F-117s had an air-to-air capability with secondary mission to shoot Soviet AWACS | Hacker News Reader

F-117s had an air-to-air capability with secondary mission to shoot Soviet AWACS

theaviationist.com

136 pointsjoeschmoe8387 comments

I recall this capability existing in the F117A Nighthawk simulator from Microprose in the 90s, you could carry sidewinders but they were close to useless because you needed to open the bay, which made you highly detectable and slower, and you needed to get close which made you detectable. It was more of a last resort thing.

I'm surprised a game that old was accurate about this at the time.

One of my favorite games from the 90s. The fact that the missions were set at night was probably a huge help for the visuals given the graphics capabilities of the time :)

Now that you mention it, I'm sure this was no coincidence!

I'm glad you posted this because when I saw the headline to this article my first reaction was, "Wait, this isn't news to me, I fired a ton of these things in that video game". Then I thought, "No, probably a false memory."

F15 Strike Eagle certainly helped me with my Eastern Bloc geography!

Middle East too. Still joke about destroying the SAM radar at Bandar Abbas, and terrorist camp at Baghdad.

Wow, did that dredge up a memory! I remember asking my parents for this game and was so excited to get it, except the box came without the disk. It took almost 7 months to finally get the disk because support kept asking my parents to send the defective disk back to be replaced, except there was no disk. :(

Bill Stealey (one of the Microprose founders) was a Pentagon planer before he ventured into games, I think I read somewhere that because of that, his games where vetted before release.

Bill Stealey was an instructor pilot in the Air Force, whence came the experience that enabled him to vet MicroProse's military flight sims for verisimilitude.

Jimmy Maher's Digital Antiquarian has a long article [1] on the origins of MicroProse, including background on both founders, Stealey and Meier. It's a great story, and he tells it well - strong recommend, if you have any interest in the subject.

[1] https://www.filfre.net/2015/03/microproses-simulation-indust...

I bought the game off GOG a couple years back. Very rudimentary graphics, of course, but the missions were a lot of fun. Avoiding detection as you fly low and slow in the dark.

You only could carry sidewinders on the lower difficulty/realism level, on the higher one you could only carry "bomb-like things" and only two different types.

I had the predecessor game, F-19 Stealth Fighter. It came out before the F-117 was officially revealed. Those "assassination" style missions were always my favorite for the reason you cite. You had to sneak in and take out the target, but once you did you got lit up and had to evade the now very angry air defenses.

I'll never forget manually flying at 150 feet at 150kts for hours, using the keyboard only, trying to evade all the radars along the way, sneaking up just to the outer edge of your missile's range to the target, popping open the bay door, launching, slamming the bay door back shut and turning hard around, throttle to the firewall to get as far away from the scene of the attack as possible (still at 150 feet off the ground if you could manage it), then trying to sneak back out a different way than the way you came to evade all the aircraft the sim sent up looking for you.

Then you get back and have to land perfectly or else you just die and have to start your character all over again as a 2lt. You could, of course, hit ctrl-alt-del and reboot the machine so your character wouldn't die, because it didn't save anything until the very end of the mission.

I'll also never forget how amazingly better the game was when I got a color monitor and could see that the game had colors -- I couldn't see half the controls in black and white.

It was a surprisingly hard game, actually.

BTW, both f19 and f117 are available on steam. I still pull them up and fly them occasionally just for nostalgia.

Why don't they make these kinds of flight sims anymore? I miss microprose!

Microprose is coming back soon. They are building a B-17 simulator for VR where a group of people work together in the bomber.

Technically that was still the easy mode ("Microprose Nighthawk") which gave you all the weapons and four weapon bays. The supposedly realistic ("Lockheed Nighthawk") mode took away the A/A weapons and left you with two bomb bays.

