Wings.Of.War.S01E02.Bandits.Secrets.and.Spies
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00:00For over a hundred years, battles have raged in the air for command of the skies.
00:09If you don't have air supremacy, you're in trouble.
00:13Since its earliest beginnings in World War I, the airplane is the supreme weapon of the
00:18armed forces.
00:19This was a real battle for civilization, for humanity.
00:24It revolutionized battle and changed the ways war was fought and won.
00:28The F-117 has obviously changed how we design aircraft and air campaigns.
00:34War drove innovation in the skies.
00:36What we hear from the Air Force is, when the F-35 wasn't there, all others died.
00:41When the F-35 was there, they reigned supreme.
00:44Aircraft bred a new kind of hero.
00:46The fate of entire nations depended on the bravery of a handful of men.
00:51An appreciation of the extent to which young men were willing to put their lives on the
00:55line for an ideal is something we need to remember more often than we do.
01:00In this episode, bandits, secrets and spies.
01:04The planes that fought using stealth and spy technology.
01:08All warfare is based on deception.
01:11To strike effectively, it's essential to know your opponent, who they are and where they
01:16are.
01:17As with all warfare, from the dawn of time until the 21st century, information is power.
01:24The Blackbird is the fastest aircraft ever built.
01:27It pretty much was impervious to enemy air defenses.
01:30At a blistering Mach 3, it was back on home turf, before the enemy even realized it had
01:36been compromised.
01:37So the capabilities of the SR-71 camera systems were absolutely astonishing.
01:44As the military took flight, so did the arts of surveillance.
01:48The British tended to use substantial numbers of airplanes to do reconnaissance over the
01:55lines.
01:56Pioneers in aerial photography turned the Rumpelstaub into the world's first spy plane.
02:02The Germans experimented with multiple different colors and patterns to counteract the aircraft
02:07being seen from overhead, from observation balloons, and in reverse from the ground and
02:12from the trenches.
02:14The U-2 plane broke new records in aviation, flying higher than any plane before it.
02:19Their target was to carry out strategic reconnaissance of the Soviet Union.
02:25It's illegal for an airplane to violate a sovereign airspace's territory.
02:31Enter the ultra-secret world of stealth.
02:34The F-117 pilots were collectively known as bandits.
02:37Stealing into the night was the Nighthawk, the world's first stealth bomber.
02:42It was able to drop bombs without anybody knowing they were coming.
02:45And so they unleashed not only surprise on the enemy, but they also had a psychological
02:50effect that the bombs were coming from nowhere.
02:53Stealth is a world where you can steal an opponent's secrets and disappear in the blink
02:58of an eye.
03:12It's the 1950s.
03:29Tensions are running high as the Cold War between America and the Soviet Union deepens.
03:34Both sides knew little about each other's new killer capability.
03:38Ignorance fuelled paranoia.
03:41The Soviet Union was eight and a half million square miles, so it's a vast area, very difficult
03:45to gain information.
03:46And so before satellites, that was extremely difficult to collect information.
03:52Espionage intensified.
03:55Spies were pitted against spies.
03:57The Soviet Union operated behind a wall of secrecy and isolated itself from the rest
04:02of the world.
04:04They called it the Iron Curtain.
04:06The Soviet Union was still a big unknown.
04:10Were the Soviets developing strategic bombers that could reach the US and deliver a nuclear
04:17weapon?
04:18But this was 1953, and the US had no aircraft capable of gathering the vitally needed intelligence.
04:27So a little-known British bomber was pressed into service.
04:30It is the original high-altitude spy plane.
04:34Before the U-2 ever came off the drawing boards, the CIA went to the British and asked them
04:39if they couldn't get this Canberra to fly higher than the current flight that was doing
04:4350,000 feet or so.
04:45The English Electric Canberra first flew in May 1949, and it was so successful, they increased
04:53the wingspan quite dramatically, which enabled it to get much, much higher in order to conduct
05:00reconnaissance missions over denied territory.
05:04So the British modified it by putting a Rolls-Royce Avon Mark 109s in it, and were surprised to
05:10find out it would do 65,000 feet.
05:16Codenamed Project Robin, the English Electric Canberra's mission was to overfly Russia's
05:22Kapustin Yar missile range.
05:25In those days, they didn't know what the Russian ballistic missiles could do, and they needed
05:29to know what kind of progress they had made.
05:32They needed photographs of them.
