Skunk Works

“Holy shit,” Major Whitley exclaimed, “that could have been me.” We were both extremely shaken, but I was also hopping mad. That nearly fatal mistake should have been caught in the inspection process. Clearly, such an oversight compounded the original rewiring error. The Air Force convened an accident review board and noted that we had instituted new safeguards and inspection procedures within forty-eight hours of the accident. But the Air Force remained confident of the product, and Major Whitley finally took off for the first time in October 1982, flying the second production model. In honor of his maiden voyage, I presented him with a cryptically worded plaque that had to get by our security censors: “In recognition of a significant event, October 15, 1982.” Al laughed, but it would be six long years before he could finally explain to his wife and kids what in hell that plaque’s inscription really meant.

“You kept your promise,” Whitley said to me. “I had a slight anxiety attack rolling down that runway, but as soon as I was airborne and those wheels were sucked up, the ride was pure exhilaration.”

The stealth fighter became operational one year later. By then, the Air Force had decided to expand its deployment on a global scale, for a total of fifty-nine stealth fighters, to comprise three squadrons of a special and secret wing. One squadron would be deployed to England, for coverage of Western Europe, the Middle East, the Soviet Union, and Eastern Europe. A second squadron would be sent to South Korea, to provide standby attack capabilities throughout Asia. The third squadron would be in training stateside. We delivered thirty-three airplanes by 1986 and the remaining twenty-six by the middle of 1990. We built eight a year at a fly-away cost of $43 million each. Stealth did not come cheap, but considering the revolutionary nature of the product and the enormous strategic advantages it afforded, the F-117A was the most cost-effective new weapons system in the inventory. The first stealth fighter squadron, composed of eighteen airplanes and a few spares, was ready to go to battle only five years after the initial Air Force go-ahead, suffering only one, nonfatal, crash in the process.