They had the potential to perform this mission, but other pilots have said that A2A missiles (AIM-9 Sidewinders) were never equipped. It would have been hard to launch them from the F-117. If they were mounted on wing rails, it would have messed up their stealth, and launching from a trapeze inside the launch bay would have required some finicky hardware.

Great idea, and definitely considered, but never made it into an actual capability.

> Great idea, and definitely considered, but never made it into an actual capability.

Never made? There were quite a few F-117 pilots who flew missions on Soviet North (rather North-West) destroying everything on their way, including airfields and especially, depots, all with airgun only (!), and flew back upside down - for kicks and because apparently it was (way) more fuel-efficient...

https://www.dosgamesarchive.com/download/f-117a-nighthawk-st...

another option mentioned is to mount the missiles on the bay doors - opening of the door would put the seeker into the air stream as if the missile were on a wing rail. Sounds like a typical quick fix/patch :) Not sure why it is AIM-9, not something more long range. The role of F-117 is just to [stealthily] truck the missile and drop it. The other radars and control would guide it.

I recall reading that the AIM9 is/was very easy to integrate into a plane and can almost be improvised in the field to work.

Only if the missile's seeker head had a clear view of the target. The missile is blind if tucked inside a weapons bay. So integrating it into the f-117 would not have been as simple as bolting a rail to the wing.

Why can't it seek just seconds after dropping out from inside?

You have to uncage the seeker head in order for it to track. You would be just dropping it with the seeker pointing forward and hoping that the missile locks onto it with a limited view. The seeker is uncaged normally when you are tracking a target before you fire it. The pilot would have no idea if the missile would track when dropped.

Can't this be solved (for a new aircraft) by having a similar seeker on the aircraft (IRST) and letting the missiles tap into that, so that it can sort of "see" while in the bay, and you can be more or less sure that once deployed it will actually track?

Perhaps that's exactly what IRST does...

I imagine the likeliness of hitting yourself with it would go up dramatically if that was the case.

If the launching aircraft has an A2A radar, newer versions of the Sidewinder can use LOAL (lock on after launch) because their sensors are so sensitive. The radar cues the seeker head prior to launch, so it knows where to search. Missile is launched, seeker head acquires target, boom.

A longer range missle would require an active radar to lock onto a target. That sort of negates the whole thing. The AIM-9 is a passive IR seeker that can aquire it's own target.

HARM missiles don't seem to be active and a special HARM derivative might be suitable. Something that may not have been made public.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AGM-88_HARM

Normal HARMs have hit radar emitting aircraft :

During the Gulf War, the HARM was involved in a friendly fire incident when the pilot of an F-4G Wild Weasel escorting a B-52 bomber mistook the latter's tail gun radar for an Iraqi AAA site. (This was after the tail gunner of the B-52 had targeted the F-4G, mistaking it for an Iraqi MiG.) The F-4 pilot launched the missile and then saw that the target was the B-52, which was hit. It survived with shrapnel damage to the tail and no casualties. The B-52 was subsequently renamed In HARM's Way.[4]

Hard to fit, probably. 5ft longer and 4x as heavy

From what I read the HARM (and all anti radiation missiles) wasnt particularly good at tracking a moving target. Especially another aircraft closing in fast that is manuverable.

As for IR missile options beyond the Sidewinder the US never really invested in any longer range IR missiles like the Soviets did as part of their overall effort to go big in IRST (which didn't seem to pan out all that well to my knowledge).

I think it did, if not otherwise because modern jets simply have stopped relying on their own radars, making long range IRST more important.

I have never read this. I always think of radar as a flashlight, because it's essentially what it is, except with electrons instead of photons.

When you have car coming from the opposite direction, with its high beams on, you can see it really, really well, even if you keep your lights off (passive HARM).

Microwaves are still photons!

I appreciate the correction - I don't really understand this at all. Physics 103 is where my knowledge of anything resembling science ends.

The difference is the challenge of imaging those wavelengths. You cannot just use a glass lens to focus a nice sharp picture onto an imaging sensor. Imagine that car is heading towards you, but you have to close your eyes and try to pinpoint its location by judging the shine of light through your eyelids.