05:34It was equipped with cameras, and therefore gathered in the main photographic intelligence,
05:39and it also had a variety of recorders on board to gather electronic intelligence.
05:47The mission objectives were just to take pictures of the launch area and the rockets that were
05:52on the launch area.
05:54This is the aircraft that flew that mission.
05:58Larry Champion was part of the Canberra's aircrew.
06:01We used to fly formation, for example.
06:04We would fly here, and the bad guys would fly here.
06:06They'd try to shoot us down, and they would come up like so and stall out.
06:10Those who knew aircraft knew what stalling is.
06:12But we were relatively safe at 65,000 feet.
06:20Russia and America engaged in a deadly nuclear arms race, each building up stocks of intercontinental
06:26ballistic missiles to strike at a moment's notice.
06:30The concept of mutually assured destruction maintained a precarious peace between both
06:35sides, but maintaining a fragile truce depended on good intel.
06:41The intelligence was most important to keep the mutual assured destruction was the colloquialism
06:47of the day, and that was the idea that we knew that what they had, they knew what we
06:51had, and therefore the Cold War stayed cold, yes.
06:56Canberra's missions were flown by the RAF.
06:59America needed its own aircraft.
07:01In 1954, President Eisenhower approved the ultra-secret project, the U-2.
07:07It's the kind of thing that the US kept wraps on, particularly because it was going to be
07:11ideally penetrating Soviet airspace.
07:13They didn't admit to its existence.
07:15It was a covert operation for good reason.
07:18As you probably know, it's illegal for an airplane to violate a sovereign airspace's
07:24territory.
07:26Development of the U-2 became a CIA project led by Agency Chief Richard M. Bissell, Jr.
07:33The U-2 was designed to fly over the Soviet Union and to not be detected, and to do that
07:40it had to fly very high, higher than any airplane had previously flown.
07:56And this one is certainly unique because you're flying at the very edge of the stratosphere,
08:00wearing a full-pressure suit, flying over some, maybe some unfriendly territory or areas.
08:08Puts you, the pilot, in some very difficult situations that you have to deal with on your
08:12own.
08:15Flying the U-2 at its operational altitude of 70,000 feet is extremely hazardous.
08:21The fastest you could go in an airplane was only a few knots different from the slowest
08:27you could fly.
08:29Pilots call it coffin corner.
08:31Fly too slow or too fast and the plane goes into an uncontrollable dive.
08:36So the pilot had to fly the plane between a window of only about 7 or 8 knots at the
08:42very highest altitudes.
08:48The U-2 boasted a new large format camera, measuring 15 feet long by 13 inches in diameter.
08:56It had an unprecedented resolution of 2.5 feet from an altitude of 11 miles high.
09:03All of our imagery is rated on a national scale so it can be compared to something maybe
09:07a satellite can see.
09:10Despite the need for vital military intelligence, President Eisenhower became concerned that
09:15overflights of the Soviet Union might cause a war.
09:19He knew what a provocation these flights were.
09:22And although he was an ex-military man himself, he was a very careful president.
09:28The CIA reassured the president that Soviet radar could not track high altitude U-2 flights.
09:35In 1956, President Eisenhower gave the CIA permission to fly for 10 days and they could
09:42launch as many flights as they liked at that time.
09:45But the big surprise and the big disappointment was that the Soviets tracked those flights,
09:51they identified them on radar.
09:59These were black ops, secret and covert operations arranged by the government.
10:05So if the plane was shot down, the CIA took steps to ensure that the pilots couldn't be taken alive.
10:11When the U-2 first started flying over the Soviet Union in 1956, the pilots were given
10:17a means to commit suicide in the form of cyanide pills.
10:21They faced a stark choice, capture or suicide.
10:24Legend has it that one of the pilots who took out sweets with him nearly mistook the suicide
10:29pill for one of his candies.
10:32But it really is a legend because the U-2 pilots were encased in a pressure suit and
10:36a pressure helmet.
10:38The CIA took steps to make sure there were no mistakes.
10:42The CIA later changed from the pills to a rather clever disguised cyanide tipped needle
10:51and hiding it inside a silver dollar because they just simply thought the Russians would
10:56not discover that, whereas they might have discovered the suicide pills.
11:06The U-2 pilots prepare to overfly hostile Russian territory.
11:12U-2 operations to spy on the Soviet Union began in 1956.
11:19And one pilot in particular would soon embark on a top secret mission that would stretch
11:24US-Russia relations to breaking point.
