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Final flight

It has Darth Vader aesthetics and a ninja’s reputation. Tracing a finger along its wing, the feel is blade-like: sharp and nearly thin enough to slice lamb.

In sunlight, it resembles an arrowhead cut from black marble. On enemy radar screens, it resembles a flock of sparrows.

Behold the magnificently weird F-117A Nighthawk one last time.

Soon the desert skies over Holloman Air Force Base, Air Force Base, an outpost in southern New Mexico’s barren dust basin, will belong to the Air Force’s new baby: the F-22 Raptor. Like the Nighthawk, it is stealthy. Unlike the Nighthawk, the Raptor is a lethal gymnast capable of supersonic maneuvers and advanced counterattacks.

It is newer and faster and stronger — and it has nudged the Nighthawk into early retirement. Holloman’s 49th Fighter Wing, home of the Nighthawk, will replace its F-117As with Raptors this summer.

Multimedia

Check out our interactive tribute to the F-117A

After an April 21 farewell ceremony at Holloman Air Force Base, the last Nighthawks will fly to Nevada’s isolated and heavily fortified Tonopah Test Site. Maintenance crews will detach the wings and America’s original stealth fighters will retire in climate-controlled storage bays.

In mid-March at Holloman, Capt. Michael “Dirty” Driscoll readied a Nighthawk for one of its final flights.

As a teenager, Driscoll tacked a glossy Nighthawk poster to his bedroom wall. Now he’s among the last to pilot the jet over this fighter pilot playground, a baking pit of dirt where the most visible signs of life are shrubs baked stiff in the sun.

Driscoll, about to fly his fifth-to-last sortie, mounts a roll-away staircase and eases into the cockpit. Plumes of exhaust cough out the rear grill. The Nighthawk’s tail fins quiver. Staring beyond the jet out the hangar’s rear door, dust particles and fuel exhaust form a haze so thick the horizon appears to melt.

Go time is noon. And Driscoll has a control tower to bomb.

Building a mystery

The Vietnam War was the last great American dogfighting conflict, pitting U.S. fighter pilots against their Soviet counterparts over Southeast Asia. Still, Russian-made MiG fighter aircraft weren’t the number-one plane killers. That distinction belonged to ground-fired flak and surface-to-air missiles.

In 1974, one year before the conflict ceased, the U.S. Air Force was already considering an attack jet that could subtract anti-aircraft threats from the equation.

Lockheed’s legendary “Skunk Works” team, the California defense firm’s chief innovators, picked up the charge. Partly inspired by an obscure Russian technical paper, Skunk Works set out to produce an airframe eliminating all right angles because those bounce back strong radar signals.

A spear-shaped prototype codenamed “Have Blue” flew in late 1977. The next year, Congress secretly launched the “Senior Trend” development phase, which led to enhanced stealth avionics and anti-radar paint the color of midnight.

In part to mislead outsiders expecting the designation “F-19” for the next-generation jet, the Air Force chose the name “F-117A Nighthawk.” Its first operational test flight took place in 1981 and, in 1982, it was first flown as intended: under cover of dark.

Test flights had taken place at the secret Skunk Works lab in Burbank, Calif., and the Air Force’s Area 51 complex in Nevada. But as 1983 closed, and the F-117As further transitioned from test jets to a secret stealth force, they began settling into their first long-term home: the remote Tonopah Test Range in Nevada’s desert.

Club Tonopah

Invitation to join Tonopah’s top-secret flight and maintenance crews often went like this:

“We’d like to send you to Nellis Air Force Base in Las Vegas for a highly classified mission. You will seldom see your family. You can’t tell a soul about your assignment. And you have five minutes to decide.

“Interested?”

Capt. Greg Meland, at the time maintaining F-15s at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia, got the talk in 1988. “One day out of the blue, my commander asked if I’d be interested in the job,” he said. “I was really taken by that ... the fact that he’d even think about me.”

Leaving his wife behind in Virginia, Meland moved into a nondescript apartment complex outside Nellis’ gate. He was soon introduced to the top-secret Nighthawk and his real destination, Tonopah Test Range. He’d be with the 4450th Maintenance Squadron and, if anyone asked, he worked A-7 light attack jets.

Meland also adopted the Tonopah commute: boarding a packed 727 passenger jet on Monday mornings on the Nellis tarmac, flying to Tonopah and living in dorms until the Thursday night return flight.

As a counterweight to the clandestine, nocturnal existence the project demanded, leadership tried to comfort the airmen working there with slick facilities. It offered comfy, single-person dorm rooms, a recreation center complete with on-site bar, volleyball courts where pilots whiled away afternoons and “The Wild Horse Café,” one of the Air Force’s finest chow halls ever.

“They fed us to death up there,” said Wayne Paddock, formerly with the site’s 4450th Tactical Group and now chief of planning and inspection for the 49th Fighter Wing. “Anything you wanted to eat, you could eat.”

