After a storied career, an F-117 Nighthawk is now on display at the National Air & Space Museum’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center. The aircraft arrived in Chantilly last week. Public viewing opened on Wednesday.
“It’s iconic,” said Michael Hankins, curator for modern military aviation at the Udvar-Hazy Center. Hankins grew up reading about and building scale models of Nighthawks. For people who came of age in the 1980s and 1990s, Hankins said, “it became, like, one of those cool aircraft that we just kind of fell in love with.”
A Historic Aircraft
The F-117 is a product of Lockheed Martin’s advanced development programs division, colloquially known as “Skunk Works.” Developed in the mid-1970s, it was the first-ever operational stealth aircraft.
In combat, Nighthawks moved surreptitiously through the night, undetectable by radar and all but invisible to enemy eyes. That meant they could fly into heavily defended areas and take out important targets, clearing the way for “non-stealthy aircraft to come in with less risk of being shot down,” said Hankins.
The dark, angular jets flew in four major conflicts: Operation Just Cause (Panama, 1989), Operation Desert Storm (Iraq, 1991), Operation Allied Force (Yugoslavia, 1999), and Operation Iraqi Freedom (Iraq, 2003).
The now-displayed F-117 is the only Nighthawk to participate in all of those operations, earning the nickname “The Overachiever.”
Getting Prepared
Readying The Overachiever for public display was no small task. Edwin Moradians, a project manager for Lockheed Martin, said it took more than 10,000 hours to de-militarize the jet. Its radar-absorbent coating had to be sand-blasted off, and its sharp edges were replaced with replica parts.
On display, the Nighthawk looks exactly as it did when it was in use, just without the classified technology.
An Air Force Reserve crew flew from Dover Air Force Base in Delaware to the Skunk Works facility in Palmdale, California, to retrieve the jet. They loaded it onto a C-5 Galaxy cargo plane and transported it to Dulles. From there, the F-117 was taken to the Udvar-Hazy Center.
“Very rewarding,” Carter Groh, a loadmaster with the crew said of the experience. He recalled that the Nighthawk has been one of his favorite planes since childhood. On a visit home this past weekend, “I actually found a little model airplane of it [from] when I was a kid,” he said.
Knowing that he was part of the crew that brought The Overachiever to Udvar-Hazy, said Groh, “is super awesome.”
One Last Mission
Bringing The Overachiever to the Udvar-Hazy Center “really lets it serve its final mission, which is to educate, inspire future generations, and really connect them to the story of stealth that began with this airplane,” said Jeff Corbets, a Skunk Works program manager.
Hankins said that seeing the jet on display was fulfilling and exciting. As the museum prepared to welcome spectators for the first time on Wednesday, he said he was looking forward to seeing people’s reactions to the F-117.
“Seeing their eyes light up is really magical,” he said. “So I plan to do a little bit of that today.”
