Original subtitles

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NARRATOR: For over a hundred years,

battles have raged in the air for command of the skies.

If you don't have air supremacy, you're in trouble.

Since its earliest beginnings in World War I,

the aeroplane is the supreme weapon of the Armed Forces.

This was a real battle for civilization, for humanity.

It revolutionised battle

and changed the ways war was fought and won.

The F-117 has obviously changed

how we design aircraft and air campaigns.

War drove innovation in the skies.

What we hear from the Air Force is

when the F-35 wasn't there, a lot of others died.

When F-35 was there, it reigned supreme.

Aircraft bred a new kind of hero.

The fate of entire nations

depended on the bravery of a handful of men.

An appreciation of the extent to which young men

were willing to put their lives on the line for an ideal

is something we need to remember more often than we do.

In this episode,

bandits, secrets, and spies.

The planes that fought using stealth and spy technology.

All warfare is based on deception.

To strike effectively, it's essential to know your opponent.

Who they are, and where they are.

As with all warfare,

from the dawn of time until the 21st century,

information is power.

The Blackbird is the fastest aircraft ever built.

It pretty much was impervious to enemy air defences.

At a blistering Mach 3, it was back on home turf

before the enemy even realised it had been compromised.

The capabilities of the SR-71 camera systems

were absolutely astonishing.

As the military took flight, so did the art of surveillance.

The British tended to use

substantial numbers of aeroplanes

to do reconnaissance over the lines.

Pioneers in aerial photography

turned the Rumpler Taube into the world's first spy plane.

The Germans experimented with different colours and patterns

to counteract the aircraft being seen from overhead

from observation balloons,

and in reverse, from the ground from the trenches.

Their U-2 plane broke new records in aviation,

flying higher than any plane before it.

Their target was to carry out

strategic reconnaissance of the Soviet Union.

It's illegal for an aeroplane

to violate a sovereign airspace's territory.

Enter the ultra-secret world of stealth.

The F-117 pilots were collectively known as Bandits.

Stealing into the night was the Nighthawk,

the world's first stealth bomber.

It was able to drop bombs without anybody knowing they were coming.

So they unleashed, not only surprise on the enemy,

but they also had a psychological effect

that the bombs were coming from nowhere.

Stealth is a world where you can steal an opponent's secrets,

and disappear in the blink of an eye.

(LIGHTNING CRACKS)

(DRAMATIC THEME MUSIC)

NARRATOR: It's the 1950s.

Tensions are running high as the Cold War between America and the Soviet Union deepens.

Both sides knew little about each other's new killer capability.

Ignorance fuelled paranoia.

MAN: The Soviet Union was 8.5 million square miles,

a vast area, very difficult to gain information,

and so before satellites,

that was extremely difficult to collect information.

Espionage intensified.

Spies were pitted against spies.

The Soviet Union operated behind a wall of secrecy

and isolated itself from the rest of the world.

They called it the Iron Curtain.

MAN: The Soviet Union was still a big unknown.

Were the Soviets developing strategic bombers

that could reach the US and deliver a nuclear weapon?

But this was 1953, and the US had no aircraft

capable of gathering the vitally-needed intelligence.

So, a little-known British bomber was pressed into service.

MAN: It is the original high altitude spy plane.

Before the U-2 came off the drawing boards,

the CIA went to the British and asked them if they couldn't

get this Canberra to fly higher than the current flights.

It was doing of 50,000ft or so.

The English Electric Canberra first flew in May 1949

and it was so successful,

they increased the wingspan quite dramatically,

which enabled it to get much, much higher

in order to conduct reconnaissance missions

over denied territory.

So, the British modified it

by putting Rolls-Royce Avon Mk.109s in it

and were surprised to find out it would do 65,000ft.

Code named Project Robin,

the English Electric Canberra's mission

was to overfly Russia's Kapustin Yar missile range.

In those days, they didn't know what the Russian ballistic missiles could do.