The Tonopah assignment was equally defined by extreme isolation. In its earlier years, airmen could only place outside calls during family emergencies. They were later allowed to phone spouses but couldn’t even discuss the weather, which might lend clues about the site’s location. A non-disclosure stipulation threatened prison and crushing fines for revealing details of the assignment.

Once Meland’s wife joined him in Las Vegas, his mysterious job strained their relationship. “It became difficult,” he said. “I can’t talk about my work. She feels like I’m keeping secrets.” Though the Melands got through it, other relationships crumbled. Paddock remembers Tonopah contributing to more than one divorce.

Still, for crews stationed at Tonopah, the quarantine bred ironclad camaraderie. “You can’t imagine the pride,” Meland said. “In most Air Force outfits working on, say, the F-15, you go home after the day’s done and forget about the guys at work. But we were so close knit, living with each other ... I was in hog heaven.”

Meland, a maintenance officer in charge of 23 Nighthawks, was issued a nightly schedule noting the times Soviet satellites were orbiting over Nevada. As these 15-minute windows approached, jets were rushed into hangars or a cave-like structure near the tarmac to thwart photography from space.

Tonopah crews skated several close calls, nights when F-117As would land screaming and quickly taxi out of sight to dodge the Russian satellites. “There were times when we had to scramble like crazy,” Paddock said. This was compounded by ongoing technical foul-ups. Sometimes, Meland said, the Nighthawk’s tires would “smolder like a charcoal briquette. We’d send the plane out and the whole back end would be glowing red when it got back.”

In October 1988, Meland’s unit got a heads up: The F-117A’s existence would soon be divulged by the Pentagon. Though Air Force leaders initially delayed the announcement for fears of swaying the election, Assistant Secretary of Defense J. Daniel Howard held up a grainy photo on Nov. 10 of the Nighthawk in flight.

That day, Meland went home and revealed his second life.

“It was a little anticlimactic,” he said. “She was never that into the military environment ... it wasn’t like telling a 12-year-old boy. She was a little impressed, I guess, and relieved.”

Meland, who later returned to Air Combat Command and left the service in 1996, now works for defense firm Northrop Grumman. No job, he said, will ever match his Nighthawk assignment.

“It was the first job I ever had where I liked going to work,” Meland said. “It’s still in my heart.”

Operation just cause

The Nighthawk tip-toed into combat in 1989, striking Panama after dictator Manuel Noriega survived a failed coup .

It was a low-stakes mission for the Nighthawk, chosen for its precision bombing but not its evasion of radar networks, which Panamanian forces lacked. On Dec. 19, eight Nighthawks departed Tonopah to strike a field near barracks housing Noriega’s most elite fighters, disorienting them as U.S. Army Rangers led an assault. However, the Panamanian Defense Forces were tipped off, targets were changed at the last minute and the bombings were not as effective as hoped. A handful of Rangers died before Panama was pinned down.

Still, the strike would foreshadow the precedent-setting career of Capt. Greg “Beast” Feest, one of Tonopah’s most skilled Nighthawk pilots. Feest, who led the mission in Panama, would fly the same F-117A during the first wave of Operation Desert Storm jet strikes over Iraq in 1991 — the Nighthawk’s true proving grounds.

Bombs over Baghdad

It was moonless over Iraq.

Feest, piloting his Nighthawk through the black, had retracted his communication antenna and killed the beacon lights. The bay beneath his feet contained Operation Desert Storm’s first bombs, which weapons crews had decorated with personal messages to then-dictator Saddam Hussein.

Feest and the 30 or so Nighthawk pilots slipping into Iraq on Jan. 16, 1991, doubted they’d return intact to King Khalid Air Base in Saudi Arabia. “I thought my chances of making it out of there were slim,’” said Feest, now a major general select. “I anticipated being shot, maybe having to jump out.”

The mission required Feest and the other F-117A pilots to bet their lives on the untested promise of stealth technology. Each pilot with the 415th and 416th Fighter Squadrons carried a lithograph printed in Turkish, Kurdish, Arabic and Farsi. It promised a reward to any nationals offering food, shelter and passage to pilots shot down over friendly soil.

As 3 a.m. neared, Feest came upon his first target: a relay buried in an above-ground bunker that connected radar units on Baghdad’s outskirts with defense control rooms in the city. He lined up the crosshairs on a monochrome video display inside the cockpit and slid his thumb over the launch button.

The bomb bay clapped open and a 2,000-pound laser-guided bomb sped towards the bunker. On the monitor, Feest saw a blast and bunker doors laying flat on the desert floor.

Then, to his surprise, up roiled hot bursts of orange and red erupting from the earth. “I thought, ‘What did I hit, some ammo dump?’ Then I realized it was triple A (anti-aircraft artillery). I just pushed up the throttle as fast as the plane would go ... and said, ‘Boy, I’m glad I’m not going into that triple A.’”

