secret intrusion vs air superiority wich always makes the F-22 more visible...real power performance over stealthy performance (The F-35 is a completly different story as i only have to say look at how the engine is placed!)....if the USAF wanted the best in stealth at that time they would have gotten the YF-23.
Another thing is the F-22 radar altough low observable will give the aircraft away.