Plane / Planes / Aircraft / Aeroplane / Airplane appreciation

Is this the F117? It was supposed to be 'invisible' to radar, so when they shot one down over Serbia during the war there, my wife and her friends made a big banner that they pitched on the side of their apartment block in Belgrade which said "Sorry Bill (Clinton) we didn't know your plane was meant to be invisible".

Part of the F117's stealth technology involves changing the standard reflections of radar waves.

Your radar sends out a wave and expects a response back. It logs the time the wave was sent and received and depending on the time taken for it to be received it says there is something here by form of a green blob on a display.

The F117 was designed so that a very small reflection of the radar wave is sent back to the receiver, the rest is bounced off in other directions and phase-shifted. IF (and it's a big IF) you can work out the reflection pattern and shift, you can set up a separate receiver where you expect to receive a return signal and get the correct green blob for an F117.

They did not manage this when they shot down the F117, it was dumb fucking luck. I don't say this as a fanboy or complete trust in technology, post conflict intel showed that they did not have the tech to implement this method, they literally just got lucky.

At the time, it was a fucking huge deal though, F117s were a plane that you couldn't see, you didn't know where it was, but it would rain destruction. Radio chatter would consist of we can hear it but we can't see it, and the fear was huge. The fact that they managed to shoot one down proved that it wasn't an el chupacabra style enemy and it could be stopped. It was a shiny shiny win against USA when it was sorely needed.