EDWARDS AIR FORCE BASE, Ca.—The flat-black fuselage rolled forward on its landing gear, pulled from its hanger at Lockheed Martin’s secretive Skunk Works compound by an aircraft tug.
More than a mile away, a giant C-5M Super Galaxy waited, its nose cone open and waiting for its unique cargo. Against a desert backdrop, the dramatic angles of the wingless airframe cut an unmistakable silhouette, a shining example of America’s first stealth aircraft, this one dubbed “the Overachiever” because it was the only Nighthawk to fly in all four major conflicts in which the jets participated.
More than 40 years after the original YF-117 operational prototype flew test runs from the shadowy Lockheed facility, the Overachiever returned to its Palmdale birthplace for a $1 million refurbishment to look its best when it assumes its place in history alongside other iconic aircraft on permanent exhibit at the National Air and Space Museum’s Stephen F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Va., beside Washington Dulles International Airport.
Air & Space Forces Magazine was on hand to witness the F-117’s 2,254-mile journey across the United States as a passenger aboard the C-5M from Air Force Reserve Command’s 512th Airlift Wing.
Conceived to give the Air Force an edge against the Soviet Union in the 1970s, the radar-evading F-117 was developed to sneak past the Russian-made, radar-guided antiaircraft missiles that had so vexed the U.S. Air Force in Vietnam.
The aircraft’s faceted exterior design radically reduced the F-117’s radar cross section, allowing it to evade radar detection during testing. While their first use in combat, in 1989’s Operation Just Cause in Panama, had been a disappointment, the Nighthawks’ performance in Operation Desert Storm proved stunning: On Jan. 17, 1991, the Nighthawks flew unobserved into heavily defended Iraqi airspace and destroyed their targets to mark the opening salvo of the Gulf War.
“This aircraft was specifically designed to be able to penetrate heavily defended areas that have radar-based defenses … which gave it a huge tactical advantage on the battlefield,” Michael Hankins, curator of modern military aviation at the Udvar-Hazy Center, told Air & Space Forces Magazine. “This will be the [museum’s] first example of the earliest generation of stealth aircraft. A lot of new aircraft that are in service today—like the F-22 Raptor, the F-35 lightning—really built on the foundation that was set by the F-117.”
The Air Force officially retired its F-117 fleet in 2008 after the F-22 Raptor achieved initial operating capability in 2005. But Nighthawks remained in “flyable storage,”and since around 2020 have participated in exercises such as Red Flag and in undisclosed activities.
Securing The Overachiever for the Air and Space Museum was the result of months of coordination between the Air Force, the Smithsonian, and Lockheed. Jeffrey Corbets, who oversaw the plane’s restoration at the Skunk Works Special Systems department, said preparing Tail No. 818 to become a museum showpiece required months of tedious restoration work by a dedicated team of more than a dozen Skunk Works employees.
The specialists who did the work aren’t standard-issue aircraft technicians. “They’re kind of different people,” Corbets said. “The team that’s actually working the bulk of this also supports our U-2 program, so they’re really familiar with supporting some of our longer-term, historical legacy products.”
Because of its highly classified status, the F-117 could not fly into Dulles and taxi over to the Udvar-Hazy Center as some other historical aircraft have done. It had to be completely de-militarized, which involved stripping away its most guarded secrets, Corbets said. From late January to early August, the Skunk Works team bead-blasted off the jet’s radar absorbing coating, known as RAM, leaving bare metal. The unique edges on the wings and rudders were replaced with “all new fake edges,” Corbets added.
“It’s a lot of manual labor,” he explained. “The first thing you have to do is actually get access to all the connectors, the bolts, and whatnot that hold edges on” These were hidden beneath the stealth coating. “You have to very carefully dig out the RAM, so you can get to those to take them off. And then once you have all the edges removed, then we can actually go into a bead blasting type operation to get the rest of the coatings off.”
