Stealth fighter marks important anniversary

From the Alamogordo Daily News.com - By Arlan Ponder - To many people, Dec. 1 marked a realization that there were only 24 more shopping days to Christmas. But to people who are involved with stealth fighters, an event happened on this date that forever changed the world of aviation. It was the first flight of "Have Blue." Have Blue was the predecessor of the Air Force's famed F-117A Nighthawk -- the first "stealth fighter" in the Air Force's inventory. On Dec. 1, 1977, just after sunrise at Groom Lake, Nev., HB1001 made its maiden flight, and history, as Lockheed test pilot Bill Park took it through its flight. Ben Rich, the former head of Lockheed's Skunk Works that built many of the nation's most advanced aircraft said, "This flight will be every bit as important to the nation's future and the future of the Skunk Works as the first test flight of the U-2 spy plane." This came after the prototype was flown disassembled, via a C-5 Galaxy, from the Lockheed Plant in Burbank, Calif., to the classified Nevada base. The crew who made that historic flight in the middle of the night Nov. 16, 1977, never knew they had the first Experimental Survivable Testbed prototype in their cargo hold until years later after the F-117A came out of "the black." The Have Blue prototypes, or XST, were the first fixed-wing aircraft designed from an electrical engineering (rather than an aerodynamic) perspective and, while similar to the later F-117, were smaller with greater wing sweep and inward-canted vertical tails. Read more

Stealth fighter marks important anniversary