They needed to know what kind of progress they'd made.

They needed photographs.

It was equipped with cameras, and therefore,

gathered in the main, photographic intelligence.

And it also had a variety of recorders on board

to gather electronic intelligence.

The mission objectives were to take pictures of the launch area

and the rockets that were on the launch area.

This is the aircraft that flew that mission.

Larry Champion was part of the Canberra's air crew.

We used to fly formation, for example,

we would fly here, and the bad guys would fly here.

They'd try to shoot us down and come up like so, and stall out.

Those who know aircraft know what stalling is,

but we were relatively safe at 65,000ft.

(DRAMATIC MUSIC)

Russia and America engaged in a deadly nuclear arms race,

each building up stocks of intercontinental ballistic missiles,

to strike at a moment's notice.

The concept of mutually assured destruction

maintained a precarious peace between both sides.

But maintaining a fragile truce, depended on good intel.

The intelligence was most important.

To keep the mutual assured destruction

was the colloquialism of the day, and that was the idea.

We knew what they had, they knew what we had,

and therefore the Cold War stayed cold.

Canberra's missions were flown by the RAF.

America needed its own aircraft.

In 1954,

President Eisenhower approved the ultra-secret project, the U-2.

It's the kind of thing the US kept wraps on

because it was going to be penetrating Soviet airspace.

They didn't admit to its existence.

It was a covert operation for good reason.

As you probably know, it's illegal for an aeroplane

to violate a sovereign airspace's territory.

Developments of the U-2 became a CIA project

led by agency chief Richard M Bissell, Jr.

The U-2 was designed to fly over the Soviet Union

and to not be detected.

And to do that, it had to fly very high,

higher than any aeroplane had previously flown.

This one is unique because you're flying at

the very edge of the stratosphere wearing a full pressure suit,

flying over some,

maybe some unfriendly territory or areas.

That puts you, the pilot, in some very difficult situations

that you have to deal with on your own.

Flying the U-2 at its operational altitude of 70,000ft,

is extremely hazardous.

CHRIS: The fastest you could go in an aeroplane

was only a few knots different from the slowest you could fly.

Pilots call it 'coffin corner'.

Fly too slow or too fast,

and the plane goes into an uncontrollable dive.

So, the pilot had to fly the plane between

a window of only about seven or eight knots

at the very highest altitude.

The U-2 boasted a new, large format camera

measuring 15 feet long by 13 inches in diameter.

It had an unprecedented resolution

of 2.5ft from an altitude of 11 miles high.

All of our imagery is rated on a national scale.

It can be compared to something maybe a satellite can see.

Despite the need for vital military intelligence,

President Eisenhower became concerned

overflights of the Soviet Union might cause a war.

He knew what a provocation these flights were,

and although he was an ex-military man himself,

he was a very careful president.

The CIA reassured the president

that Soviet radar could not track high altitude U-2 flights.

In 1956, President Eisenhower gave the CIA permission

to fly for ten days.

They could launch as many flights as they liked at that time,

but the big surprise and the big disappointment

was that the Soviets tracked those flights.

They identified them on radar.

These were Black Ops,

secret and covert operations arranged by the government.

So, if the plane was shot down, the CIA took steps

to ensure that the pilots couldn't be taken alive.

When the U-2 first started flying over the Soviet Union in 1956,

the pilots were given a means to commit suicide

in the form of cyanide pills.

They faced a stark choice, capture or suicide.

Legend has it, one of the pilots who took out sweets with him,

nearly mistook the suicide pill for one of his candies!

But it really is a legend because the U-2 pilots

were encased in a pressure suit and a pressure helmet.

The CIA took steps to make sure there were no mistakes.

The CIA later changed from the pills

to a rather clever disguised Cyanide-tipped needle,

and hiding it inside a silver dollar

because they simply thought the Russians would not discover that,

whereas they might have discovered the suicide pills.

The U-2 pilots prepare to overfly

hostile Russian territory.

