Ben Rich, Skunk Works, & the F117 Stealth fighter
An evening pause: As one commenter at the youtube page said, “Every once in a while 60 minutes comes up with a great story.”
Hat tip Mike Nelson.
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Great book. I encourage everyone to read it. It is not only about the F-117, but the history of the organization, the U-2 and the SR-71 as well. While in college I had to take a business class and we had to read a book about a business and give a speech about it. Of course I read this book. The business majors in the class were horrified that engineers ran the Skunkworks and not the typical management.
That’s as it should be. Stealth helped ruin the beauty of military aviation…and the advantage is slipping. I didn’t mind the paint spec’ …show the flag. That paint may have a spinoff use.
Another Rich story I heard:
When they were working on the B2 the radar cross section tests were not down to the level wanted . Rich showed it to his Boss a
With the off hand Comments from one of the engineers that What they needed a Klingon Cloaking device.
His Boss looked him straight in the Eye and said…then go build one…..then added I mean it come back when it’s ready…..
Thus the coating on the outside of the bird was invented… And became the maintenance headache to this day.
Just posted are pictures of the F35s launching in the Pacific, with (looks like) mold growing in their current (great grand child) generation coatings…….
Many years ago, living under the flight path off one of the runways of Hanscom Field, my after midnight TV watching could be modified by multipath interference as the analog TV signal bounced off moving aircraft. Then one moonless night I heard something in the air but saw no TV signal changes. I ran outside, no lights in the sky and no light from the airfield either. Being ready for the next moonless night and recognizing the particular sound and lack of electro magnetic wave signal changes, the only thing I ever saw was the pattern of blocked stars as the thing flew overhead.
If I had a suitable software defined radio and the spare time I could still observe those multipath effects. And I suppose that with enough Starlink nodes and ground nodes cooperating one would have other ways to detect some hidden things.
“Tony Stark Was Able To Build This In A Cave! With A Box Of Scraps!”
https://youtu.be/H4oHU3RXjiM
0:45
Ben Rich once told a story about when they had a model of the F117 mounted upside down on a stand testing it’s radar reflection using a radar on a neighboring hill.
The radar operator asked him to check if the model had fallen off the stand because he wasn’t getting any return, Ben had a look, just then a bird landed on the model – “no it’s ok, I’ve got a return now”.
This country has been blessed over the years by practical geniuses such as Ben Rich and Kelly Johnston — who designed the SR-71 using only slide rules. Heaven help us if the country squelches such gifted individuals, as our so-called woke military seems to be doing now.