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It was the first aircraft that I classified as ugly when I was a little boy, and looking at it now...still ugly
Interesting info on the "v" tails, thank you
I like it
It looks ugly but elegant...
Very cheap trainer and did a good job recovering the French Aero industry.
F-117 has a V-tail configuration and it seems to be working fine with it.
Is it?
It did - I think there was an article in the AV Press last week about the last F-117 leaving Palmdale.It DID. They have all been retired. I think the very last ones left Palmdale a week or so ago to storage up at Tonopah.
From what I understand it was a matter of skill, luck, and good old spying. From what I read there were Yugoslav spies around the Italian airbase where the F-117s were based out of. They would keep record of what time the aircraft took off. The times of the strikes were also monitored, so there was a value from the time they took off to the time they released their bombs. This Hungarian guy allegedly used a low frequency radar and was able to track the aircraft based on the cluttered return and the time to target gained from intelligence. It seems the night that F-117 was brought down all that was put together and it worked.That was a really unique airplane, really futuristic. Its victory to loss ratio could had been PERFECT, hadn't that Hungarian serving in Yugoslav army shot it down. We still don't know how, at least I don't. I saw the remains of a cockpit, a tail and the pilot's helmet on a display in our Aviation museum.