Finally! F-117 Nighthawk Stealth Bomber Revives Its Mission

Ride along on a Microsoft Flight Simulator journey through history in the world's first top-secret stealth aircraft.Today on Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020, I’m at Homey Airport KXTA, also known as Groom Lake, aka “Area 51.” I’ve come here to the remote Nevada desert to fly one of the most iconic top secret aircraft of all time: the F-117 Nighthawk stealth fighter.

The story of the F-117 begins in 1964, when Soviet mathematician Pyotr Ufimtsev published the paper, Method of Edge Waves in the Physical Theory of Diffraction. It demonstrated that the radar return from an object depended more on its shape than size. Given the technology at the time, Ufimtsev’s insight was dismissed as impractical in Russia.