11:39It's the height of the Cold War.
11:42Both sides unleash their spies to discover the secrets of their opponent.
11:47The US developed stealth technology as part of its armory.
11:51Although the Soviets could track the U-2 in the northern parts of its territory, the Russians
11:56weren't aware that Moscow and Leningrad had been photographed.
12:01The photographs also showed MiG fighters scrambling to intercept the U-2.
12:07American President Eisenhower was worried.
12:09He knew what a provocation these flights were.
12:13And although he was an ex-military man himself, he was a very careful president.
12:19He never again gave the CIA carte blanche permission to fly a series of missions.
12:31By the end of the 1950s, tensions reached breaking point between the US and Soviet Russia.
12:38Cold War rhetoric threatened nuclear war.
12:41Russian Premier Nikita Khrushchev boasted that a Soviet missile could deliver a 5-megaton
12:46warhead 8,000 miles away.
12:50America needed to know the facts.
12:51Could they launch intercontinental ballistic missiles from their own territory over the
12:57pole and onto US targets?
13:01Even though the CIA knew that the Soviets could spot the American U-2 planes on their
13:06radar, the missions continued.
13:09They knew that they could still outfly the missiles, i.e. the altitude of the U-2 was
13:13sufficient that the Soviet surface-to-air missiles couldn't quite reach them.
13:17So they were still able to fly this aircraft without being intercepted.
13:21Even if the Soviets could actually detect them, they weren't able to do anything about it.
13:26Gary Powers was chosen for Operation Grand Slam.
13:31He was their most experienced pilot, with a record of 27 successful missions.
13:39But this mission would be different.
13:45Unlike the previous missions, which launched and recovered to the same base, this was going
13:51to be a mission that was going to fly all the way across the Soviet Union, launching
13:56from Pakistan but landing in Norway.
14:01The flight plan was scheduled for May 1st.
14:04This would prove to be a mistake.
14:06The date of May 1st was problematic for the mission, simply because it's a Soviet holiday,
14:11it's May Day.
14:12That meant there was very little air traffic at the time.
14:14As a result, any flight, any incursion to Soviet airspace was that much more noticeable.
14:21The Soviets began tracking the U-2, 15 miles outside its border.
14:26He reached a point three and a half hours into his mission over Sverdlovsk, where the
14:31Soviet Union had a significant number of their new surface-to-air missiles, the SA-2.
14:38The Soviets targeted their SA-2 surface-to-air missiles on Gary Powers.
14:43They launched a total of eight missiles that day from three different sites, and just one
14:49of those missiles nearly reached the U-2.
14:53The missile had a proximity fuse, designed to explode when it got close to its target.
14:59One of the missiles that had engaged the U-2 of Gary Powers then explodes near the aircraft,
15:04knocking off one of the wings, making it unflyable.
15:07Powers had no choice but to bail.
15:09The G-forces were pinning him forward in the plane, and he realized that if he tried to
15:15eject, he'd probably have his legs cut off by the canopy rail because he was pressed
15:21forward.
15:22So he opened the canopy and was sucked out and then dangling by his oxygen cord.
15:26He was desperately trying to free himself while the plane was in free fall, and was
15:30unable as a result to hit the self-destruct button.
15:34The dying U-2 was still loaded with spy cameras and incriminating film, but the CIA had made
15:41contingency plans for a crash.
15:43There were a set of destruct switches in the cockpit, which would operate an explosive
15:49charge to disable the camera and its film, so that hopefully, even though the wreckage
15:56would break up, that was a big camera, but the evidence that it had been taking pictures
16:02would be destroyed by this explosive charge.
16:04But those switches were beyond his reach as he bailed out of the plane.
16:12Powers survived the missile strike and was quickly captured.
16:16The crash didn't completely destroy the U-2, and the Soviets were able to identify
16:21much of the equipment.
16:23So initially it was thought that he probably had not survived the crash.
16:27Information didn't come out immediately that he had survived this.
16:30On the 3rd of May, NASA announced that one of its aircraft making a high-altitude weather
16:34research flight in Turkey was missing.
16:38Russian Premier Nikita Khrushchev remained silent.
16:41The Americans stuck to their story.
16:44On May 7th, the Russians paraded Gary Powers to the world and revealed that he confessed
16:49to spying on the Soviet Union.
16:51The US was caught in a lie.