Something like the Brazo (radiation tracking Sparrow) would've been nice.

Didn't exist at the time, but the AMRAAM doesn't require the launching aircraft to be using (or presumably even have) a radar. The launching aircraft just gives the missile the target's state vector before launch, which it could have gotten from another aircraft. The AMRAAM then flies to intercept the target, receives course updates if they're available, and then turns on its own radar when it gets close.

The state vector could even potentially come from an AWACS, although the angular resolution wouldn't be great. If the launching aircraft had an IRST system though, that is easily solved.

Incidentally, this basic capability is the present/near future of air combat. Modern but non-stealth aircraft hang back with their radars on. 50 miles or so in front of them are the AMRAAM equipped stealth aircraft getting datalinked targeting from the "quarterback" aircraft behind them. Tracks can be refined by having multiple radars observe the same target from different angles, and further augmented by the stealth aircraft's IRST system if it has one. The (stealth) launching aircraft can then immediately turn tail and run while the quarterback aircraft continues to provide midcourse updates to the missile.

This sort of datalinked network with aircraft up front with radar off, IRST on and launch capability feels like the future of BVR combat. Also add in an awacs to do IFF interrogation and declaring to the launchers as well.

It's really the present. This is a capability that exists and what is being trained now.

There are a number of variations on this play. The simple ones are:

1. Stealth (F-35/F-22) squadron keeps taking turns "illuminating" using radar and spot for each other, toggling radar on and off.

2. AWACS / ground-based radar / MIG-31M provides targets and stealth comes in close to take them out.

3. There is a concept that flips #2 - stealth comes in and looks for targets, a large transport aircraft is converted into a "missile truck" and ripple fires on target from a distance, WITHOUT having to illuminate - there are missiles called AWACS killers which are pretty dangerous to #2. Note that ripple fires implies missiles with multiple means of targeting.

4. Drones can play the role of finding targets and recon-by-fire too.

The AMRAAM requires a fairly powerful transmitter -- usually a radar -- to send it those datalink updates.

We've already had a JSF launch a missile from an Arleigh Burke over the horizon and guide it all the way to the target.

This stuff that was science fiction a decade ago is now reality.

Painting targets with lasers by ground troops was one of the main ways to target without radar and was an approach for many stealth missions for decades. Though to what degree over alternatives today, I would not known.

Laser painting is still THE way to target in a contested (No GPS environment). The SU-25 basically has no TV/IR targeting capability in practice (though it's been developed) ALA the A-10, Javelin, etc.

I don't fully understand why - whether it's a technical, expense, or reliability hurdle.

At least our aircraft can self-designate though, they don't require a laser on the ground.

So can the SU-25, it has a laser pointer in the nose (ignore if you mean former Soviet bloc by "our"). My point is that a lot of US aircraft use TV/IR targeting frequently, whereas Russian ones don't have that capability except on the higher-end bombers/fighter-bombers (e.g. SU-34, and it's still rarely used with TV/IR guidance). I don't understand if this is a cost, tech, or reliability issue.

Furthermore, self-designation is useless when an aircraft is doing close air-support and can't tell apart friendlies from enemies, which is an extremely common scenario.

I meant US, I'm far less familiar with soviet bloc aircraft.

Dropping LGBs in close air support isn't a thing. There are other tools for that. Target designation with a laser designator isn't something that anyone is going to do in a danger close CAS situation.

It's a common practice for Russia. They just did it a bunch in Syria.

>There are other tools for that.

Not really, artillery is going to have the same problems if not more. Unless you have a Reaper, Apache, or Spooky on station.

Not necessarily. An AAMRAAM derivative could have used passive radar homing. After all, if an AWACs is the target, it's emitting huge amounts of signal on well know frequencies.

