Officialy Retired F-117 Stealth Fighters Carry Out Secretive Mission in Southern California

F-117 Nighthawk stealth fighters have been reported by a number of sources to be flying missions in Southern California, and are operating at sea off the state’s coast. While the F-117 was offially retired by the U.S. Air Force in 2008, the platform has been sighted operating on multiple occasions both in the United States and in the Middle East. It has been widely speculated that the fighters could be flown by private contractor pilots, and are being flown to test a number of technologies particularly for countering stealth fighters. While China broke the American monopoly on active stealth fighters in 2017, the U.S. is the only country to deploy them widely enough that it can spare fighters for aggressor squadrons and for testing on a large scale. The Nighthawks seen flying on May 19th were reportedly operating alongside at least one E-2 Hawkeye airborne early warning aircraft, a platform designed to detect threats at a long distances and provide a situational awareness advantage to the U.S. Navy’s carrier strike groups with its powerful sensors. This had led to speculation that the F-117’s were deployed to test the E-2’s ability to detect them. Information from such testing could allow for both refinement of the E-2’s sensors to better detect stealth aircraft, and allow the Navy to develop tactics to better counter such aircraft in future.

With stealth aircraft increasingly widely deployed, the opportunity to test various systems especially sensors against them is a valuable asset for the U.S. Military. Potential threats from stealth aircraft include China’s J-20 and upcoming J-31 stealth fighters, its H-20 stealth bomber and a wide range of stealth drones such as the Sharp Sword - to name but a few examples. While China is the only state other than the U.S. to deploy stealth fighters, stealth drones are deployed in large numbers by Iran - and are expected to be deployed by Russian forces in the near future with development ongoing under the Okhotnik-B program.

The F-117 is the oldest stealth fighter in the world, entering service in the late 1980s and spearheading assault on Iraq air defences in the Persian Gulf War in 1991. The aircraft was phased out of service shortly after the entry into service of the F-22 Raptor, which was considerably more survivable and outperformed the Nighthawk across the spectrum. While the F-22 lacked the F-117’s ability to carry high diameter bombs for an air to ground mission, the F-35A which entered service in 2015 and the B-2 Spirit bomber which has served since 1997 both retain this capability - which left the high maintenance Nighthawks somewhat obsolete.