Skunk Works

Other Voices

Colonel Alton Whitley

The F-117A was the nation’s best-kept secret. Only a very small number of Air Force brass even knew that we existed. The Pentagon located us in one of the most desolate spots in North America, on a remote high-desert airstrip originally used by the Sandia National Laboratories for nuclear warhead testing. It was part of the Nellis Air Force Base test range, about 140 miles from Las Vegas, an uninhabited area of undulating plains and scrub with looming High Sierra foothills in the far distance. The nearest town, about twenty miles away, was called Tonopah. Only the Lord knows how many other secret government projects were tucked away in remote corners of that huge test range, the size of Switzerland, but we figured we were far from alone out there. Wild mustangs roamed freely through the desert scrub and galloped across our runways. Big scorpions scuttled around the dayrooms and inside the new hangars we built to hide our airplanes from Soviet satellites. Colonel “Burner Bob” Jackson saw an advertisement in the Wall Street Journal by Chevron, out of Canada, offering to sell its temporary cold weather trailer units from a discontinued oil patch for $10 million. Jackson flew up there and bought the whole thing for a million bucks and had it shipped down to Tonopah. And that became our first temporary housing. But over the years the Air Force poured $300 million into the base, building three runways, and transformed it into a very major facility, complete with gym and indoor pool.

Before that base was ready and before we had enough fighters ready to fly, our newly formed squadron took over a remote corner of Nellis Air Force Base and spent our time flying A-7 attack fighters. The A-7s became our cover. In early 1984, we deployed in A-7s to Kunsan Air Base in South Korea, to test our deployment procedures to the Far East ahead of the F-117A squadron that would be sent there. The word was purposely leaked that our A-7 fighters were carrying supersecret atomic antiradar devices that would render the airplane invisible to enemy defenses. To maintain the deception we outfitted each plane with old napalm canisters painted black and flashing a red danger light in the rear. It carried a radiation warning tag over an ominous-looking slot on which was printed: “Reactor Cooling Fill Port.” When we deployed carrying these bogus devices, Air Police closed down the base and ringed the field with machine gun–toting jeeps. They forced all the runway crews to turn their backs on our airplanes as they taxied past and actually had them spread-eagled on the deck with their eyes closed until our squadron took off. Real crazy stuff. But the deception actually worked.

When we finally moved into Tonopah in 1984, we kept A-7s parked on the ramp so that Soviet satellites would think we were an A-7 base. But if their photo analysis experts were really on the ball, they would have picked up the double fencing around the perimeter, the powerful searchlights, television cameras, and sensing devices, all signs of unusually tight security. And I think they may have picked this up because satellite overpasses increased to as many as three or four a day for weeks on end. They were looking for something special, but we did all our real work well after sundown.

We called ourselves “The Nighthawks,” which became the official nickname of our 37th Tactical Fighter Wing. For years on end we were forced to live like vampire bats in a dark cave. We slept all day behind thick blackout curtains and began to stir only when the sun went down. The F-117A is a night attack plane using no radio, no radar, and no lights. The Skunk Works stripped the fighter of every electronic device that could be picked up by ground-to-air defenses. The engines were muffled to eliminate noise. We flew below thirty thousand feet to avoid contrails on moonlit nights. We carried no guns or air-to-air missiles because the airplane wasn’t designed for high-performance maneuvering, but to slip inside hostile territory, drop its two bombs, and get the hell out of there. So nights were meant for stealth, and we spent five nights a week practicing bombing runs and air-to-air refueling above the remote test range. We started work two hours after sunset and finished two hours before sunrise. Whenever the airplane left the hangar, the hangar lights had to be turned off. No landing field lights were allowed.

Our families had no idea about where we took off to every Monday or where we returned from every Friday evening. Most of us were family men who lived on base housing at Nellis, just outside Las Vegas. Going home on weekends by charter flights into Nellis was rough because we led normal lives for two days with our wives and kids before reverting to night-stalking vampires again. Marriages were really put to a severe test. In cases of emergency, wives would call a special number at Nellis and ask us to call home.

I know it sounds corny, but our morale stayed high because our task was to keep twelve airplanes on standby alert to go to war on the instant command of the president of the United States. Only the president or his secretary of defense could unleash us. And the second reason our morale stayed high was the airplane itself. All of us who flew it got to fall in love. We all agreed that if we flew within the assigned mission and stayed within the flight envelope, the stealth fighter was a sweetheart. Absolutely superb. And we all became proficient using smart and precise laser-guided bombs. We carried a pair of two-thousand-pounders that would follow our laser guide beam right into the heart of a target as we lined it up on crosshairs on our cabin video screen. We could find Mrs. Smith’s rooming house and take out the northeast corner guest room above the garage. That kind of precision was awesome to behold.

I was made colonel in early 1990 and by mid-summer became the wing commander, just in time for our early August deployment to Saudi Arabia. And a few months after that we struck the first blow in Operation Desert Storm.