"Thanks for the lecture, was the wonderful F117 the fantastic stealth fighter the Russian missile took out in the 1990s over Serbia?"
Lets look at it's actual combat record when the aircraft was in service from 1983 to 2008 and you'll realise that not only was the F117 a wonder and fantastic strike aircraft it was revolutionary and the best and most technically advanced strike aircraft of the 20th Century.
Contrary to the name F117A Fighter, F117A was primarily designed as a strike aircraft, even though it could carry air to air missiles, it was never intended for that pupose.
During the aircraft service with the US Air Force the F117A flew 1270 combat sorties for a total of 6905 hours and only 1 loss due to enemy fire.
Now what makes that statistic even more impressive is that the F117A was the first aircraft into Iraq, it had to avoid Iraq air defences to make the first strikes on CnC and Air Defence Networks.
All without loss, F117A flew only 2% of missions in Iraq but accounted for over 40% of targets destroyed.
Now statistic of 1270 for one loss gives the F117A the highest combat sortie to loss ratio of any strike aircraft in history.
Kind of like the F15 Eagle having the worlds highest air to air K/D Ratio.
Also reason I state it's revolutionary is because the F117A could strike targets which previously would take multiple elements and missions of different aircraft types to preform the same mission, from fighters to ECM Aircraft in support just to get one strike elemet to it's target and back. F117A could perform same mission on it's own.
Now lets look at Russian combat sorties total for stealth aircraft. That's right ZERO they have never developed a Stealth Fighter/Strike Aircraft.
Not only that US is now four generations ahead in stealth technology from the F117A which was first designed in the 1970s
Only aircraft with a better combat record over enemy territory is this one. Over 3,500 combat missions over the most defended air space in the world and had no less than 4,000 SAM fired at it.
Soviets never developed a SAM that could shoot it down or interceptor that could reach it, and the aircraft first flew in 1964. It flew so high and so fast that even a SA-5 battery, had to fire their missiles 48 miles in front of the aircraft to even have a hope of reaching it. However pilots use to just push the throttles forward and leave the missiles and any interceptor aircraft standing still including the Mig 25 & Mig 31.
When it comes to aircraft and especially stealth technology, Russians and rest of the world are still decades behind.
