‘Wobblin’ Goblin’: The F-117A Nighthawk Stealth Fighter Was Designed to Allow the US Air Force to ‘Secretly Penetrate Defended Airspace’

‘Wobblin’ Goblin’: The F-117A Nighthawk Stealth Fighter Was Designed to Allow the US Air Force to ‘Secretly Penetrate Defended Airspace’

By the early 1970s, layered Soviet air defenses of radars, surface-to-air missiles, and interceptors, along with the losses over North Vietnam, had convinced U.S. planners that speed, altitude, and jamming were no longer enough. Skunk Works engineers, limited by the computers of the day, used simplified equations to design a jet that scattered radar away from receivers. The Have Blue demonstrators flew in 1977 and proved that shaping alone could…