I'd like to talk about how stealth technology started with Lockheed.

And that actually started back in the U-2 program in the late 50s.

It was known that the Soviets were building advanced missile systems to shoot down aircraft

with guided missiles.

And the fact of it is, is the U-2 from 1954 on was flying over Moscow, typically photographing a lot of

things in the Soviet Union.

So there was a stealth program to stealthize the U-2.

They looked into the fact that they could reduce the signature of the U-2 about two orders

of magnitude.

And my boss at that time used computer simulations to simulate that

effect. And in April of 1959, he told Kelly Johnson, even reducing the signature of the U2

by two orders of magnitude was insufficient and that the U22 would be shot down by a Soviet radar-guided

missile. Kelly immediately the next day took my boss to the Pentagon and they immediately started

the A-12 program. Later on, the Yom Kipper War showed the United States that we had

to have a different way because we found that the Soviet radar-guided missile systems were

so effective. We could not penetrate the Soviet Union with impunity and so therefore DARPA was

started with the program to build, quote, an invisible airplane.

That was Dennis Overholzer, the man who conceived of the idea of faceted plates on an aircraft, making it invisible to radar.

During conflicts like Vietnam and the Yom Kipper War, radar-guided missiles were a huge threat to aircraft.

As they say, necessity is the mother of invention

and the creation of what would eventually become

the F-117 Nighthawk was no exception.

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