Stealth Fighter being retired

This news item seems to have fallen to the back pages.

I have a few reactions to this:

1. Am I that old??? The F-117 debuted when I was in Middle School. And it's already being retired?

2. No, I'm not that old. The F-14, made irretrievably cool by Top Gun, was in service for 32 years from 1974 to 2006. The Stealth Fighter served less than 20.

3. I'm sure that the retirement of the F-117 is being downplayed to avoid the harsh spotlight of fiscally concerned taxpayers. Although there are no official figures, there's little doubt that this was one of the most expensive military aircraft to design & develop in history, and one of the largest Skunk Works projects. Seems pretty inefficient to have the outcome of a 15-year development project in service for only 20 years.

4. The Stealth Fighter played a unique role in American folklore. Many of the claimed UFO sightings around the infamous Area 51 in the Nevada desert during the 1970s and 80s were probably caused by prototypes of the F-117. When most well-known jet aircraft looked something like this (below), it's not unreasonable for people to think something that looked like the picture above must have had extra-terrestrial origins.