16:54They had to admit the missions, so Eisenhower has to make a public statement, it was essentially
16:58unprecedented at the time, saying that yes, we have conducted these missions.
17:03Premier Khrushchev had no hesitation in exposing America's spy operation to the world's press.
17:09They wanted to put him on trial, a show trial, all part of Khrushchev's big propaganda effort
17:16to exploit this incident for all it was worth.
17:23Gary Powers' trial began on the 17th of August 1960.
17:27He apologized to the Soviets and was sentenced to three years in prison.
17:32Just two years later, on the 10th of February 1962, as part of a deal, the Soviets handed
17:38him over at Glienka Bridge between West Berlin and Potsdam, Germany.
17:43More than 50 years after its first flight, the U-2 remains in frontline service.
17:49The U-2, designed in the 50s, first flight in 1955, certainly not the same aircraft that
17:54our grandfathers would have flown.
17:56This one is now the S model.
17:58But in the age of satellites, is the U-2 still relevant?
18:02We are relevant because of our dynamic retasking.
18:06It's very expensive to maneuver.
18:08It can be deployed anywhere in the world, for the most part, certainly the Middle East,
18:12then over in the Pacific theaters is where we operate mostly.
18:17The U-2 flies high, but it is not stealthy.
18:21To combat modern radar systems, covert operations demand stealth aircraft.
18:27We turn to stealth as much as possible to try and gain that information.
18:31For the Americans, gathering secrets from the Soviets meant creating a new plane with
18:39cutting-edge stealth technology.
18:41They decided to turn to a much faster aircraft that could fly even higher.
18:45The CIA set to work.
18:48In the cloak-and-dagger world of espionage, its very existence was kept a closely guarded
18:53secret for 10 years.
18:55And its construction team were sworn to secrecy.
18:59And its design was revolutionary.
19:01They developed the first modern stealth plane, the Lockheed Martin A-12.
19:09The A-12 is really one of the benchmarks of early stealth technology.
19:13So it was very important at the time to fly really high, really fast, but to have a really
19:19reduced radar cross-section.
19:23The A-12 was made of new materials.
19:25Well the design challenges for the A-12 and essentially the SR-71 were significant because
19:29the parameters that they were designing for were far in excess of any current aircraft,
19:34fighter aircraft.
19:35So the speeds that they were talking about were double the speeds of the contemporary
19:39fighter aircraft.
19:41Powered by the J-58 turbojet engine, the A-12 was fast too.
19:46This was the largest turbojet engine of its day.
19:49And that was what was required to get this airplane up to Mach 3.
19:53And it was designed to be able to use its afterburner for significant periods where
19:57most fighter aircraft had maybe a minute on afterburner at maximum speed.
20:01Some people say it's as fast as a bullet, but three times the speed of sound, over 2,000
20:09miles an hour is pretty quick.
20:16The A-12 was fitted with the latest surveillance technology.
20:20Well the big thing for the A-12 was the cameras it carried.
20:23There were three different types of cameras used.
20:25They were able to capture swaths of land between 40 miles wide and almost 70 miles wide with
20:31a resolution down to 12 inches from 70,000 feet.
20:36So it was quite remarkable cameras that were used and carried by this airplane.
20:42In 1968, the A-12 was put to the test when North Korea sparked an international crisis
20:48known as the Pueblo Incident.
20:50That's when North Korea, doing their saber rattling, went and captured a U.S. ship that
20:54was on a spy mission in international waters, the USS Pueblo.
20:58The ship was boarded and was taken into tow by the North Koreans.
21:03It was very important for the U.S. intelligence community to understand what was going on
21:08here.
21:10America was already embroiled in the Vietnam War.
21:13Now there was the prospect of another conflict opening up with North Korea.
21:18The only way to prevent it was to bring in the A-12 to see what the regime was really
21:23up to.
21:24If it was more than saber rattling, if they captured the ship as part of a bigger operation
21:28to maybe invade the South Korean peninsula, there was a whole other war going on.
21:33They wanted to accomplish three things.
21:36Find the Pueblo, determine where the crew may be held, but more importantly, determine
21:40if the North Korean military was mobilizing for a bigger conflict.
21:45Three days later, a mission was scheduled out of Kadena with the A-12, a Black Shield
21:52sortie, and it flew three passes over North Korea.
21:58And they were able to prove with just three overflights of A-12s that the North Korean
22:03military was not mobilizing and they can allow diplomatic processes to get the crew back.
