Sep 162010
And here’s an F-117 carrying conventional non-stealthy LGB’s. Also shown is the faceted pylon that would carry all of these weapons.
7 Responses to “F-117 with External Stores:Laser Guided Bombs”
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That pylon is complete bunk; you can flatten all the sides but all the knobby bits to actually support the store will have a signature big enough to make the rest of the effort pointless.
Besides, why send a sub-sonic mini-bomber at the enemy in an un-stealthy manner to drop two non-stealthy external stores, when an F-15 could do the same job twice as fast, and armed to defend itself?
Two bombs carried internally isn’t a lot of tonnage, but it is playing to the design’s strengths.
Jim
An attempt at justifying extending the life of F-117, eh?
Can’t say that I think it is a great concept, but it is the kind of thinking that I like to see in the military: Learning how to get the most out of existing assessments.
Not to justify a decreased defense budget, but because it is the kind of ingenuity required to win wars. Like the CAM ships and merchant aircraft carriers of World War Two.
In 1994, when these tunnel tests were apparently done, the F-117 was still kinda in the prime of its life.
True, but I like to hope forward thinking and contingency is alive and well in the military; plus, she was less than 15 years away from retirement at that point. Possibly a temporary solution if anything caused JSF to get delayed or canceled, since I doubt they would consider 32 B-2s sufficient stealth strike capability.
If it was 1994, perhaps it’s related to development of the proposed A/F-117X, which was apparently going to have two pylons for external weapons.
They were designed to carry those in the bomb bay; what the hell would be the point in carrying them externally, particularly given the fact that the F-117 could be air-refueled?
I could see the cruise missiles, but this just defeats the purpose.
the problem is you have a super-specialized plane and I think this was to try to justify it’s existence for missions where all the radars have already been dealt with. but what a waste of a plane.
the cruise missiles I could see..launch them before you reach air defenses at a second (or third) target inbound to the primary one. same with external fuel tanks, if the mission required an range beyond that of internal fuel and you can’t put a tanker that close to the target. like the cruise missiles, you’d need to dump the stores and associated racks before you hit air defenses, but it could add mission flexibility.