But when Feest approached his second target, he again witnessed a blistering column of missile fire and cannon flak. The attacks appeared unguided. The Iraqis’ strategy, he guessed, was to wait for Nighthawk strikes to announce the stealth jets’ presence — and then blindly light up the sky.

Feest’s bombs had broken Iraq’s calm. The pilots following him entered an explosive maelstrom of anti-aircraft fire: muzzle flashes blinking like strobe lights, surface-to-air missiles spiraling upwards, a stream of headlights fleeing the burning capitol, steady attacks lighting Baghdad like the sun.

“There’s always a chance for a lucky shot,” Feest said. “Especially in the heart of triple A. The golden BB could hit you at anytime.”

Once Feest dropped his second laser-guided bomb, he cut a 270-degree turn and cruised back to Saudi Arabia. At the border, he popped the jet’s antenna and radioed Capt. Dave “Dogman” Francis, a fellow F-117A pilot who had just braved the same ballistic gauntlet. Seconds passed with no answer. Feest hit the frequency again and, this time, the Dogman responded.

His wingman was safe.

“Now the question was, well, who got hit?” Feest said. “How much battle damage did we sustain?”

After docking with a refueling tanker, Feest kept his ear to the radio, listening as more and more pilots connected with the tanker and verified their status. Eyeing a list of pilots fixed to his knee, he checked off every last name from the first wave. They were all safe. One pilot, Maj. Jerry Leatherman, even rewarded himself by rocking Def Leppard’s “Pour Some Sugar on Me” through a Walkman he’d stashed in the cockpit.

Feest’s wife, a logistics officer also working at King Khalid, greeted him after he landed at King Khalid roughly six hours later. Not only did every pilot escape with his life, she said, but the Nigthhawks were landing without triple-A scars.

It seemed the stealth concept jet had matured into a battle-tested war machine.

Nighthawk down

On March 27, 1999, Lt. Col. Darrell Zelko was crouched in hiding. Dirt caked his face and hands. His downed Nighthawk, the first and only ever to fall to enemy forces, was crumpled in a Serbian crater miles away.

Zelko, flying combat sorties during the Kosovo War, was sighted that night by Serbs operating jury-rigged, Soviet-engineered radar.

According to a Serbian commander, downing a stealth fighter was a matter of pride. A network of spies and observers would report F-117A takeoffs from Italy’s Aviano Air Base. Coupling this intelligence with tweaked radars, the Serbians fired several surface-to-air missiles almost blindly, hoping for a hit.

In Zelko’s case, one explosion blinded the pilot and pelted his Nighthawk with shrapnel. He ejected and parachuted to safety.

Serbian forces scoured Belgrade’s outskirts to locate Zelko. But after about six hours, pararescuemen protected by A-10 Warthog attack jets found Zelko and evacuated him safety. Serbian villagers were filmed jubilantly bouncing on the jet wreckage, signaling to the world that even the Nighthawk was not invincible — or even invisible.

Last days

Somewhere in the infinity that is White Sands Missile Range, a control tower has it coming.

Nighthawk pilots have long targeted a mock city hidden in this expanse of chalk-white soil, a military-owned area triple Rhode Island’s size. Today’s target is the city’s crumbling control tower, which Driscoll likens to a “Swiss cheese log.”

“Without a warhead, we have to punch holes in it,” said Driscoll, shortly before disappearing behind the Nighthawk’s translucent bronze cockpit glass. Will today’s dummy payload clenched in his weapons bay finally topple the tower? Driscoll smirks. “I hope so.”

“I still get out of the jet, look back and can’t believe what I’m doing,” said Driscoll, who will soon reassign to an F-16 unit out of Japan’s Misawa Air Base. His shining moment with the Nighthawk was buzzing North Korea’s air space last year as a show of force to dictator Kim Jong-il’s regime.

Driscoll has heard all of the Nighthawk vets’ “back in the day” stories and feels blessed to have piloted the bizarre jet that once graced his bedroom wall.

“I’ll be sad to see it go.”

Scaring Kim Jong-il aside, the Nighthawk has mostly devoted its recent years to test sorties and air shows. Its pilots, who now number fewer than 20, are not the only ones who feel the glory years waning.

Tech. Sgt. Eric Boozer, who heads a weapons maintenance crew, remembers sliding live bombs onto the Nighthawks’ rack. He recalls the electricity his crew felt knowing those munitions were hot. Now most of the live munitions are gone and the stash is whittled down to dummy bombs filled with cement.

But for the younger maintainers in Holloman’s canyon of corrugated hangars — some unborn when the Nighthawk first glided into Southwestern skies — all that nostalgia is eclipsed by a new thrill.

Soon, they’ll be loading laser-guided bombs on the F-22 Raptor.

Live ones.

The Raptor is a beast, no doubt. But in terms of innovation, mystique and sheer audacity, few planes in Air Force history can touch the Nighthawk — soon to become a memory as it flies into the sunset.

Multimedia

Check out our interactive tribute to the F-117A

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