|
In one of his most dramatic paintings, Michael Rondot portrays a sinister black Lockheed F-117A Stealth fighter landing at dawn with its distinctive black braking parachute streamed. This superb print, the seventh edition in the GULF WAR series, is countersigned by TWENTY operational F-117A pilots from the 49th Fighter Wing, Holloman AFB, serving in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere, symbolising a remarkable breakthrough in access to the once super-secret Black Jet and its aircrews.
Designed and built in the early 1980s at the Lockheed 'Skunk Works' under conditions of intense secrecy, the F-117A Stealth fighter was not revealed to the public until 1990, after it had been in service for over 7 years. A year later during Operation Desert Storm, laser-guided precision bombing images from the cockpits of Black Jets over downtown Baghdad were on every television screen and newspaper front page around the World. Night after night, the theory of an aircraft designed to evade radar detection was tested by brave pilots in combat over densely packed Iraqi radar-directed air defences. The results, together with the aircraft and its pilots, are now legend.
|
