No, the stealth fighter was not in operation for 20 years before the public knew about it. The F-117 was delivered in 1982 and operational in 1983. It was 'declassified' in 1988 and displayed in 1990. And it wasn't even a fighter. It was for ground attack.

https://fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/ac/f-117.htm

Besides the SR-71/A-12, there were other stealth aircraft that preceded the F-117. The immediate predecessor was Lockheed's Have Blue[0] which was flying in the 70s. Related to Have Blue, there was also Senior Prom[1], which was apparently a scaled down unmanned "cruise missile" variant of Have Blue.

And beyond airplanes, the first stealth helicopters were developed in the late 60s to early 70s and saw limited service during Vietnam. Called The Quiet Ones[2], these helicopters were painted with radar absorbing paint and had several novel mechanisms to reduce their noise, making them stealthy not only to radar but also to ground observers. They were tested over Area 51 and apparently near LA as well, so it seems likely they may have spooked some civilians at one point or another. The infamous "black helicopter" conspiracies/stories started popping up in the 70s, which doesn't seem particularly coincidental when you consider that we now know the The Quiet Ones existed.

The original Quiet Ones are long gone, but it's evident they were replaced by newer stealth helicopters that we don't yet know the names of. We can be pretty sure of this because famously one crashed during the raid on bin Laden[3].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Have_Blue

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Senior_Prom

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vinh_wiretap#Planning_and_...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Osama_bin_Laden#Helic...

Have Blue was the POC for the F-117, it wasn't used in actual operations. It was a test platform to demonstrate the concept's stealth capabilities and its ability to fly despite its non-conventional shape.

Yeah but it's a discussion about the public seeing spooky strange aircraft and calling in UFO reports, so considering pre-production aircraft seems obvious.

I think the gp confused the stealth fighter with cruise missiles.

In the northeast, the Tomahawk missile’s terrain navigation was tested out of a few air bases in the region, for example.

I thought maybe the poster was talking about the SR-71, but it too didn't stay classified for very long.

It also wasn’t stealth, or an attack aircraft.

> The second operational aircraft[38] designed around a stealth aircraft shape and materials, after the Lockheed A-12,[38] the SR-71 had several features designed to reduce its radar signature. The SR-71 had a radar cross-section (RCS) around 110 sq ft (10 m2).[39] Drawing on early studies in radar stealth technology, which indicated that a shape with flattened, tapering sides would reflect most energy away from a radar beam's place of origin, engineers added chines and canted the vertical control surfaces inward. Special radar-absorbing materials were incorporated into sawtooth-shaped sections of the aircraft's skin. Cesium-based fuel additives were used to somewhat reduce exhaust plumes visibility to radar, although exhaust streams remained quite apparent. Kelly Johnson later conceded that Soviet radar technology advanced faster than the stealth technology employed against it.[40]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_SR-71_Blackbird

To be clear, a 10m^2 radar cross section is enormous compared to the F-117 (0.001 m^2) The F-117 was in a completely different league than the SR-71, but the SR-71 was in fact designed to be stealthy.

A-12 did stay classified for a while.

There were actually two A-12s. The Lockheed A12 was introduced in 1967 and retired in 1968. The McDonnell Douglass A12 was never built and finally cancelled in 1991.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_A-12

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_A-12_Avenger...

The SR71 succeeded the Lockheed A12. It was hard to keep secret.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_SR-71_Blackbird

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/keeping-the-sr-71...

> There were actually two A-12s. The Lockheed A12

I bet this was made on purpose. USA has learned some tricks from Soviets with their "fake patterns"

F-117 wasn't a fighter, and A-12 was not a CAS aircraft. Pretty much like Kirov was not really an "auxiliary craft," and Tu-22 M-1-2-3 were all nearly completely different aircraft

Tanks are so named because during WWI, the British decided to conceal their true purpose by calling them 'water carriers.' 'W.C.' was deemed an inappropriate initialism though, so the name was changed to 'tank' as in "a tank of water."

The F117 is also the USAF designation for an aircraft engine (Pratt & Whitney PW2000), used on the C-17.

Someone suggested to me a few years ago that might be the reason why the F-117 was designated that way.

> Similarly, the stealth fighter was in operation for 20 years before the public knew about it

First flew 1981, first official photo released 1988. And plenty of speculation in betwee..

I was camping with my father above Tuolumne Meadows near Yosemite in 1986. We just had sleeping bags, no tent.

As we bed down for the night, four tiny black diamonds silently flew overhead to the west. Absolutely creepy to see things so abstract and quiet.

Didn't make sense until the reveal in 1988, but it was four nighthawks heading from Nevada to the Pacific Ocean.

Yeah he admits how he is a prankster but then fully expects people to believe his explanation of a 60 second video clip without any other context than his interpretation?

> Similarly, the stealth fighter was in operation for 20 years before the public knew about it.

Wouldn't it look just like an unusual plane to a naked eye observer?

Probably to most people, but some people have wild imaginations.

I don't think they would operate in areas where training is taking place without notifying the pilots in the area that they are also operating there. The risk of collision is too high (and there apparently was at least one very close call).

It's one thing to confuse a civilian, it's not that hard. But your narrative doesn't explain actual fighter pilots observing objects flying orders of magnitude faster and making incredible maneuvers.

Honestly how many people have seen jet fighters do crazy movies at night. Not very many, they don't know what they are seeing. It is like a car accident. Happens every minute, how many people actually witness it? The aftermath maybe, but very few of the actual event.

Why put it commercially if keeping it secret gives you a huge advantage over foreign powers?

Case in point the satellite photo Trump leaked - leading civilian experts were dumbfounded that such a clear image from a satellite was even possible, let alone already deployed and in use.

Commercial applications for that would be huge, yet it’s staying secret.

I've heard tales of the wink and a nod method of releasing capabilities without broadcasting that's what they were doing. Back in the early days of satellite with ground penetrating radar, there were detailed images released of river deltas. It was supposed to be a boon for geology, but it was also meant as a shot across the bow to the Russians that we could see their underground bunkers and what not. Sometimes the clandestine games were cool. I miss the spy novels/stories of the 80s.

No one was dumbfounded. Image clarity was consistent with expectations based on the known size of the KH-11 series. This is basic physics.

“The resolution is amazingly high,” Ankit Panda from the Federation of American Scientists told NPR, adding it was “much higher than anything I’ve ever seen.”

Tell it to Ankit Panda.

Melissa Hanham, deputy director of the Open Nuclear Network at the One Earth Foundation, believes that the resolution is so high, it may be beyond the physical limits at which satellites can operate.

And this lady.

You have misunderstood. Ankit Panda was simply stating that the image resolution was higher than anything that had been publicly released so far. It wasn't anything unexpected.

Melissa Hanham is a policy specialist, not a physicist or optics engineer. She has no particular expertise in this area.

If you don't believe me then do the math yourself. It's easy enough to figure out the maximum diameter of a KH-11 based on the size of the available launch vehicles. And from that you can calculate the maximum resolving power. They can play some tricks with adaptive optics and digital image processing but that doesn't add much.

The minimum size of KH-11 mirrors has been common knowledge for many years now, since it influenced the Hubble telescope. From the book Power To Explore -- History of Marshall Space Flight Center 1960-1990:

> "In addition, changing to a 2.4-meter mirror would lessen fabrication costs by using manufacturing technologies developed for military spy satellites."

PDF: https://web.archive.org/web/20170205104821/https://history.m...

They're 2.4 meters at their smallest, with later KH-11's possibly being larger. But even 2.4 meters is enough to get way better image quality than has been publicly released.