22:09It took 11 months, but they did get the crew back.
22:11But we avoided that bigger war.
22:13It proved the technology.
22:15It proved that triple sonic reconnaissance worked.
22:19I would say that the A-12 not only changed the course of history in that area, but maybe
22:23prevented a larger war.
22:26And once you're dealing with the North Koreans, you're dealing with the Chinese.
22:30So if we had gone off a little half-cocked with the North Koreans during the Pueblo incident
22:35and maybe attacked them, things might be very, very different today and not very good.
22:42As good as it was, the A-12 was simply a curtain-raiser to its faster, more dynamic
22:48successor.
22:49A plane that would rewrite the rulebook.
22:52The Blackbird SR-71.
23:09By the 1960s, global tensions threatened to descend into all-out war.
23:14The development of stealth technology offers a vital lifeline to keep the peace.
23:19Enter the Blackbird, generally regarded as America's most successful spy plane.
23:24The SR-71 has a much bigger sensor suite.
23:26It could carry a number of different kinds of sensors.
23:29That included cameras, electronic intelligence gathering, infrared cameras.
23:34The SR-71 was particularly effective because of its speed and its altitude, so nothing
23:39could actually catch it.
23:43The Lockheed SR-71 was a pure reconnaissance aircraft.
23:47It was triple sonic, so therefore it would cruise in after burner at Mach 3.2.
23:53That's about 2,200 miles an hour.
23:57The Blackbird is the fastest plane ever made, period.
24:01But breaking aviation records almost broke the plane.
24:04The other problems were at that altitude and at those speeds were the temperatures, so
24:08the skin of the aircraft, depending on where you're talking about on the aircraft, would
24:12be anything from 250 to something like 550 degrees.
24:16At Mach 3, the heat generated from air friction alone would simply melt the plane mid-air.
24:22So they had to find new solutions, and things like aluminum structures simply weren't up
24:27to the task, so they had to turn to new materials such as titanium.
24:33The interesting side story is that the titanium reserves in the U.S. were actually quite insignificant,
24:38and most of this titanium could be found in the Soviet Union.
24:41So they had to use third parties and front companies as a sort of subterfuge to manage
24:46to get enough titanium to build the A-12 and the SR-71.
24:49So the Soviet Union actually helps build the SR-71 and the A-12.
25:00The SR-71 flew on the edge of space at a record-breaking altitude of 85,000 feet.
25:07From 15 miles high, the Blackbird's camera photographed targets in astonishing detail.
25:13Stealthy, secret, and quick.
25:17The SR-71 is a 35-mile amended aircraft.
25:20You don't have to worry about being shot down with a surface-to-air missile.
25:26The Blackbird could go where no other plane would dare fly.
25:31It was an aircraft that could fly over heavily defended areas.
25:34And that's why it was selected to go ahead and fly the Yonkapur missions in 1973.
25:41October 6th, 1973.
25:44The simmering tension between Egypt and Israel boils into all-out war.
25:49Soviet-backed Egypt and Syria attack Israel and invade the tiny state.
25:54The Middle East was the new front line in the Cold War.
25:58US-backed Israel vigorously defends itself against overwhelming odds.
26:03An Israeli defeat could lead to global war.
26:07An Israeli defeat could lead to global nuclear conflict.
26:12The Soviets launch Cosmos 5,
26:15a spy satellite bringing them immediate intelligence from the battlefront,
26:19putting them ahead of the US.
26:22The United States could not spare a satellite to put into orbit over that battlefield area.
26:29So instead they called upon the services of the SR-71.
26:34The mission was called Operation Giant Reach.
26:38Operation Giant Reach was an SR-71 mission over the Middle East during the 1973 war.
26:43And it was essentially to survey the area and see what the Israelis and the Arab forces,
26:47how they were configured and whether they were living up to some of the agreements they'd made,
26:50in order to help broker a peace.
26:52The original flight plan was just over eight hours,
26:55which allowed the SR-71 to stop over in England to refuel and the crew to rest.
27:01But the British government had other ideas.
27:04And the British said, you can't land here.
27:07We don't want to support anything going on in the Middle East
27:10because we rely so heavily on the Middle East oil.
27:13So instead of an eight and a half hour mission,
27:16we turned into an 11 hour and 20 minute mission flying out of New York.
27:22It would be the longest mission a Blackbird had ever flown.
27:27In the early hours of October the 12th,
27:30Jim Shelton took off from Griffith's Air Force Base in New York
27:33on his vital intelligence gathering mission.