U-2 operations to spy on the Soviet Union

began in 1956.

One pilot in particular,

would soon embark on a top secret mission

that would stretch US-Russia relations to breaking point.

NARRATOR: It's the height of the Cold War.

Both sides unleash their spies

to discover the secrets of their opponents.

The US developed stealth technology

as part of its armoury.

Although the Soviets could track the U-2

in the northern parts of its territory,

the Russians weren't aware that Moscow and Leningrad had been photographed.

The photographs also showed MiG fighters

scrambling to intercept the U-2.

American President Eisenhower was worried.

CHRIS: He knew what a provocation these flights were.

And, although he was an ex-military man himself,

he was a very careful president.

He never again gave the CIA

carte blanche permission to fly a series of missions.

By the end of the 1950s,

tensions reached breaking point between the US and Soviet Russia.

Cold War rhetoric threatened nuclear war.

Russian Premier Nikita Khrushchev

boasted a Soviet missile could deliver a five megaton warhead,

8,000 miles away.

America needed to know the facts.

Could they launch intercontinental ballistic missiles

from their own territory over the pole,

and onto US targets?

Even though the CIA knew

the Soviets could spot American U-2 planes on their radar,

the missions continued.

They knew they could still outfly the missiles.

The altitude of the U-2 was sufficient.

Soviet surface-to-air missiles couldn't reach them,

so they were still able to fly without being intercepted.

Even if the Soviets could detect them,

they weren't able to do anything about it.

Gary Powers was chosen for Operation Grand Slam.

He was their most experienced pilot

with a record of 27 successful missions.

(DRAMATIC MUSIC)

But this mission would be different.

CHRIS: Unlike previous missions

which launched and recovered to the same base,

this was gonna be a mission

that's gonna fly all the way across the Soviet Union,

launching from Pakistan, but landing in Norway.

The flight plan was scheduled for May 1st.

This would prove to be a mistake.

The date of May 1 was problematic

because it's a Soviet holidays, it's May Day.

That meant there was very little air traffic at the time.

As a result, any incursion to Soviet airspace,

was that much more noticeable.

The Soviets began tracking the U-2,

15 miles outside its border.

They reached a point 3.5 hours into its mission over Sverdlovsk

where the Soviet Union had a significant number

of their new surface-to-air missiles, the SA-2.

The Soviets targeted their SA-2 surface-to-air missiles on Gary Powers.

They launched a total of eight missiles that day

from three different sites,

and just one of those missiles nearly reached the U-2.

The missile had a proximity fuse

designed to explode when it got close to its target.

One of the missiles engaged the U-2 of Gary Powers

and explodes near the aircraft,

knocking off one of the wings, making it unflyable.

Powers had no choice but to bail.

The G forces were pinning him forward in the plane.

And, he realised that if he tried to eject,

he'd probably have his legs cut off by the canopy rail

because he was pressed forward.

So, he opened the canopy and was sucked out

and then dangling by his oxygen cord.

He was trying to free himself while the plane was in freefall,

and was unable as a result, to hit the self-destruct button.

The dying U-2 was still loaded with spy cameras

and incriminating film.

But, the CIA had made contingency plans for a crash.

There were a set of destruct switches in the cockpit

which would operate an explosive charge

to disable the camera and its film,

so that hopefully even though the wreckage would break up,

that was a big camera,

but the evidence that it had been taking pictures,

would be destroyed by this explosive charge.

But those switches were beyond his reach

as he bailed out of the plane.

Powers survived the missile strike and was quickly captured.

The crash didn't completely destroy the U-2,

and the Soviets were able to identify much of the equipment.

Initially it was thought he had not survived the crash.

Information didn't come out immediately he'd survived this.

On the 3rd of May, NASA announced

one of its aircraft making a high-altitude

weather research flight in Turkey, was missing.

Russian Premier Nikita Khrushchev remained silent.

The Americans stuck to their story.

