Now you see 'em; now you don't

Flight Journal, Apr 2004 by Davisson, Budd

ONE OF GUIDING AXIOMS of aviation has always been, "Whatever you do, make sure you look good while doing it." The concept of controlling the way we are seen by others has always been on our minds. As aviation came of age, however, there have been those who wanted to be seen and those who didn't.

Take the Wright boys, for instance. Talk about keeping a low profile! You would think that after whipping gravity, they'd shout it from the rooftops! But not Wilbur and Orville. In a five-year fit of paranoia, they did virtually all they could to hide their accomplishments for fear that someone would steal their ideas.

Then Glenn Curtiss comes along and flip-flops the concept of profile; he was early aviation's P. T. Barnum. he made an airplane fly better, longer and with more maneuverability, and he did everything he could to let the world know he was outdoing the Wrights. Kirk House's description of Curtiss in "License No. 1" paints him as the kind of guy you'd like to hang with because he was full of the energy and excitement of flight. The Wrights, on the other hand, sound as though they couldn't liven up even a very dull party.

When the airplane went into the military, the concepts of "profile" and "looking good" changed again. The military was all too happy to strut its stuff for the taxpayers, but when it came to combat, the name of the game was invisibility-low profile in the extreme. Combat crews are always happiest when no one knows they're there.

As seen in the raids on Romania's Ploesti oil refineries, low profile meant surprise, and that meant getting right down into the bushes where they couldn't see you. Flash! You're there, and then you're gone-a fleeting target, at best. Ron Dick's article, "Ploesti B-24: Utah Man," about getting up close and personal at smokestack level is hair-raising.

And then we come to modern times and a return to the dream of invisibility. Today, invisibility means foiling technology. It's one of those push-pull games that remind us of the old story about the two guys in the waiting room of the U.S. Ordnance Department during WW II. One asks, "What are you doing here?" The other answers, "We manufacture armor, and they say their ammunition is punching right through it." The first replies, "That's funny. We manufacture ammunition, and they say it isn't penetrating their armor."

In the stealth game, half of the technological world is building better radar systems, while the other half builds harder-to-see airplanes.

The hide-and-seek facts of superstealth are hard for most of us to understand, so we asked Barnaby Wainfan and some F-22 pilots to wade into the "no-see-um" F-22 and explain it to us in "The F/A-22 Raptor."

The logical extension of stealth will probably be a button on a fighter's instrument panel emblazoned with the icon of a closed eye. The pilot hits it, some sort of magic plasma shield envelops the airplane, and-bam-it's gone to the naked eye.

Of course, as soon as that becomes practical, some optometrist will market $1.98 glasses that can see through plasma shields.

And the game goes on.

Budd Davisson, Editor-in-Chief