27:36So you want to be over a target area somewhere between 11 and 1 o'clock
27:41to go ahead and get the brightest sun.
27:44Also, that allows the photo interpreters to have bits of shadows
27:48so that they can determine elevation, heights of buildings and things of that nature.
27:53Jim Shelton's mission was top secret.
27:56Neither the Egyptians nor the Israelis knew about it.
27:59The intelligence officer said,
28:01don't be surprised if the Israelis or the Egyptians shoot at you.
28:05Undaunted, the SR-71 entered Egyptian airspace
28:09and began photographing its armed forces.
28:12Jim Shelton's navigator, Gary Coleman, alerts Jim with urgent news.
28:17So now as we're coming down the Suez,
28:20So now as we're coming down the Suez,
28:22Gary tells me that the Egyptian surface-to-air missiles are tracking us.
28:27It's not only the Egyptians that are tracking the Blackbird.
28:31But as the US hadn't notified the Israelis,
28:33even though they were allies at this stage,
28:35the Israelis weren't aware of this and any incursion in their airspace they fired on,
28:39so they did launch some surface-to-air missiles against the SR-71.
28:44Jet fighters are scrambled to intercept the Blackbird.
28:48Then we get towards Cairo area.
28:51I could look down and see contrails,
28:54but I couldn't tell exactly if those were Egyptian or Israeli contrails I could see below us.
29:04But the Blackbird flew too high for the fighters to attack.
29:08Jim Shelton's crew began to photograph the region.
29:12The SR-71's nose camera can capture an entire country on film in just one hour,
29:17on 10,500 feet of film.
29:20Its mission provided vital intelligence that quite literally changed the world.
29:25It allowed the US to broker a peace deal between Egypt and Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir.
29:31What I had heard was that the State Department advised Golda Meir
29:35that she was further into Egypt than she was letting the rest of the world know.
29:41And of course she wanted to know how, and they said,
29:43well, we've got this photo, here's the battle line,
29:46and there's no arguing against the photo that shows troops up so far into Egypt.
29:52And she backed up a little bit there when they finally signed their negotiating treaty.
29:58In its 35-year service record, not one Blackbird SR-71 was lost,
30:04demonstrating just how far stealth ingenuity had come since its inception.
30:12STEALTH TECHNOLOGY
30:19Stealth technology has its roots back in World War I,
30:22when Germany's Rumpler Taub aircraft experimented with camouflage.
30:27You can barely see them when they come over the lines,
30:31and to try to position yourself to intercept them when they're coming back is almost impossible.
30:37The Rumpler Taub was used for reconnaissance. It was the first of its kind.
30:43It had a translucent fuselage, which made it very difficult for ground-based observers to detect.
30:50The early Rumpler Taubs were very, actually, flimsy aircraft,
30:55and because of the nature of the linen covering the fuselage and the wings and the tail,
31:03they're almost invisible from the ground,
31:06because it's like looking right through them if the sun is shining.
31:13These reconnaissance aircraft also had an early form of stealth technology applied to their wings.
31:19It's called the lozenge camouflage.
31:21The Germans experimented with multiple different colors and patterns
31:25to counteract the aircraft being seen from overhead, from observation balloons,
31:31and in reverse, from the ground, from the trenches.
31:36From the outset, aircraft proved its ability to capture vital intel through reconnaissance.
31:42In World War II, British radar technology brought even greater powers of intelligence gathering.
31:48There were stations, hundreds of stations, across the coast,
31:51all the way up from Scotland, all the way down the south coast as well.
31:55What was critical about the radars was that they were able to tell
31:58that something was coming in at what height, what distance, which direction it was traveling,
32:04so it was tracking something coming through.
32:07And how many were coming in, so we needed to know how many bombers were coming in,
32:11how many Messerschmitts were coming in supporting those bombers,
32:15and therefore how many fighters and which squadrons we needed to get up into the air.
32:21Both sides were in a race to develop the best radar systems.
32:25But as soon as one side gained an advantage, the other side found ways to block it.
32:35Germany had perfected a top-secret airborne radar system known as Lichtenstein,
32:40an aircraft-mounted radar that was state-of-the-art.
32:44The Lichtenstein radar is a German airborne radar that's used to detect, track, and then attack
32:49Allied bombers in the Allied bomber offensive.