On May the 7th, the Russians paraded Gary Powers to the world

and revealed he confessed to spying on the Soviet Union.

The US was caught in a lie.

They had to admit the missions.

Eisenhower has to make a public statement, unprecedented at the time,

saying, 'Yes, we have conducted these missions.'

Premier Khrushchev had no hesitation in exposing

America's spy operation to the world's press.

They wanted to put him on trial, a show trial,

all part of Khrushchev's big propaganda effort

to exploit this incident for all it was worth.

Gary Powers' trial began on the 17th of August, 1960.

He apologised to the Soviets,

and was sentenced to three years in prison.

Just two years later, on the 10th of February, 1962,

as part of a deal, the Soviets handed him over at Glienicke Bridge,

between West Berlin and Potsdam, Germany.

More than 50 years after its first flight,

the U-2 remains in frontline service.

The U-2 designed in the '50s, first flight in 1955,

certainly not the same aircraft our grandfathers would've flown.

This one is now the S model.

But in the age of satellites, is the U-2 still relevant?

We are relevant because of our dynamic re-tasking.

Satellites are very expensive to manoeuvre,

but it could be deployed anywhere in the world.

Certainly the Middle East and over the Pacific theatres is where we operate mostly.

The U-2 flies high, but it is not stealthy.

To combat modern radar systems,

covert operations demand stealth aircraft.

We turn to stealth as much as possible

to try and gain that information.

For the Americans, gathering secrets from the Soviets

meant creating a new plane with cutting-edge stealth technology.

They turned to a much faster aircraft that could fly higher.

The CIA set to work.

In the cloak and dagger world of espionage,

its very existence was kept a closely-guarded secret for ten years.

Even its construction team was sworn to secrecy,

and its design was revolutionary.

They developed the first modern stealth plane, The Lockheed Martin A-12.

ERIC: The A-12 is really one of the benchmarks

of early stealth technology.

It was very important at the time to fly really high, really fast,

but to have a really reduced radar cross section.

It was made of new materials.

The design challenges for the A-12

and the SR-71, were significant,

because the parameters they were designing for

were far in excess of any current fighter aircraft.

The speeds they're talking about were double the speeds

of contemporary fighter aircraft.

Powered by the J58 Turbojet engine,

the A-12 was fast too.

This was the largest turbo jet engine of its day.

That was what was required to get this aeroplane up to Mach 3.

It was designed to be able to use its afterburner for significant periods,

where most fighter aircraft had maybe a minute on afterburner at maximum speed.

ERIC: Some people say it's fast as a bullet

but three times the speed of sound,

over 2,000mph is pretty quick.

The A-12 was fitted with the latest surveillance technology.

ERIC: The big thing for the A-12 was the cameras it carried.

There was three types of cameras used,

and they were able to capture swaths of land

between 40 miles wide and almost 70 miles wide,

with a resolution down to 12 inches from 70,000ft.

It was quite remarkable cameras

that were used and carried by this aeroplane.

In 1968, the A-12 was put to the test

when North Korea sparked an international crisis

known as the Pueblo Incident.

That's when North Korea doing their sabre rattling, captured a US ship,

that was on a spy mission in international waters, The USS Pueblo.

PAUL: The ship was boarded, and was taken into tow by the North Koreans.

It was very important for the US intelligence community

to understand what was going on here.

America was already embroiled in the Vietnam War.

Now, there was the prospect of another conflict opening up with North Korea.

The only way to prevent it, was to bring in the A-12

to see what the regime was really up to.

If it was more than sabre rattling,

if they captured the ship as part of a bigger operation

to maybe invade the South Korean Peninsula,

that was a whole other war going on.

They wanted to accomplish three things. Find the Pueblo.

Determine where the crew may be held.

But more importantly, determine if the North Korean military

was mobilising for a bigger conflict.

Just three days later,

a mission was scheduled out of Kadena with the A-12,

a Black Shield sortie,

and it flew three passes over North Korea.

