After 1945, Britain's Plessey Company, a massive electronics firm, was largely responsible for refining Germany's pioneering work on radar-absorbent material into yet another version of stealth technology. By the 1950s, Royal Air Force Canberra and Vulcan bombers were flying with radar-absorbent material on "hot spots," such as their leading edges and engine intakes. Using CIA-owned RB-45 Tornado reconnaissance aircraft and on at least one occasion, a RAF English Electric Canberra, British pilots made "penetration flights" of Soviet air space, ostensibly for the CIA. The Canberra had a crude form of stealth material to get through the Soviet defences, a large band of radar frequencies across an elaborate early-warning chain and surface-to-air missile belt.
But it was Lockheed's Skunk Works, whose U-2 spy plane made its first flight June 19, 1956, that actually developed the first stealth aircraft. During the four years the U-2 had been making its Operation Overflight runs, which ended with the downing of Francis Gary Powers over Sverdlovsk in 1960, Lockheed had been experimenting with radar-absorbing material to make the aircraft less detectable. Lockheed went on to produce its breakthrough Mach-3-plus A-12 fighter and its derivative, the SR-71 Blackbird, both of which had the radar cross-section of a single-edged Cessna.
Meanwhile, in Britain, during the late 1950s and early 1960s, because of advances in the Soviet Union's air defences, RAF bomber operations had switched from a medium-high to low-altitude strategy, making invisibility to radar less vital. The U.S. Air Force, however, was still training for and operating in the medium-high to low-altitude bombing role. So around 1961 the British Ministry of Defence packaged all its research into the pages of the "Dawson Report" and sent it to Washington.
In that report were more pieces of the puzzle of stealth, or "low observables," technology that a generation later would alter the shape of air warfare and come to be thought of as uniquely American. Not until the late 1970s, however, did the word stealth actually enter the military lexicon. At that point, the Carter administration admitted it was working on technology that could make aircraft invisible to radar.
The irony is that Britain's gift of stealth was largely ignored by the United States, commented Ben Rich, who in 1975 had become the Skunk Works' head of a stealth development team that produced the F-117A. According to Rich, the original research material was never touched by Lockheed and Northrop, the two principal proponents of the U.S. stealth revolution. The British Ministry of Defence gave it directly to the U.S. military, "who didn't let us see it," although they considered the work very good, says Rich. Only after the F-117A began operating in 1983 did the Pentagon hand over the MoD data on its breakthrough stealth technology.
Britain's Stealth Connection
Once the war ended, Washington and London joined in an organized plunder to latch onto Germany's impressive defense technology base. Tons of documents, not to mention scientists and hardware, were shipped back to Washington and London, one aim being to beat Moscow to the booty. The U.S.-British Air Documents Research Center in London, a clearing house for the distribution of captured scientific information, was soon transferred to the U.S. Army Air Force's Air Technical Service Command, at Wright Field, now Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio. This would become the U.S. National Air Intelligence Center.
