Reporter's Notebook: Improved F-117 Jets Ready for Iraq

T H E   P E R S I A N   G U L F, Feb. 10 -- Like a flock of ghosts returning to the place of their first haunting, the F-117A Nighthawks slipped from the skies of the Middle East late this week and landed at a classified location — an air base belonging to an American ally the U.S. Air Force would like to keep secret.

It was the end of a four-day journey for the single-seater jets — including a layover in Europe and over a dozen tricky mid-air refuelings en-route — and the beginning of a mission military analysts expect, should war come about, to be crucial to U.S. and coalition efforts to disarm and displace Saddam Hussein from power.

The aircraft ground crews — and their reputation — preceed them.

In 1991, Desert Storm was the first real combat test of the radar-evading fighters. Two years earlier, a limited campaign to oust Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega marked the $45 million jets' debut in battle.

But it wasn't until the F-117s were used successfully in the anti-aircraft-laced skies over Baghdad that the legend of the Stealth fighters emerged.

Thirteen hundred sorties were flown during the Gulf War, with over 1,600 targets hit and not a single F-117 downed.

Reports in later years called into question some of the military's claims of the Stealth fighters' spotless record, but few have disputed their usefulness or unique abilities.

The air campaign went better than pilot Col. Rich Treadway could've hoped for. "As the airplanes all checked out every night," he recalls, "hit their targets and came home, and the confidence grew in the technology, it became less of a gnawing, nagging, stomach-twisting kind of feeling."

Treadway was one of the pilots who took his Nighthawk, simply dubbed the "black jets" by those who fly them, into the angry skies over Iraq's capital. He found himself admiring the strange beauty of the anti-aircraft fire that reached up to kill him.

"There was a sort of a reddish glow over the city from a distance," he said. "As I got closer I could see the tracer rounds from the different kinds of triple-A [anti-aircraft artillery]."

Stealth Fighters Are Relatively Fragile

Only one in seven rounds from most anti-aircraft weapons is the visible tracer round that helps the shooter aim. For every round Treadway and the other pilots could see, six other invisible ones were tearing through the skies in close order. Invisible to radar doesn't mean invincible to lead; Stealth fighters are relatively fragile compared to the A-10 Warthogs or even the F-15Es.

The sorties over Baghdad were considered the most dangerous of the war.

"Some of them [triple-A], from the bigger guns, looked like big pink basketballs floating up, two-by-two." Treadway said, "Other guns that shot at a higher rate looked like garden hoses spewing fire, waving around like a sprinkler system."

The pilots flying missions over Baghdad couldn't simply fly above the deadly fire; oftentimes to ensure placing their weapons on target, and thus not causing collateral damage, the Stealth fighters had to actually fly through the anti-aircraft fire.