They were able to prove with just three overflights of A-12s,

that the North Korean military was not mobilising,

and they can allow diplomatic processes to get the crew back.

It took 11 months but they did get the crew back.

But we avoided that bigger war.

It proved the technology.

It proved that triple sonic reconnaissance worked.

I would say the A-12 not only changed the course of history in that area,

but maybe prevented a larger war.

And once you deal with the North Koreans,

you deal with the Chinese.

So, if we had gone off a little half cocked

with the North Koreans during the Pueblo incident and maybe attacked them,

things might be very, very different today

and not very good.

As good as it was, the A-12 was simply a curtain raiser

to its faster, more dynamic successor,

a plane that would rewrite the rulebook.

The Blackbird SR-71.

(EXPLOSION)

NARRATOR: By the 1960s,

global tensions threatened to descend into all-out war.

The developments of stealth technology

offers a vital lifeline to keep the peace.

Enter the Blackbird,

generally regarded as America's most successful spy plane.

The SR-71 has a much bigger sensor suite.

It could carry a number of sensors that included cameras,

electronic intelligence gathering, infrared cameras.

The SR-71 was particularly effective

because of its speed and its altitude,

so nothing could actually catch it.

The Lockheed SR-71 was a pure reconnaissance aircraft.

It was triple sonic,

so therefore it would cruise in afterburner at Mach 3.2.

That's about 2,200mph.

That Blackbird is the fastest plane ever made, period.

But, breaking aviation records almost broke the plane.

The other problems were at that altitude and at those speeds, were the temperatures.

The skin of the aircraft, depending on where on the aircraft,

could be anything from 250 to something 550 degrees.

At Mach 3, the heat generated from air friction alone

would simply melt the plane mid-air.

They had to find new solutions.

Things like aluminium structures simply weren't up to the task,

so they had to turn to new materials such as titanium.

The interesting side story

is titanium reserves in US were actually quite insignificant

and most of this titanium could be found in the Soviet Union.

They had to use third parties and front companies

as a subterfuge to manage to get enough titanium to build the A-12 and the SR-71.

The Soviet Union actually helps build the SR-71 and the A-12.

(CHUCKLES)

The SR-71 flew on the edge of space

at a record-breaking altitude of 85,000ft.

From 15 miles high,

the Blackbird's camera photographed targets in astonishing detail.

Stealthy, secret and quick.

MAN: The SR-71 is a 35-mile-a-minute aircraft.

You don't have to worry about being shot down

with a surface-to-air missile.

The Blackbird could go where no other plane would dare fly.

It was an aircraft that could fly over heavily-defended areas

and that's why it was selected to go ahead and fly

the Yom Kippur missions in 1973.

October the 6th, 1973.

The simmering tension between Egypt and Israel

boils into all-out war.

Soviet-backed Egypt and Syria

attack Israel and invade the tiny state.

The Middle East was the new frontline in the Cold War.

US-backed Israel, vigorously defends itself against overwhelming odds.

An Israeli defeat could lead to a global nuclear conflict.

The Soviets launched Cosmos 5, a spy satellite,

bringing them immediate intelligence from the battlefront,

putting them ahead of the US.

The United States could not spare a satellite

to put into orbit over that battlefield area.

So instead, they called upon the services of the SR-71.

The mission was called Operation Giant Reach.

Operation Giant Reach was an SR-71 mission

over the Middle East during the 1973 war.

It was to survey the area

and see how the Israelis and Arab forces were configured

whether they were living up to agreements made,

in order to help broker a peace.

The original flight plan was just over eight hours,

which allowed the SR-71 to stop over in England to refuel,

and the crew to rest.

But, the British government had other ideas.

And the British said, 'You can't land here.

'We don't wanna support anything going on in the Middle East

cos we rely so heavily on Middle East oil.'

So, instead of 8.5 hour mission,

it turned into 11 hours and 20 minute mission

flying out of New York.

It would be the longest mission a Blackbird had ever flown.

