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Anatomy of a Stealth Fighter Shootdown
Perhaps the best cautionary tale against assuming stealth fighters are invulnerable is the story about how one has already been shot down. Four days into NATO’s air campaign over Serbia, an F-117A was brought down by an SA-3 northwest of Belgrade. The alliance’s air forces assumed Serbia’s outdated equipment posed a minimal threat to the Nighthawk. They didn’t even mind the crowds, which are believed to have included Serbian agents, outside their airbases watching planes takeoff.
The stealth fighters flew the same routes every night on their way to Belgrade. On the ground, Lt. Col. Zoltan Dani, commander of the 3rd Missile Battalion, 250th Air Defense Missile Brigade, was able to eavesdrop on the unencrypted radio traffic between fighter pilots and the E-3 AWACS directing them. Colonel Dani had studied the F-117’s technology and positioned his unit where he determined to be the optimum position from which to detect it.
On the night of March 27, 1999, weather had forced the cancellation of all NATO strike missions with the exception of eight F-117s. A little after 8pm, radar units in northern Serbia reported they had detected a target with a small RCS. At 26,000 ft., an F-117 was heading northwest from Belgrade after striking its target.
Col. Dani ordered his P-18 search radar (a 1970s upgrade of the P-12) activated. Initially, it detected nothing, but then he instructed the operator to activate an “innovation” and a target appeared on the screen at 31-37 mi. Colonel Dani has declined to detail the “innovation” but it’s believed to have enabled operation at an even lower frequency than normal. When the target closed adequately, the SA-3 operators began turning on their radars for 20-second intervals, to minimize exposure to NATO’s anti-radar missiles. On the third try, they locked on a target from 8-9 mi. away and fired off a pair of missiles at its 4 o’clock. The first flew over the F-117, failing to detonate, but the second struck, blowing off its left wing and sending it uncontrollably towards the ground.
