Stealth

The Secret Contest to Invent Invisible Aircraft

Peter Westwick

$51.95

Hardback

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English

Oxford University Press Inc
17 February 2020

History; Postwar 20th century history, from c 1945 to c 2000; The Cold War; Air forces & warfare; Military aircraft; History of engineering & technology

On a moonless night in January 1991, a dozen U.S. aircraft appeared in the skies over Baghdad. To the Iraqi air defenses, the planes seemed to come from nowhere. Their angular shape, making them look like flying origami, rendered them virtually undetectable. Each aircraft was more than 60 feet in length and with a wingspan of 40 feet, yet its radar footprint was the size of a ball bearing. Here was the first extensive combat application of Stealth technology. And it was devastating.

Peter Westwick's new book illuminates the story behind these aircraft, the F-117A, also known as the Stealth Fighter, and their close cousin the B-2, also known as the Stealth Bomber. The development of Stealth unfolded over decades. Radar has been in use since the 1930s and was essential to the Allies in World War Two, when American investment in radar exceeded that in the Manhattan Project. The atom bomb ended the war, conventional wisdom has it, but radar won it. That experience also raised a question: could a plane be developed that was invisible to radar? That question, and the seemingly impossible feat of physics and engineering behind it, took on increasing urgency during the Cold War, when the United States searched for a way both to defend its airspace and send a plane through Soviet skies undetected. Thus started the race for Stealth.

At heart, Stealth is a tale of not just two aircraft but the two aerospace companies that made them, Lockheed and Northrop, guided by contrasting philosophies and outsized personalities. Beginning in the 1970s, the two firms entered into a fierce competition, one with high financial stakes and conducted at the highest levels of secrecy in the Cold War. They approached the problem of Stealth from different perspectives, one that pitted aeronautical designers against electrical engineers, those who relied on intuition against those who pursued computer algorithms. The two different approaches manifested in two very different solutions to Stealth, clearly evident in the aircraft themselves: the F-117 composed of flat facets, the B-2 of curves. For all their differences, Lockheed and Northrop were located twenty miles apart in the aerospace suburbs of Los Angeles, not far from Disneyland. This was no coincidence. The creative culture of postwar Southern California-unorthodox, ambitious, and future-oriented-played a key role in Stealth. Combining nail-biting narrative, incisive explanation of the science and technology involved, and indelible portraits of unforgettable characters, Stealth immerses readers in the story of an innovation with revolutionary implications for modern warfare.

By: Peter Westwick
Imprint: Oxford University Press Inc
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 163mm, Width: 236mm, Spine: 28mm
Weight: 1g
ISBN: 9780190677442
ISBN 10: 0190677449
Pages: 336
Publication Date: 17 February 2020
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Peter Westwick is a research professor of history at the University of Southern California and director of the Aerospace History Project at the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West. He is the author or editor of several books, including Into the Black: JPL and the American Space Program, 1976-2004, which won book prizes from the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and the American Astronautical Society.

Reviews for Stealth: The Secret Contest to Invent Invisible Aircraft

A lucid and lively account of the achievement of what many thought impossible and resisted - sizable attack aircraft essentially invisible to radar. Westwick writes the story of the Stealth bombers on the expansive canvas of southern California, drawing in the security-veiled iconoclasm of the region's aerospace enterprise, the strategic thinking of its post-Vietnam military patrons, the innovations enabled by both computing and technical intuition, the passionate obsession of the physicists and engineers who envisioned the aircraft, and the differences in the technological cultures between Lockheed and Northrop, the ferociously competitive corporations where they turned their ideas into two divergent flight-ready realities. A rich, compelling, and eye-opening book. --Daniel J. Kevles, Professor of History Emeritus, Yale University, author of The Physicists