That's cool. I had a seasons pass there when I had a condo in PSP sitting reserve in ONT. Great museum. I like how much of it is still flyable. The F117 exhibit wasn't there then.
The release of 117s to museums are a fairly recent thing. I think PSP was the first one to “complete’ theirs, more explanation on that below to
@knot4u
Would you join the AF again to fly it?
I still remember it fairly well, can still get it operating as well as employ it as the weapons system it was designed as. Still have all my publications for it of all the unclassified stuff. Would have to sit in the cockpit just to fully remember again the flows that I used to run through with ease before, to still do it with ease. It’d be tough to go back to the USAF and the general BS that went with it, but it’d be tempting.
Don't the F-117s show up to the museums naked (that means no paint perverts)? What did they paint it with when it was being prepared for display? I might have a tiny bit of experience doing these sorts of things, I once replaced all of the hydraulic fluid in an F-5 nose strut with a piece of aluminum tubing.
Yes, and moreso than you think. The USAF strips many external airframe parts such as the nose, wing leading edges, aft exhaust bricks, and some other parts, as well as nearly all internals other than the cockpit and bomb bay, when they are sent to the museum. Additionally, the USAF sends exactly Zero publications, checklists, Mx manuals, or anything else of any written or electronic records with them; so a museum essentially receives an empty shell that is stripped of airframe components, and has to manufacture those components themselves in order to complete the airframe externally. The jet itself has had its wings sliced off, so when they are reassembled, the airframe is never-again flyable due to how they have to reattach them. The bare-metal aircraft has had all its RAM coating stripped off by the USAF, so the jets are just painted in a flat black paint of some sort.
This is essentially how the jet shows up, but is disassembled. This here is 85-0817 “Raven Beauty” over at Clinton-Sherman airport, and has been maybe 25% refurbished. A lot more work has to go into it. you can see all the missing airframe components that have to be manufactured. A lot of the wire bundles are cut and removed, but strangely, the cockpits are mostly complete; even still having some components that I thought for sure would have been removed…