(Image: Alan Radecki, cc-sa-3.0)
Chances are you’ll never get a close look (it’s located at Lockheed’s highly restricted Skunk Works facility in Palmdale), but this pole-mounted F-117 Nighthawk is notable for being the only complete example of a production Stealth Fighter on display. Well, that’s partially true. The aircraft is actually a mutt – cobbled together from the remains of the first production F-117, which crashed on take-off from Groom Lake, and an assortment of spare parts.
The Accident
On April 20, 1982 test pilot Bob Riedenauer took-off in aircraft 80-785, on its maiden flight. The Nighthawk had been delivered to Groom Lake by a C-5 cargo plane two months earlier. Just 30 feet off the runway, the F-117 pitched up violently, rolled over and slammed into the lake-bed, catching fire.
It took crash crews 20 minutes to cut Riedenauer from the cockpit. He survived, but spent eight months in hospital and was forced to retire from flying. The cause of the crash was traced to an error in the assembly of the flight control system.
(Image: Alan Radecki, cc-sa-3.0)
Aftermath
The battered wreck of airframe 785 was returned to the factory in Burbank and spent the next 25 years serving as a functional engineering rig. Plans to restore the aircraft to flight as a two-seat trainer went unrealised. Eventually, its remains were combined with the forward and mid fuselage sections of structural test articles 778 and 779, and mounted on a pole outside the Skunk Works.
The left wing, meanwhile, began life as the right wing of Nighthawk 801, named ‘Perpetrator’, which crashed on August 4, 1992 eight miles northeast of Holloman Air Force Base. Capt. John B. Mills ejected safely. The aircraft was destroyed, and the wing was 90 per cent rebuilt before installation on the hybrid airframe.
(Image: US Air Force)
Four YF-117 full scale development (FSD) aircraft are on display in the United States. The wreckage of aircraft 806 ‘Something Wicked’, shot down over Serbia, is displayed in Belgrade. Meanwhile, the rest of the fleet (above) is allegedly being buried at Tonopah.
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