In the early hours of October the 12th,

Jim Shelton took off from Griffiss Air Force Base in New York,

on his vital intelligence-gathering mission.

You wanna be over a target area

somewhere between 11 and one o'clock

to go ahead and get the brightest sun.

Also, that allows the photo interpreters

to have bits of shadows so they can determine elevation,

heights of buildings, and things of that nature.

Jim Shelton's mission was top secret.

Neither the Egyptians nor the Israelis knew about it.

The intelligence officer said,

'Don't be surprised if the Israelis or Egyptians shoot at you."

Undaunted, the SR-71 entered Egyptian airspace

and began photographing its armed forces.

Jim Shelton's navigator Gary Coleman,

alerts Jim with urgent news.

So now as we're coming down the Suez, Gary tells me

Egyptian surface-to-air missiles are tracking us.

It's not only the Egyptians that are tracking the Blackbird.

As the US hadn't notified the Israelis,

even though they were allies,

the Israelis weren't aware of any incursion in their airspace

so they did launch some surface-to-air missiles against the SR-71.

Jet fighters are scrambled to intercept the Blackbird.

JAMES: Then we get towards Cairo area.

I could look down and see contrails,

but I couldn't tell exactly

if those were Egyptian or Israeli contrails I could see below us.

But, the Blackbird flew too high for the fighters to attack.

Jim Shelton's crew began to photograph the region.

The SR-71's nose camera

can capture an entire country on film in just one hour

on 10.5 thousand feet of film.

Its mission provided vital intelligence

that quite literally changed the world.

It allowed the US to broker a peace deal between Egypt

and Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meier.

What I had heard was that

the State Department advised Golda Meir

that she was further into Egypt

than she was letting the rest of the world know.

She wanted to know how and they said,

'We've got this photo. Here's the battle line.'

And there's no arguing against the photo

that shows troops up so far into Egypt.

She'd backed up a little bit

when they finally signed their negotiating treaty.

In its 35-year service record,

not one Blackbird SR-71 was lost,

demonstrating just how far stealth ingenuity had come

since its inception.

Stealth technology has its roots back in World War I

when Germany's Rumpler Taube aircraft

experimented with camouflage.

You can barely see them when they come over the lines.

To try to position yourself

to intercept them when they're coming back is almost impossible.

The Rumpler Taube was used for reconnaissance.

It was the first of its kind.

It had a translucent fuselage which made it very difficult

for ground-based observers to detect.

The early Rumpler Taubes

were very, actually, flimsy aircraft,

and because of the nature of the linen

covering the fuselage and the wings, and the tail,

they're almost invisible from the ground

because it's like looking right through them

if the sun is shining.

These reconnaissance aircraft

also had an early form of stealth technology applied to their wings

It's called the lozenge camouflage.

The Germans experimented with multiple colours and patterns

to counteract the aircraft being seen from overhead

from observation balloons,

and in reverse from the ground, from the trenches.

From the outset, aircraft proved its ability

to capture vital intel through reconnaissance.

In World War II, British radar technology

brought even greater powers of intelligence gathering.

There were hundreds of stations across the coast,

all the way up from Scotland, all the way down the south coast.

What was critical about the radars was that

they were able to tell something was coming in

at what height, what distance,

which direction it was travelling.

It was tracking something coming through,

and how many were coming in.

So, we needed to know how many bombers were coming in,

how many Messerschmitts were supporting those bombers,

and therefore how many fighters and which squadrons we needed

to get up into the air.

Both sides were in a race to develop the best radar systems.

But, as soon as one side gained an advantage,

the other side found ways to block it.

Germany had perfected a top secret airborne radar system

known as Liechtenstein,

an aircraft-mounted radar that was state-of-the-art.

The Liechtenstein radar is a German airborne radar

that's used to detect track and attack Allied bombers

and the Allied bomber offensive.

It's the mainstay of the German night fighters

and more advanced than designs the Allies had at the time.