The de-mil process also involved removing classified technical “components” in the cockpit, said Corbets, who would not elaborate on the systems that were removed.
“The cockpit is mostly intact, so they have, I’d say, 95 percent of the avionics are still in there—the screens and the displays are still in there, the hub system is still in there, the ejection seat, etc., etc. To even the educated observer, it would look like an operational F-117,” Corbets said. “The museum wanted it to be as representative a configuration as we could leave it, so if it didn’t absolutely have to come out, we didn’t take it out.”
Other F-117s are already in museums, including at the Museum of the U.S. Air Force in Dayton, Ohio. Lockheed’s Skunk Works performed a similar job in 2019 so a Nighthawk could go on display at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum in Simi Valley, Calif.
To fit the Nighthawk into the C-5 transport, the F-117’s wings had to be removed, secured to wheeled dollies and loaded separately onto the aircraft. Air Force loadmasters used an electric winch and cable to gently pull each dolly onto the ramp and back to the rear of the plane. Airmen completed the slow, tedious task in the desert heat without incident.
But loading The Overachiever’s freshly painted fuselage onto the plane, so it could be safely secured for flight, was not without surprises. The wings and fuselage together weighed about 24,000 pounds, an easy lift for the C-5, which has a maximum cargo capacity of 285,000 pounds—enough to carry not just one, but two M1A2 Abrams tanks.
But there’s more to moving a disabled plane than weight. A miscommunication during the restoration process meant the aircraft lacked the proper amount of bolt-on anchoring points when it was time to tie it down in the cargo bay. That meant special anchoring collars had to be attached to each of the three landing gear struts to keep the jet from shifting during flight.
“We decided to use the collars that we use on the struts to help secure it down, but in order for that to work, we had to raise the struts so we get the right angle to use the collar,” a maintenance technician said. Getting clearance to make raise each strut roughly four inches and mount the collars took time.
Air Force Reserve Senior Master Sgt. Vasean Townsend, a C-5 loadmaster for the past 13 years, said it was nothing he hadn’t seen before.
“Basically, one of the tie-down points was missing on each side,” said Townsend, who helped transport another F-117 some years earlier. “We as loadmasters have to find a way to create other tie-down points. “If something is missing … we’ve just got to be creative. That’s part of the job.”
With the problem solved, Lockheed staff and aircrew silently watched as The Overachiever was lashed down for its flight to Dulles.
For C-5 pilot Maj. Dean Mouritzen, the mission was “humbling.”
“This is my last flight in the military,” he said. “It’s my last mission, and doing something this—taking an F-117 to a museum and being able to tell my kids, my grandkids, that I was just one of the peons to take it some place where it’s going to sit forever—it’s pretty awesome.”
To Corbets and the Lockheed team, “it’s a little bit like watching a friend leave you, because obviously everyone’s been really excited to be part of the project, and now it’s going off to its new home.”
After hours in the air, the C-5 landed at Dulles and finally lowered its ramp at 8:38 p.m. local time, and the crew quickly offloaded The Overachiever’s fuselage and wings onto the chilly ramp by 9:16 p.m. From there, museum officials whisked it away to the nearby Mary Baker Engen Restoration Hangar, where it will be reassembled before going on exhibit.
The Overachiever was scheduled to be unveiled for public viewing at the Udvar-Hazy Center late this month.
“The current plan is to have this airplane on the floor next to all the other aircraft in our Cold War modern military section,” Hankins said. “It’ll be right next to the F-15 Eagle, which it flew with during Operation Desert Storm. There’s a lot of a lot of historical significance there to having those two together on the floor.”
“This is a really big step and a very historic and important aircraft in the history of U.S. aviation,” said Hankins, who said he had been working on the project for “several years.”
“We’re so excited to have this on the floor,” he said, “and be able to show the public why this airplane is so unique and special and important and iconic.”
Shaun Barrows, senior multimedia manager at Air & Space Forces Association, contributed to this story.