In fact, the Soviets had AWAC hunter teams using exactly this type of missile. They figured (correctly), that sacrificing a squadron of planes to blind NATO would be a fair trade. The number of E-3s in NATO were limited, and extremely expensive. The R-27 had radar homing variants with a range around 70km. This would require the launching aircraft to get very close to the AWACs and it's protective escort.

The Russians have continued this with the R-37, which has a range of up to 400km. They plan on targeting AWACS, tankers, ECM aircraft (JSTARS) and other high value aircraft. All of these are slow, easy targets for a fighter.

Mounts on the bay doors might have infringed on space requirements for other weapons that would be used more frequently. IIRC, the F-117's primary payload was 2 2000lb bombs, so cutting that in half for a mission that might not be very common would be a hard to sell tradeoff.

There's an update to the article at the bottom which confirms this.

> “It turns out that this was never an actual capability in any operational form whatsoever, but it was experimented with over the years in unique and intriguing ways, something we are detailing in a soon to be released special feature.”

Were they never equipped because we were never at war with Russia?

Perhaps they were never equipped because it just wouldn't work well. It's possible that this was used as misleading information to deceive Russian intelligence as a deterrent against Russian AWACS flights.

Nothing would deter the Soviets from flying SUAWACS on likely ingress routes. They lacked a comparable system to the comprehensive early warning radar network enjoyed by the United States since the DEW line in the late 1950s.

Fun fact: the Advanced Strategic Air-Launched Missile (ASALM) had a secondary anti-SUAWACS mission. With a 200kt warhead, depending upon the location of the launching aircraft, the Pk could be 2...

Tom Clancy mentioned it in "Red Storm Rising"! No one believed then.

It may not have been a very debugged capability, but neither were Soviet AWACS. To this day, A50s are hardly too useful, and in the Soviet times, they were a joke.

Great book. My father read the book as a Marine stationed in Keflavik Iceland and said it was eerie.

I do love the chapter name "Frisbees of Dreamland ".

The problem I had with Red Storm Rising was that the scenario leading to the war was pretty weak - I much prefer Arc Light.

Exactly. An Azeri muslim radical couldn't probably do what he did to help his "brothers" in Tatarstan, because Clancy overlooked that Azeri, unlike all other Soviet muslims, are Shia, others being Sunni... They'd much rather kill one another than a Commie.

I don't get it. I don't see how this mission would work. The f-117 was/is slow. Getting one within sidewinder range of a russian mainstay would not have been easy. Mainstays loiter well behind enemy lines. With the F-117's range (1000miles) just getting in and out would not have been easy. And mainstays are moving targets.

"Secondary Mission" means that it would only perform the action on its way to/from its primary mission. So if--on the way to or from bombing a target--the pilot saw a Soviet AWACS aircraft, it would then attack. It wouldn't have been sent out specifically for that mission.

Which is another way of saying, this would spend munitions load on the forlorn hope of maybe backshooting a Mainstay out of pure luck and happenstance, instead of spending that mass and volume on ordnance that actually made sense for the mission.

Which is another way of saying, this is something some engineers at Lockheed blue-skyed around a table one day, and the PMO liked it enough to throw it into a stack of viewgraphs as "planned future capability", thus promising absolutely nothing, in case it might help sell the aircraft.

I see you have also worked with government procurement.

Never directly, but I've spent 20 years adjacent to the defense industry, almost half of that working directly under a salty old engineer of Lockheed pedigree.

Something like that should be a minimum job requirement for covering the defense industry, imo. Without it, they're far too credulous.

Plus stealth shaping didn't make the F-117 invisible, just reduced the detection and identification range. With a Mainstay radar emitting > 1 megawatt the 117 would have been detected well, well outside Sidewinder range.

Curious if anyone knows how with a range of 1000 miles it got to Europe? I presume several of aerial refuels in a single flight, which sounds mentally taxing.