This meant that Germany was able to see deep into British airspace.

But events were about to

swing the balance of power very dramatically.

(ENGINES ROARING)

NARRATOR: In World War II,

the struggle for dominance between Germany and Britain intensified,

as both sides engaged in a technological arms race.

It's a constant battle between innovation in radar

and stealth technology.

May the 9th, 1943,

on the German-occupied airfield of Aalborg, Denmark.

Luftwaffe flying ace Heinrich Schmitt

takes off in his Junkers with two other crewmen,

and disappears into the mist.

The aircraft is one of the first 12 Junkers Ju 88

fitted with the new radar system.

But, Schmitt is not planning a raid.

He's defecting.

Pilot Heinrich Schmitt cannot reconcile his love of flying

with the Luftwaffe's bombing campaign.

Schmitt was disillusioned with the German regime at the time.

After a raid on the undefended Spanish town of Guernica,

the pilots were taken on a visit

to see the devastation they'd caused on the ground.

He was shown the devastation afterwards,

the number of bodies of women and children,

and swore not to use air power again offensively, regardless of situation.

Schmitt was horrified.

As a result he was determined to defect

and also hand the British this copy of the Lichtenstein radar

hoping to at least give the British a leg up.

Schmitt had a fiancee and she was Jewish.

While he was away flying,

she was taken to a concentration camp and executed.

So, Schmitt was determined to defeat the Nazis,

whatever the cost.

He began feeding intelligence reports to his father in Switzerland,

a former German diplomat who had also rejected the Nazi cause.

Helped by his father, he began to live two lives on the base.

One as a pilot. A second as a spy.

And help was close at hand.

The second crewmember was Paul Rosenberger.

He was partly Jewish, which is quite unusual for the Luftwaffe,

so he was also politically motivated to defect.

Schmitt's chance came when his crew was sent out on a sortie

to shoot down an unarmed civilian Mosquito plane

flying from Scotland to neutral Sweden.

On May the 9th, 1943, they set off.

They flew out towards the North Sea,

keeping the aircraft below radar.

A few miles from the Scottish coast,

Schmitt appears on Allied radar

and two Spitfires are scrambled from RAF Dyce.

They're quickly intercepted, and Schmitt waggles his wing tips

to announce their intention to surrender.

Allied planes escort the Junkers back to the airfield.

The prized Liechtenstein technology

is handed to the Allied scientists.

Schmitt and Rosenberger had given the British a vital advantage

over the Luftwaffe.

From its earliest beginnings,

stealth technology has provided crucial intelligence

to military commanders and world leaders.

For nearly 80 years, spies ruled the skies,

but the Holy Grail of invisibility eluded the US Air Force,

until the arrival of a game changer.

The Lockheed F-117,

otherwise known as the Nighthawk.

But this wasn't just a spy plane.

This one can take out the opposition.

The key combat role for the Nighthawk during Gulf War

was attacking high-value and highly-defended targets in the heart of Baghdad.

The Nighthawk was the world's first true stealth bomber.

Partly driving the need for stealth

was the US experience in Vietnam where they lost a lot of aircraft

due to Soviet-controlled surface-to-air missiles in North Vietnam.

The programme to develop the Nighthawk was a Black Ops project.

Very few people in the Pentagon even knew it existed.

The aircraft was delivered to the United States Air Force in 1982 through 1990.

Through most of that period, it was a programme in secret

that the United States Air Force

kept from the public and the world.

The Nighthawk's distinctive angular lines

make it undetectable by radar.

The engine's exhausts are two rectangular slits

located above its wings to reduce infrared emissions,

and its distinctive faceting reduces radar detection.

Faceting is the use of flat panels

to diffract radar signals, so the radio energy from a radar

is diffracted in such a way it doesn't return to the radar dish.

Therefore there's no radar return.

It has a radar signature smaller than a marble.

But its angular, stealthy shape,

makes it inherently unstable in flight.

