>Little known fact:
>You often hear that the F117 was not a fighter, and the F designation was erroneous
>This is untrue
>A mission role for the F117 designed from the outset was that F117s could carry IR AA missiles, and it's role was to hunt down Soviet airliners carrying elite Soviet politicians and shoot them down during WW3
It’s role was to carry Steven Seagal and deliver him to passenger airliners in case of a terrorist takeover of a civilian jet
Now all I can picture is a nighthawk with Steven Seagal wearing a jetpack and goggles strapped to it's underbelly
Nono, it worker like pic related and it carried a special forces squad led by Seagal and I think Kurt Russel was also there. They infiltrated a terrorist-hijacked airliner mid-air.
What movie?
Executive Decision, shit's crazy
I always get it confused with Air Force One for some reason
Honest mistake, I think they came out around the same time and were like Deep Impact and Armageddon
Another great movie.
Kek I remember that shit, pure kino. I also remember some shitty B movie where the bad guy was flying a black F-117 and the good guy (Michael Dudikoff?) was flying a white one and they had a dogfight.
Some sperg used a space laser to shoot one down in Under Siege 2 iirc
i believe you
You shouldn’t. The only source of that information is a random pilot.
I don't know if it would have the range to penetrate into the center of Russia where targets like that would be found, but it's certainly plausible that it could be used for assassination missions or high-value air targets. How hard can it be to target some short range IR missiles?
Considering it doesn’t have any sort of radar, and the USAF won’t even admit if it has RWR or not, and also that any such target would have an escort, pretty fricking hard
>and also that any such target would have an escort, pretty fricking hard
LMAO the Russian "air Force" doesn't have that capability.
Tbqh the mission itself doesn't really exist. Putin would likely go by train if a nuclear exchange was inbound. Not enough time to get to the airport but you could definitely get into the subway which is designed to survive a first strike.
Lots of the power players in Russia aren't directly politicians. Lots of businessmen which wouldn't be legitimate military targets either.
We’re talking about late eighties early nineties Russia here, where theyWEREN’T incompetent, merely poor
>Lots of businessmen which wouldn't be legitimate military targets
Lol, you naive idiot.
>Considering it doesn’t have any sort of radar,
F-117 has forward looking IR station in addition to downward looking IR used for bombing.
But yeah totally doable for taking down high value vulnerable targets. Not Shure about command planes, not enough range. But AWACS, why not? (Say hi to Clancy).
>combat radius of f-117 - 980nm
>using concealed IR missiles that can't see shit
yeah nah op is moronic. i'm sure some blue suited general floated the idea at one point and ben rich called him a moron but the myth gets perpetuated by morons like op.
That's true, the IR missiles would have to be carried in the weapons bay, and Sidewinders didn't have LoAL at the time.
>and Sidewinders didn't have LoAL at the time.
F-117 has retractable launchers. Of course you may ask why bother with such if you gonna use just bombs...
I didn't make it up, it was talked about by an actual F117 pilot on the fighter podcast.
And until there’s any supporting evidence, he’s talking out of his ass.
He is a pilot of one you fricknut
And? That doesn’t mean he’s not pulling shit out of his ass to sound important.
Example. He claims that the F-117 could carry every munition in the inventory. But it could not carry the AGM-86
Lmao I bet you champ at the bit every time a SEAL rights another self stroking book that's 100% legit. Muh Chris Kyle punisher man. Muh Marcus Lutrell is a SAINT. Gullible moron.
>calls someone a moron
>doesn't know right from write
See:
that just makes it FUDlore
Against civilian ft airliners any IR AA missile works.
2 to 4 massive heat signatures going in a perfect line at constant speed.
Okay.
Now how do you find it without radar?
it could have like 3 vulcans in a gun pod instead of bombs
It wasn’t VIPs it was going to carry missiles for, the idea was it could opportunistically hunt down or kill valuable air assists to and from its bombing missions, like Soviet AWACS.
Which is fricking dumb
>Hey, so we built this sneaky plane right?
>And it’s entire mission is to sneak by radars and drop bombs
>>Okay
>Now, what if we made it able to do more?
