The F-117 is not dead, it simply went on living in the Nevada test world after it was retired by the United States Air Force in 2008. And, according to current plans, the process of demilitarizing it is expected to continue until 2034. This unusual afterlife says as much about modern air combat as it does about the Nighthawk itself. The F-117 was the first stealth aircraft ever flown in combat, but it was never a conventional fighter despite the designation rather, it was a specialized ground attack aircraft designed on purely mathematical principles, with radar shaping trumping aerodynamics in importance in every possible way. It was a very unconventional weapon system to begin with and, as it turns out, the most unconventional aspect of the whole affair was probably its unusual post-retirement life.
Indeed, it is hard to think of anything more relevant to today’s air combat than the shape of the Nighthawk. Lockheed used the faceted construction to disperse radio waves reflected off its surfaces from a potential opponent’s emitter, resulting in a very unstable craft requiring a quadruple-redundant fly-by-wire system to be able to stay airborne at all. Its pilots called the F-117 “flying a refrigerator”: this is how difficult it must’ve been to fly the airplane, designed as late as in the 1970s when computer processing power was severely limited. The ability to fly at all became secondary to radar stealth for its designers.
And that is exactly why the F-117 still has relevance. An example of a functioning low-observable aircraft with a known signature gives the United States Air Force many opportunities to experiment that would otherwise be closed for example, to fly the plane against experimental radars or sensors and compare it with an aircraft whose signature is known. This makes the jet an excellent test bed, since the way older generation stealth designs react to radar waves differs considerably from newer ones, whose aerodynamics and computing power allowed for more refined solutions to stealth problem.
The aircraft serves as a valuable training platform too. Without any enemy stealth aircraft to practice against, American pilots and engineers can use the Nighthawk as an adversary stand-in to learn how to detect, track, and react to low-observable designs. Recent public sightings have proven that the program is still active, from California Air National Guard training exercises in 2021 to appearances on test grounds in the Western United States and Southern California. One video from 2022 shows a crew member claiming there were approximately 48 flyable F-117s left.
There are also some practical considerations. Low-observability is a complex technology to maintain, with special coatings, careful surface treatment, heat management, and other issues involved something which requires continuous development and training that can be best gained on existing older platforms rather than on front-line fighters. Using existing airframes to develop stealth technology saves money in the process. In summary, the F-117 proves another important point: retirement does not necessarily mean disappearance. In the case of the F-117, it simply shifted from being a combat penetrator to an invaluable experimental and training tool.