- 鐵幣
- 26461 元
- 文章
- 11533 篇
- 聲望
- 11136 枚
- 上次登入
- 19-10-17
- 精華
- 175
- 註冊時間
- 05-12-25
- UID
- 215856
|
The F-117A first saw action in December 1989 during Operation Just Cause in Panama. Two F-117A fighters targeted the field outside the Panamanian Defense Forces barracks at Rio Hato with BLU-109 2,000 lb. bombs to stun and disorient the troops quartered in those barracks in preparation for an assualt by US Army Rangers. Technical failures and communications mixups caused the pilots to miss their targets, dropping the bombs farther away from the barracks than intended.
The stealth fighter attacked the most heavily fortified targets during Desert Storm (January-February 1991) , and it was the only coalition jet allowed to strike targets inside Baghdad's city limits. The F-117A, which normally packs a payload of two 2,000-pound GBU-27 laser-guided bombs, destroyed and crippled Iraqi electrical power stations, military headquarters, communications sites, air defense operation centers, airfields, ammo bunkers, and chemical, biological and nuclear weapons plants.
Although only 36 stealth fighters were deployed in Desert Storm and accounted for 2.5 percent of the total force of 1,900 fighters and bombers, they flew more than a third of the bombing runs on the first day of the war. In all during Desert Storm, the stealth fighter conducted more than 1,250 sorties, dropped more than 2,000 tons of bombs, and flew more than 6,900 hours. More than 3,000 antiaircraft guns and 60 surface-to-air missile batteries protected the city, but despite this seemingly impenetrable shield, the Nighthawks owned the skies over the city and, for that matter, the country. The stealth fighter, which is coated with a secret, radar-absorbent material, operated over Iraq and Kuwait with impunity, and was unscathed by enemy guns.
F-117 fighters deployed to the Gulf several times during the late 1990's to support U.S. attacks against Iraq designed to deprive Saddam Hussein of his Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) programs and to force his compliance with the UN monitoring regime. F-117 fighters deployed to the Gulf during Operation Desert Fox to upgrade the strike force's capability to attack high-value targets. But the 18 hour flight from the F-117s' home base to Kuwait meant that the operation was over before the F-117 aircraft arrived in the Gulf.
On 22 January 1997 Lockheed Martin delivered the first F-117A with the "RNIP-Plus"-navigation system from Honeywell after it had been overhauled in Palmdale (California). The F-117A now operates with laser gyroscopes and a GPS receiver, giving the aircraft a much higher precision than the inertia platforms did, which were previously used and which could show deviations of several hundred meters during a flight. Apart from this, the old system was more expensive to maintain.
In the opening phase of Allied Force, aimed primarily at Yugoslavia's integrated air defense system, NATO air forces conducted more than 400 sorties. During the first two night attacks, allied troops in the air and at sea struck 90 targets throughout Yugoslavia and in Kosovo. F-117 Nighthawks from the 8th Expeditionary Fighter Squadron at Holloman Air Force Base NM participated in air strikes against targets in the Balkans during NATO operations. One F-117 fighter was lost over Yugoslavia on 27 March 1999. A US search and rescue team picked up the pilot several hours after the F-117 went down outside Belgrade. Serbian air defenses managed to string together a series of brief sightings, perhaps starting as early as the F-117's takeoff in Italy, to project the F-117's course and loft an anti-aircraft missile at the F-117 when it was most vulnerable. On 01 April 1999, Defense Secretary William Cohen directed 12 more F-117 stealth fighters to join NATO Operation Allied Force, to join the total of 24 F-117s that were participating in NATO Operation Allied Force.
In December 2001, TRW and Lockheed Martin Aeronautical Company completed a series of success F-117 flight tests evaluating the ability for commerical off the shelf (COTS) technology combined with COTS emulation technology to execute the existing F-117 Operational Flight Plan (OFP). TRW's Reconfigurable Processor for Legacy Applications Code Execution (RePLACE) emulates legacy hardware on more modern hardware, allowing that modern hardware to run legacy applications without changes. This technology offers the potential for low-cost, low-risk, incremental upgrades to aircraft processing power. In the F-117 demonstrations, the technology performed flawlessly, requiring no updates, generating no anomalies, and surprising the evaluators. |
|