Lockheed
F-117 Nighthawk
First flight June 18, 1981  Introduction October 1983

The Lockheed F-117 Nighthawk is an officially retired American single-seat, subsonic, twin-engined stealth attack aircraft developed by Lockheed's secretive Skunk Works division and operated by the United States Air Force (USAF). It was the first operational aircraft to be designed with stealth technology. Work on what would become the F-117 commenced in the 1970s as a means of countering increasingly sophisticated Soviet surface-to-air missiles (SAMs). During 1976, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) issued Lockheed a contract to produce the Have Blue technology demonstrator,

The decision to produce the F-117 was made on 1 November 1978, and a contract was awarded to Lockheed Advanced Development Projects, popularly known as the Skunk Works, in Burbank, California. The program was led by Ben Rich, with Alan Brown as manager of the project. Rich called on Bill Schroeder, a Lockheed mathematician, and Overholser, a computer scientist, to exploit Ufimtsev's work. The three designed a computer program called "Echo", which made it possible to design an airplane with flat panels, called facets, which were arranged so as to scatter over 99% of a radar's signal energy "painting" the aircraft.