Tom Somma was a young aircraft mechanic in the late 1970s when he got his first look at the new F-117 Nighthawk.
But Lockheed wouldn’t let him see all of it.
“We were only allowed to know what we were working on. We weren’t allowed to know the rest of it, and nobody was supposed to get together with anybody else.”
He’d been living and working in his native New York when the company hired him to move across the country -- to Burbank, California -- to help produce one of the prototypes that would become known as the Stealth Fighter.
It took months of paperwork to get his necessary security clearance, but in 1979, Somma began wrapping its wings in sheet metal.
The U.S. Air Force ultimately bought 64 of the distinctively flat, radar-resistant jets, which saw service in the 1991 Persian Gulf War and, later, above Iraq and Afghanistan. The military denied their existence until 1998 and retired the fleet a decade later, stowing them in hangars at the Tonopah Test Range, nearly 150 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
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Somma retired, too. He’d stayed with Lockheed for nearly six years, moved back east and found a career on the Long Island Rail Road. He moved to Nebraska -- his wife’s home state -- more than two years ago.
And in May, the 65-year-old sat along the highway near his new hometown of Ashland, waiting for the flat-bed trailer that was delivering one of the decommissioned F-117s to the nearby Strategic Aerospace and Air Command Museum.
Chuck Burchess of Lincoln was also waiting. Before he retired from the Air Force, he’d served as an F-117 crew chief at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico, keeping the Nighthawk maintained and prepared for flight.
When he learned the museum was getting one of the planes, he reached out and offered to help with its restoration. He was at the museum when the truck arrived.
The fighter’s wings had been clipped and its nose removed, but Burchess knew what he was looking at when the truck pulled into the parking lot.
“You never forget that shape. I even think I broke down in tears.”
* * *
The museum announced its newest acquisition -- just the fourth F-117 to go to a private museum -- nearly a year ago.
At the time, the marketing manager stopped short of calling it the Holy Grail of aircraft. But it was big. The fighter played an important role in the tail end of the Cold War, and it would serve as a bookend to the conflict’s earlier aircraft already on display -- the U2 spy plane and supersonic SR-71.
The single-seater Nighthawks could reach cruising speeds of 620 mph, and they were famous for their geometry and outer coating, which allowed them to elude enemy radar.
But what made the Nebraska-bound Nighthawk special would also slow its trip to the museum. In addition to all of the standard demilitarization steps the Air Force takes when it donates a plane -- disarming the weapons, removing the rockets beneath the ejection seat, recovering radioactive components -- it had to strip the F-117 of all of its secrets.
It removed the nose and all of the leading and trailing edges of the wings and other control surfaces. And it scoured, stripped and sandblasted all of its surfaces to get rid of radar-absorbing compounds.
The museum had planned to retrieve the plane in March, but the trip was delayed to late May.
In the air, the Stealth could have made the trip in under two hours. But on the back of a flatbed trailer, it took four days to make it from Nevada to Ashland.
Burchess was there to help usher it into the restoration bay. The former F-117 crew chief knew his way around the plane.
“I’m the one that opened the canopy when we put it in the hangar,” he said. “I was one of the first ones to sit on it.”
* * *
Restoration manager Andy Beemer and his team of volunteers weren’t used to a plane like this.
The first difference: They were familiar with aircraft that were decades old, that had sat outside succumbing to the elements. But the F-117 had flown in the past 15 years, and was then stored inside.
“We usually start with an old wreck, and we’re hunting for corrosion and rot. But this plane is in very good, solid condition. There’s nothing broken; there’s nothing corroded.”
The second: Because the military was still keeping its secrets to itself, this jet was incomplete. “It’s missing a lot of stuff -- stuff they won’t let us have. There’s a whole lot of stuff we have to fabricate and replicate.”
But they didn’t let that stop them from putting the wings back on and getting to work.
“Other than looking weird, it’s an airplane. It just happens that it’s a really square, flat one,” Beemer said.
They weren’t starting from scratch. Beemer had consulted with the Air Zoo in Kalamazoo, Michigan, which is nearly done with its own Nighthawk restoration. And he’d found new volunteers in Burchess and Somma, who knew the aircraft before its retirement.
But even that knowledge was limited.
“The parts I’m making now, I never got to see,” Somma said. “They weren’t installed until they took it to wherever they took it.”
The Air Force and Lockheed did provide rough guidelines of what the missing parts should look like, and how to build them. But the instructions were geared toward larger manufacturing plants, with more sophisticated equipment.
“For a small shop like us, we had to find some work-arounds,” Beemer said. “It’s been an interesting process of trial and error.”
For instance: The knife-like edges of the wings had been stripped, and the instructions suggested bending sheet metal nearly 170 degrees to replicate them.
A big shop would have the equipment and ability to heat-treat the steel before the bend. The museum doesn’t.
“We’d be cracking metal constantly. So how can we replicate that without breaking a lot of metal?”
By getting creative. Aircraft supply houses sell pre-bent wing edges designed for small planes -- like Cessnas and Beechcrafts -- and Beemer ordered more than 200 feet of them.
“Other than a manufacturer, I’m probably buying more of it than anybody.”
The strips are too narrow to fully replicate the F-117’s wing edges, but he and the volunteers use them as a guide to add more sheet metal.
They’ve spent seven months rebuilding the rear of the plane -- the trailing edges of the wings, rudders, exhaust and other areas -- and are just now moving around toward the front.
They have at least a year’s worth of work remaining before it moves from the restoration bay to the museum floor, Beemer said.
And he has measured expectations of what he wants it to look like when they’re done -- especially for a plane that’s been shrouded in so much secrecy.
“The goal of our restorations is to restore dignity to the airplane and to make it as close as we can, under whatever the circumstances are, to what it looked like in service,” he said.
“But fooling the guys who flew it is really hard.”