> On their first deployment, with the aid of aerial refueling, pilots flew non-stop from Holloman to Kuwait, a flight of approximately 18.5 hours—a record for single-seat fighters that stands today

OK now I'm interested in what drugs they gave the pilot for this endurance feat!

Amphetamines ;)

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7661838/

Of course, their use has been blamed for other issues, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarnak_Farm_incident

In the Radar Man book I read, he said it’s primary mission was to take out a Soviet, radar controlled anti-aircraft gun, which I believe was called the Buzz Saw.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07932Z7WV/ref=nodl_?tag=duckduckg...

Maybe it was this:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZSU-23-4_Shilka

That is definitely "the Buzz Saw" - it's also no longer relevant against anything besides helicopters due to low run on gun-based AA (nor is its updated version, the Tunguska, or derivative, The Pantsir).

This was exactly what they did in the novel Red Storm Rising by Tom Clancy.

yep, except Clancy used the (theoretical) F-19A "Frisbee" stealth attack fighter.

Kinda off topic but I miss those days when you could go to a drug store and buy fighter plane model kits with all the paints and other supplies. As a kid the one I always wanted was the F-117. This kind of thing got me interested in studying history and building things with my hands.

Explains the mysterious “Just like an AMRAAM launchpad on a stealth” line from Independence Day.

could have also been referring to the F-22 Raptor.

I totally get the appeal of the technology involve in sophisticated weapons, and find it appealing myself (and especially did in my teens), but I wish we would read less about it.

So many cool technologies out there to choose from.

So F-19 stealth fighter wasn't totally off base!

Did we not have an air-to-air passive anti-radiation missile?

The air-to-ground ARM missiles were designed to remember where radar stations were with some precision so when they saw the missile coming and shut down, the missile could still hit them. The concept doesn't apply with an airplane that can shut down its radar and maneuver.

If you design an ARM that also has a backup sensor (IR or radar) to follow the maneuvering aircraft, why not just make that the primary sensor? At which point you've got a standard air-to-air missile, except with some superfluous stuff on it?

If you're targeting AWACS, even getting them to shut down is going to be pretty disruptive for your opponent.

Right, but that was a hypothetical. They're not going to shut down, and you're not going to take your shot at them using a passive-sensor anti-radiation missile. You'll use a passive-sensor infrared or an actively guided radar missile.

(And an AWACS plane isn't without other countermeasures.)

FWIW, ASALM had a passive ARM guidance mode, switching to active radar homing in the endgame.

The benefit to having "home on jam" in this case is that it's passive, (no warning to the target aircraft) and generally has a larger detection range than IR. AMRAAM has this capability now, which would allow for, in theory, long-range shots without the launching aircraft even having to illuminate. The AMRAAM's radar is short range, so you can use a combination of "home on jam" to guide to a range where the jamming is no longer effective, then go active and potentially make the kill.

This is a simplistic example of course; EW being a very complicated subject. But overall, having multiple sensors that you can either correlate or fall back on is the trend in smart weapons right now, and we'll be seeing more of those sorts of combinations.

Home on jam also has the benefit that it works when the enemy can jam your radar. You have an incoming enemy raid with heavy jammer support, you lob some missiles at it set for home on jam and their jammers are now calling them in.

Aim-7MH Sparrows and AAMRAAMs have a home on Jamming feature which works because jamming is directional and continuous. Unfortunately with moving targets, home on radar is difficult. You only see the radar when it is pointed at you and a scanning radar you will only see blips. Also you can't get range and bearing so lead targeting is difficult.

An anti-radiation missile may be able to home on a target that is using a Single Target Track mode. However it would have to ride the beam in and would still have trouble with terminal guidance if the target is cranking left or right. Also in that case, the enemy already knows where you are.

The best passive tracking system I know of is the R-27ET which uses thermal tracking and is best against targets facing away (cold) to your plane. This is usually paired with an Electro-Optical or FLIR system on the plane for target acquisition.

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