国家地理:Wings Over The Gulf 波湾战机 - 8

Very roomy. For a single-seat fighter it's spacious 1. Plenty of room to lay out stuff we carry with us. The nose is cut and you won't see any perpendicular 2 surfaces go around. The four probes in the front are not machine guns. And they are not holographic projectors 3. They are called pitot tubes, air sensing tubes we used. There were four channel fly-by-wire flight control system. We have four pitot tubes.

The grids 4 in front replace normal intakes 5 and are put on there for radar 6 cross section reduction. Also you will notice / around the airplane where the cantipedes meet and where the weapons' bay yard is opened, and on the gear door you shall see saw-toothed edges . That's also done to break up the radar energy, I mean we have two edges that meet, end up with a reflective edge.

One of the things to notice is also from the bottom, once the gear goes up there is an elliptical shape to it. And those are how it's hard to see which way the airplane is. We call it aspect angle. For other pilots, which way the airplane is approaching, you're angle to it. And so as you see it can almost look like when the airplane is turning or straight leveled like it has a saucer sort of type of shape below that is surrounded.

If you look at the tail you don't see any visible exhaust. The reason is that ledge 7 aligned 8 around the cross here, / is a set of bricks that goes before with the tail we take and spread the exhaust out across the width to cool it from / across these bricks and duct it up so that there is no jet blast nearly behind the airplane it's above. It gets rid of all our infrared 9 signature below and if you imagine / you are entering a fighter trying to fight this from above, you'll see the tails slope out, which get directly at six o'clock, the tail will cover the exhaust from right behind the airplane.

We have to do maintenance in the airplane and we have to remove the RAM 10 portions to get to the panels so that the maintenance in the airplane is exactly like our any other airplane as far as once you get under the skin. Ugly is always skin-deep for beauty is always skin-deep, depend on how you'll look at it. Once you get under the skin it's a standard air force type of aircraft.

The F-117's skin, a radar-absorbant material, or RAM, absorbs whatever lingering radar energy that hasn't been deflected 11 by the Nighthawk's faceted 12 surfaces. This tori contains the F-117's forward-looking infrared sensor 13, part of its highly classified navigation and attack system. Under the fuselage sits the downward-looking infrared sensor. Both the FLIR and DLIR are equipped with lasers that spotlight 14 targets for laser guided precision weapons. And precision is a must since the Nighthawk can only carry two 2000-pound bombs. The bombs must be carried internally to keep the plane's radar cross section stealthy. When not flying combat missions, pilots carry their belongings 15 in personal effects pods that ride in the bomb bay.

Until the Gulf 16 War began, even those familiar with the F-117 weren't completely certain that stealth would work against a sophisticated air defense 17 system. But the coalition's air command was gambling 18 that stealth would work as advertised. They planned to send F-117s alone into Baghdad, the most heavily defended city in Iraq.

January 17th, 1991, 3 A.M. Saudi time, two squadrons of F-117 Nighthawks launched simultaneous strikes across the city of Baghdad. Dropping approximately 60 laser guided bombs on Iraqi communications buildings, air defense bunkers, ammunition 19 bunkers, Scud 20 missile sites and the headquarters of the Iraqi air force. Within minutes the foundation of Iraq's complex command and control network has been crippled. And the war in the...