32:52It's the mainstay of the German night fighters
32:55and more advanced than the kind of designs that the Allies had at the time.
32:59This meant that Germany was able to see deep into British airspace.
33:04But events were about to swing the balance of power very dramatically.
33:10World War II
33:21In World War II, the struggle for dominance between Germany and Britain intensified
33:26as both sides engaged in a technological arms race.
33:30It's a constant battle between innovation in radar and stealth technology.
33:35May 9, 1943, on the German-occupied airfield of Aalborg, Denmark,
33:41Luftwaffe flying ace Heinrich Schmidt takes off in his Junkers with two other crewmen
33:47and disappears into the mist.
33:50The aircraft is one of the first 12 Junkers Ju 88 fitted with the new radar system.
33:56But Schmidt is not planning a raid. He's defecting.
34:00Pilot Heinrich Schmidt cannot reconcile his love of flying with the Luftwaffe's bombing campaign.
34:06Schmidt was very disillusioned, I think, with the German regime at the time.
34:10After a raid on the undefended Spanish town of Guernica,
34:15the pilots were taken on a visit to see the devastation they'd caused on the ground.
34:20He was shown the devastation afterwards, a number of bodies of women and children,
34:25and he swore not to use air power again offensively, regardless of the kind of situation.
34:30Schmidt was horrified.
34:32And as a result, he was determined to defect and also hand the British this copy of the Lichtenstein radar,
34:38hoping to at least give the British a leg up.
34:41Schmidt had a fiancée, and she was Jewish.
34:45While he was away flying, she was taken to a concentration camp and executed.
34:51So Schmidt was determined to defeat the Nazis, whatever the cost.
34:56He began feeding intelligence reports to his father in Switzerland,
35:00a former German diplomat who had also rejected the Nazi cause.
35:05Helped by his father, he began to live two lives on the base,
35:09one as a pilot, the second as a spy.
35:13And help was close at hand.
35:16The second crew member was Paul Rosenberg.
35:19He was partly Jewish, which is quite unusual to lift off at the time,
35:22so he was also politically motivated to defect.
35:25Schmidt's chance came when his crew was sent out on a sortie
35:28to shoot down an unarmed civilian Mosquito plane flying from Scotland to neutral Sweden.
35:35On May 9, 1943, they set off.
35:39They flew out towards the North Sea, keeping the aircraft below radar.
35:44A few miles from the Scottish coast, Schmidt appears on Allied radar,
35:48and two Spitfires are scrambled from RAF Dice.
35:52They're quickly intercepted, and Schmidt waggles his wingtips
35:55to announce their intention to surrender.
35:58Allied planes escort the Junkers back to the airfield.
36:02The prize Liechtenstein technology is handed to the Allied scientists.
36:08Schmidt and Rosenberger had given the British a vital advantage over the Luftwaffe.
36:17From its earliest beginnings, stealth technology has provided crucial intelligence
36:22to military commanders and world leaders.
36:25For nearly 80 years, spies ruled the skies,
36:28but the holy grail of invisibility eluded the US Air Force
36:32until the arrival of a game-changer.
36:37The Lockheed F-117, otherwise known as the Nighthawk.
36:43But this wasn't just a spy plane.
36:45This one can take out the opposition.
36:50The key combat role for the Nighthawk during Gulf War
36:53was attacking high-value and highly defended targets in the heart of Baghdad.
36:57The Nighthawk was the world's first true stealth bomber.
37:01Partly driving the need for stealth was the US experience in Vietnam
37:05where they lost a lot of aircraft due to Soviet-controlled surface-to-air missiles in North Vietnam.
37:11The program to develop the Nighthawk was a black-ops project.
37:15Very few people in the Pentagon even knew it existed.
37:19The aircraft was delivered to the United States Air Force in 1982 through 1990.
37:24Through most of that period, it was a program in secret
37:27that the United States Air Force kept from the public and the world.
37:33The Nighthawk's distinctive angular lines make it undetectable by radar.
37:38The engine's exhausts are two rectangular slits located above its wings
37:43to reduce infrared emissions.
37:45And its distinctive faceting reduces radar detection.
37:49Faceting is the use of flat panels to diffract radar signals.
37:53So the radar energy, the radio energy from a radar,
37:55is diffracted in such a way that it doesn't return to the radar dish.
37:58Therefore, there's no radar return.
38:01It has a radar signature smaller than a marble.
38:05But its angular, stealthy shape makes it inherently unstable in flight.