>What if we made it bigger and more complex so that it can carry missiles in order to target something that’s most likely to detect it?
>>Go on…
>But it can carry only short range missiles. And once it’s close to the thing (that it doesn’t actually have the capability to track) that’s going to DEFINITELY have escorts, it has to open bay doors, rapidly increasing it’s signature for the several seconds it takes for a sidewinder to acquire lock
>going to DEFINITELY have escorts, it has to open bay doors, rapidly increasing it’s signature for the several second
You have wrong understanding how figher"s radar works, you seem to be under delusion that they scan entire hemisphere around then continuously. You can't be more wrong. Play DCS at you will see that several seconds of open bomb bays are not gonna be any real danger fighter escorts considered.
Fighters have great problems to find "normal" targets having full RCS all the time with radar , this is way AWACS exist in the first place.
No. It couldn't.
“yes his primary role was attack but having said that, it could actually carry every munition in the inventory at the time of its insertion, with the exception of the Sparrow missile which was radar-guided so we could carry air-to-air missiles we could carry the full gamut of air-to-ground munitions and everything. So the f-117 designation has long been rumored and then postulated and and many beers have gone down about why it was as such but I think it was basically they just said – hey we don’t want to have anything really too extraordinary out there at all – but yes in all reality it is an attack jet but it did have a limited air-to-air capability.”
“our secondary role was to shoot down the Soviet AWACS. So yeah, we were invisible to their radar and we didn’t want them controlling their airspace so, either on the way in or on the way out you could add a Soviet AWACS paint it to the side of your aircraft”.
In Ben Rich's memoir he implies the F designation was because bombers were unpopular after the B-1 fiasco.
This is the real reason for the F designation, because no hot shit pilot was going to choose to fly a B.
>, because no hot shit pilot was going to choose to fly a B.
Rich mentions that as well.
I bet its designation was the result of multiple DC bureaucrats coming to the same conclusion for different reasons.
This is even more moronic than the initial claim of the thread
>creator of the damn plane implies something about that plane
>the creator is moronic
Nice.
Government procurement and 'what do we call the airplanes' is pretty moronic though.
>Be the most advanced stealth bomber of it's era.
>Get shot down by some Serb's with soviet era equipment.
it's a low visibility strike craft, vatnik shill
And it was downed by a missile system developed in the 50's, dipshit
no it wasn't.
It was. Serbs got lucky in a dozen different ways, and it's unlikely that something like that's ever going to repeat - but they did do it. So credit where it's due.
>and it's unlikely that something like that's ever going to repeat
>Retired U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Charlie Hainline confirmed on an episode of The Afterburn podcast that a second F-117 had been neutralised from the ground. “I kind of looked to my right over Belgrade, and [saw] this huge missile coming up - it looks like a Saturn V thing,” Hainline recalled.
https://militarywatchmagazine.com/article/serbia-s-long-rumoured-second-hit-on-american-stealth-fighter-now-confirmed-and-why-it-matters#:~:text=Retired%20U.S.%20Air%20Force%20Lieutenant,V%20thing,%E2%80%9D%20Hainline%20recalled.
I thought the reason was so they could convince top pilots to fly what was basically a light (hyper expensive) bomb truck, and if it was a bomber it'd be stuck with the B team pilots
>and it's role was to hunt down Soviet airliners carrying elite Soviet politicians and shoot them down during WW3
As much as that sounds plausible: How would the F-117 be able to do that without radar or IRST?
>/k/'s brains spinning wild because of the F designation
>Don't know that it was a mere piece of bait because they needed the most capable pilots to fly a plane that's aerodynamically inherently unstable
>Which are fighter pilots, the best ones each class has to offer
It was just like that: They called it F-117 instead of A- or B- because they needed to attract fighter pilots because they were (are) the most capable pilots a military has to offer.
It was a complicated plane to fly, the missions were complicated and very dangerous. So they slapped the F designation on it to tell the fighter jocks
>Hey guys, see: It's a Fighter so it's perfect for you. Nobody would force highly trained and very capable fighter pilots to fly a bomber, wouldn't we, guys? Not in the Air Force.
I don't often hear that
it would be good at anti radar missions
i understand the F35 has a smaller signature on radar