The aircraft has very poor aerodynamic qualities,

so it needs a computer to fly it, it's an unstable aircraft.

Not designed with aerodynamics in mind, but stealth.

That was first and foremost.

JAMES: They showed me this F-117, the stealth fighter,

the first one coming down the assembly line,

and I looked at that aeroplane,

I said, 'It'll never fly, but would make a nice tie tack.'

The Nighthawk requires constant flight corrections from a computer to maintain flight.

The shape of the aeroplane does make you think that it's...

There's a lot of ones and zeros making that thing fly.

It has four computers that make the thing fly.

Without computers, the aeroplane won't fly.

The F-117 is silent, stealthy,

and comes with a powerful sting in its tail.

Armed with laser-guided bombs,

it eliminates ground targets with devastating efficiency.

1991, the Nighthawk briefly emerges from the shadows

when America announces its existence.

The reason? Iraq's increasing defiance against the West.

International tensions run high, but Iraq refuses to back down.

Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein

declares that he's preparing for the mother of all battles.

The Nighthawk is about to play a crucial role.

On the 17th of January, 1991,

Desert Storm kicked off.

America's President Bush

leads an international coalition to strike Iraq.

The F-117 was deployed in Operation Desert Storm

primarily to attack strategic targets.

This was the Nighthawk's first real test.

Was it truly battle ready?

The F-117 Nighthawk really did receive

a true baptism of fire during the Gulf War

when it was pitted against

some of the most highly-defended targets on the planet.

That Nighthawk pilots lived up to their given name.

The call sign of F-117 pilots were bandits.

The F-117 fleet began their long journey from the US,

finally landing in Saudi Arabia on the 20th August,

after a gruelling 15-hour non-stop flight.

The F-117 struck early in the morning

on the 17th January, 1991,

directly into Baghdad, and the intent was, is that,

using the stealth capability of the F-117,

we could employ more stealth

by taking out the eyes and ears of the Iraqi leadership.

Iraqi power stations,

military headquarters and communications sensors,

were all targeted and destroyed by the Nighthawk.

It had about a 900-mile combat radius

it employed from Saudi Arabia,

and attacked principally on the opening parts of the war in Baghdad.

Then throughout the war,

it continued to employ against command and control,

strategic targets, nuclear, biological and chemical targets

and a lot of the hardened aircraft shelters.

As a matter of fact, out of 600 aircraft shelters in Iraq,

375 were struck throughout the war

by either 117s or F-111s.

It conducted 1,300 sorties

and scored direct hits on 1,600 high value targets,

dropping 2,000 tonnes of precision-guided bombs.

It was able to drop bombs without anybody knowing they were coming,

and so they unleashed not only a surprise on the enemy,

but had a psychological effect that the bombs were coming from nowhere.

The F-117 guys had the maxim,

'We own the night.'

70 to 75% of the bombs

were direct hits on the exact location,

which was revolutionary in warfare.

The success of the F-117 was a game changer.

I personally think that the F-117 has revolutionised

the way we employ airpower in the 21st century.

The F-117 was the first platform we used

that allowed us to use stealth technology

and precision-guided munitions in concert,

to achieve effects immediately in the battlespace,

and to essentially blind the enemy leadership.

Stealth is an essential art of war.

In the 5th century BC,

the legendary Chinese battle general Sun Tzu,

used stealth as one of his key tactics.

26 centuries later,

stealth planes follow his legendary doctrine.

It's as dark and impenetrable as the night.

It takes the enemy by surprise, and strikes like a thunderbolt.

Today, stealth is taking the form of unmanned drone aircraft,

flown by pilots from the other side of the world,

capable of launching attacks from five miles up.

In the future, we'll see fully autonomous drones

spying, surveying, and striking.

Stealth began as the unseen spy in the sky.

Now, it's an essential part of aerial warfare.

The next generation of jet fighters and bombers

fitted with stealth technology,

ready to attack under the cloak of invisibility.

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