F-117 Nighthawk Retired

I was lucky enough to not only see the Nighthawk fly on several occasions, but also to get an up close and personal tour as a scrub mechanic at an airshow in 1995. It was an amazing, beautiful aircraft in many ways, and it doesn’t seem right that it’s retired already when the F-15 and F-16 are still kicking after so many more years in the fleet. However, the F-117 Nighthawk was built almost with “spare” technology from earlier fighters, and was obsolete very early on.

From Wikipedia:

The F-117 has been used several times in war. Its first mission was during the United States invasion of Panama in 1989.^[23] During that invasion two F-117A Nighthawks dropped two bombs on Rio Hato airfield.

During the Gulf War in 1991, the F-117A flew approximately 1,300 sorties and scored direct hits on 1,600 high-value targets in Iraq^[1] while flying 6,905 combat flying hours.^[24] The F-117 comprised only 2.5 percent of the American aircraft in Iraq yet struck more than 40 percent of the strategic targets.^[25] “During their mission, the F-117A pilots delivered over 2,000 tons of precision-guided ordnance with a hit rate of better than 80 percent. Although the 37th Tactical Fighter Wing Provisional and its 42 stealth fighters represented just 2.5 percent of all allied fighter and attack aircraft in the Gulf, the F-117As were assigned against more than 31 percent of the strategic Iraqi military targets attacked during the first 24 hours of the air campaign.”^[24] However, during the war, it performed rather poorly in its dropping of smart bombs on Iraqi military targets, achieving a success rate of only 40%.^[26]

It was among the only U.S. or coalition aircraft to strike targets in downtown Baghdad. Among the aircraft the Nighthawk shared this distinction with were the F-16s which attacked Baghdad during daylight on 19 January 1991 during the “Package Q” mission - the largest single strike flown during the war.^[27]

Since moving to Holloman AFB in 1992, the F-117A and the men and women of the 49th Fighter Wing have deployed to Southwest Asia more than once. On their first trip, the F-117s flew non-stop from Holloman to Kuwait, a flight of approximately 18.5 hours – a record for single-seat fighters that stands today.^[1]

It has since been used in Operation Allied Force in 1999, Operation Enduring Freedom in 2001 and in Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003.