A Brief History of Stealth
Gizmodo.com has a great short article up on the history of the development of "Have Blue", the project that became the F-117 stealth fighter and how Lockheed got into the stealth business. It's from a new book, Stealth Fighter: A Year in the Life of an F-117 Pilot by Lt. Col. William B. O'Connor USAF (ret.) An excerpt:
To test the model at all, Lockheed then had to design an invisible "stealth pole" to mount the model utilizing the same technology as the proposed fighter. The results were once again astounding, and incredulous USAF officials were called in to witness and verify the data.
The first opportunity to impress these officials almost resulted in embarrassment. When the radars were turned on, the reflections, while still very small by airplane standards, were orders of magnitude larger than what the USAF officials had been led to expect. They could still clearly see a small radar return from where the model was mounted.
While the Lockheed engineers were trying to explain this discrepancy, a radio call came in from a technician downrange. He reported that a bird was perched on the ten-foot model. The quick reply was an order to blow the horn of the pickup truck the guy was sitting in. As the startled bird flew away, the radar reflection on the test scope disappeared.
The very idea that a combat aircraft could be made so invisible as to hide behind a bird was an opportunity that couldn't be passed up. Everything associated with the program became classified at the highest levels. The program was transferred from DARPA to the USAF special projects office. The word "stealth" was forbidden to be mentioned in any unclassified document. And in April 1976, the Ford administration gave Lockheed the go-ahead for a full-scale aircraft. The Skunk Works was officially in the stealth fighter business.
If you found the Gizmodo article interesting, check out the book, or the quite excellent Skunk Works by Ben Rich, which documents not only the stealth fighter but also the U-2, SR-71, and other Skunk Works projects.
