A photo of a Chinese copy of the F-117 appeared

The first high-quality photos of a copy of the American F-117 fighter-bomber installed in the Chinese city of Luoyang on the territory of a military factory have appeared on the Web. The explanation to the post says that satellite images of the Chinese F-117 have been known for a long time, but photos from a closer distance have not been published before.

The Lockheed F-117 Nighthawk, the first production aircraft built using stealth technology, entered service with the US Air Force in 1983. Its combat use ceased after the Yugoslav air defense shot down the F-117 in 1997 with the old Soviet S-125 complex. According to the commander of the brigade commander Dani Zoltan, this became possible thanks to the carelessness of the Americans flying the same route. In addition, the transmitting and receiving antennas of the anti-aircraft radar were in different places, and stealth technologies are not designed for this.

Several fragments of the fighter - including the cockpit light and his helmet - are on display at the Belgrade Aviation Museum. The rest of the artifacts were dismantled for souvenirs by the population. Later, the Associated Press, citing an unnamed Serbian military, reported that Chinese agents were actively buying up fragments of F-117 from farmers - and some of the artifacts were "the size of a small car." Therefore, when the Chinese stealth fighter J-20 took to the sky, many experts in the United States hastened to accuse China of using Nighthawk technologies. At the same time, they did not mention that under President Bill Clinton, American companies provided Beijing with several key technologies necessary for the production of stealth aircraft. So BP America and Hexcel transferred the secrets of precursors and composites to China, and Sikorsky - the methodology for calculating the shapes of fuselages, wrote G2Bulletin.

Anyway, the Chinese built a copy of the F-117.

Anton Valagin