38:10The aircraft has very poor aerodynamic quality, so it needs a computer to fly it.
38:14It's essentially an unstable aircraft.
38:17Not designed with aerodynamics in mind, but stealth in mind.
38:19That was first and foremost.
38:21And they showed me this F-117, the stealth fighter,
38:25the first one coming down the assembly line.
38:28And I looked at that airplane, I said,
38:30it'll never fly, but I'm sure it'll make a nice tie-tack.
38:35The Nighthawk requires constant flight corrections from a computer to maintain flight.
38:41The shape of the airplane does make you think that it's,
38:44there's a lot of ones and zeros making that thing fly.
38:47And it has four computers that make the thing fly.
38:50Without those computers, the airplane won't fly.
38:53The F-117 is silent, stealthy, and comes with a powerful sting in its tail.
38:59Armed with laser-guided bombs,
39:01it eliminates hardened ground targets with devastating efficiency.
39:121991. The Nighthawk briefly emerges from the shadows
39:16when America announces its existence.
39:19The reason? Iraq's increasing defiance against the West.
39:24International tensions run high, but Iraq refuses to back down.
39:29Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein declares that he's preparing for the mother of all battles.
39:35The Nighthawk is about to play a crucial role.
39:38On the 17th of January, 1991, Desert Storm kicked off.
39:44America's President Bush leads an international coalition to strike Iraq.
39:49The F-117 was deployed in Operation Desert Storm primarily to attack strategic targets.
39:56This was the Nighthawk's first real test. Was it truly battle-ready?
40:01The F-117 Nighthawk really did receive a true baptism of fire during the Gulf War,
40:08when it was picked against some of the most highly defended targets on the planet.
40:14The Nighthawk pilots lived up to their given name.
40:18The call sign of F-117 pilots were bandits.
40:25The F-117 fleet began their long journey from the U.S.,
40:29finally landing in Saudi Arabia on the 20th of August,
40:32after a grueling 15-hour non-stop flight.
40:36The F-117 struck early in the morning on the 17th of January, 1991, directly into Baghdad.
40:44And the intent was that using the stealth capability of the F-117,
40:49we could employ more stealth by taking out the eyes and ears of the Iraqi leadership.
40:57Iraqi power stations, military headquarters and communication centers
41:02were all targeted and destroyed by the Nighthawk.
41:05It had about a 900-mile combat radius that it employed from Saudi Arabia
41:11and attacked principally on the opening parts of the war in Baghdad.
41:15And then, throughout the war, it continued to employ against command and control,
41:20strategic targets, nuclear, biological, chemical targets,
41:24and a lot of the hardened aircraft shelters.
41:27As a matter of fact, out of 600 aircraft shelters in Iraq,
41:3175 of them were struck throughout the war by either 117s or F-111s.
41:35It conducted 1,300 sorties and scored direct hits on 1,600 high-value targets,
41:42dropping 2,000 tons of precision-guided bombs.
41:45It was able to drop bombs without anybody knowing they were coming.
41:49And so they unleashed not only surprise on the enemy,
41:52but they also had a psychological effect that the bombs were coming from nowhere.
41:57The F-117 guys had the maxim, we own the night.
42:0270 to 75% of the bombs were direct hits on the exact location,
42:08which was revolutionary in warfare.
42:10The success of the F-117 was a game-changer.
42:14I personally think that the F-117 has revolutionized
42:18the way we employ air power in the 21st century.
42:21The F-117 was the first platform we used
42:25that allowed us to use stealth technology and precision-guided munitions in concert
42:30to achieve effects immediately in the battle space
42:34and to essentially blind the enemy leadership.
42:39Stealth is an essential art of war.
42:42In the 5th century BC, the legendary Chinese battle general Sun Tzu
42:47used stealth as one of his key tactics.
42:5126 centuries later, stealth planes follow his legendary doctrine.
42:57It's as dark and impenetrable as the night.
43:00It takes the enemy by surprise and strikes like a thunderbolt.
43:05Today, stealth is taking the form of unmanned drone aircraft
43:09flown by pilots from the other side of the world,
43:12capable of launching attacks from 5 miles up.
43:16The future will see fully autonomous drones spying, surveying and striking.
43:23Stealth began as the unseen spy in the sky.
43:26Now it's an essential part of aerial warfare.
43:30The next generation of jet fighters and bombers fitted with stealth technology,
43:34ready to attack under the cloak of invisibility.