On March 27, 1999, during the height of NATO’s air war on Serbia, a very smart and very lucky Serbian air-defense commander achieved the seemingly impossible. Firing three 1960s-vintage SA-3 missiles, Col. Zoltan Dani managed to shoot down an attacking U.S. Air Force F-117 stealth fighter-bomber piloted by Lt. Col. Dale Zelko. NATO commanders had been sending the alliance’s planes, including the stealth attackers, into Serbia along predictable routes, allowing Dani to carefully plan his missile ambush.
A fast-acting team of Air Force A-10 attack planes and helicopters retrieved Zelko intact, but not so the wreckage of the colonel’s top-secret jet, one of the technological stars of the 1991 Gulf War. The destroyed F-117’s left wing, canopy and ejection seat — plus Zelko’s helmet — wound up in a Belgrade aviation museum, but most of the rest of the 15-ton jet was gathered up by farmers living around the crash site. Twelve years later, some of those components may have finally surfaced — in the design of China’s new J-20 stealth fighter.
If true, and that’s a huge “if,” the partly American origin of China’s first radar-evading warplane could be both a damning indictment of the Pentagon’s reliance on easily-copied high technology, and a potential comfort to U.S. military planners desperately trying to assess the J-20’s impact on Pacific war plans.
The J-20 appeared without warning in late December and flew for the first time this month. For weeks, observers from all over the world have debated the J-20’s significance. Some are calling it the death-knell for 50 years of U.S. air dominance. Others dismiss it as a visually-impressive but militarily uselesspiece of showmanship. The truth is probably somewhere between those extremes, especially if the J-20 has F-117 DNA.
Back in March 1999, the F-117’s wreckage was possibly still cooling when foreign agents sprang into action. “At the time, our intelligence reports told of Chinese agents crisscrossing the region where the F-117 disintegrated, buying up parts of the plane from local farmers,” Adm. Davor Domazet-Loso, then the top Croatian officer, told the Associated Press.
“The destroyed F-117 topped that wish-list for both the Russians and Chinese,” added Zoran Kusovac, a military consultant based in Rome.
Although both are optimized for bombing, the sleek J-20 doesn’t even remotely resemble the ungainly F-117. In overall shape, the J-20 is most similar to the mid-1990s-vintage Russian MiG 1.44 prototypeand Lockheed Martin’s Joint Advanced Strike Technology concept from roughly the same period.
Even so, the J-20 doesn’t necessarily mimic the MiG 1.44, JAST or any other plane, either. Granted, Beijing does have a reputation for carbon-copying foreign weapons, often badly. But China also has a growing number of its own weapons designs. And besides, the principles of aerodynamics and radar-deflection know no political borders. As long as Chinese engineers understand the basics of what makes a plane fly and hides it from radar, it should come as no surprise that the J-20 looks a lot like other stealthy jets.
That said, when it comes to aerial stealthiness, shaping is just part of the equation. A plane’s materials — particularly any skin coatings — are equally important. That’s where China might have really benefited from studying the crashed F-117.
It’s possible the U.S. defense establishment knew that China had cracked the F-117’s secrets. Perhaps accepting that the cat was out of the bag, the Americans reportedly made no effort to retrieve the stealth artifacts from that Belgrade museum. “A lot of delegations visited us in the past, including the Chinese, Russians and Americans … but no one showed any interest in taking any part of the jet,” Zoran Milicevic, deputy director of the museum, told the AP.
And in a move that surprised many observers, in 2008 the Air Force formally retired the entire F-117 fleet, then roughly 40 strong. (A few F-117s are secretly still flying, apparently for tests.) Officially, the F-117 was obsolete. “I mean it’s a 30-year-old concept now,” F-117 pilot Lt. Col. Chris Knehans said, ignoring the fact that almost all U.S. combat aircraft designs are at least that old. It could be that the F-117 had to go because every potential rival knew its secrets.
It’s almost certainly true that the more recent B-2 bomber, F-22 and F-35 fighters and a whole roost ofknown and rumored stealthy drones are made of newer, better materials than the F-117 and are therefore less visible to radar. If the J-20 is based on the F-117 in any way, then the J-20 probably has stealth qualities a full generation behind current American designs — to say nothing of the nextgeneration, including the forthcoming “B-3 bomber.”
Still, it should be discouraging to U.S. war planners that the loss of a single high-tech fighter can possibly render useless that fighter’s entire design. What happens when the first B-2, F-22 or F-35 crashes in enemy territory?
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