"Thomas Schoene" wrote in message link.net...
robert arndt wrote:
the "Hopeless Diamond" version:

http://www.f-117a.com/images/XST/hdiamond1.gif

Looks much different from the designs the Germans came up with for
their MBB Lampyridae (Firefly)... independently, of course.

Lampyridae reportedly began development in 1981. Have Blue flew in the
1970s. Who was copying whom?
No, the US team that discovered the Lampyridae did so in 1981 after the scale model was being tested. The design studies and construction of the model began years before and was in no way connected to the XST.

The German
design was much better at radar defraction and was from the onset
designed as an armed interceptor.

It might have occurred to them that a LO aircraft with conventional active
radar (State fo the art for the 1980s) was a fairly pointless undertaking.
Ther'es a good reaosn the F-117 does not have radar.

But US pressure cancelled the program just like the Canadian
CF-105 Arrow.

Ah, the eternal lament of would-be super-plane builders everywhere. Easier
to blame the US than their own governments, I guess.

The Arrow wasn't a would be at all- it WAS the greatest interceptor in
the world at the time-far beyond what the US had and equal to the
CIA's U-2 ceiling.


p.s. However, it is not quite confirmed that the Germans actually
stopped with their stealth program. Reports of Firefly II stealth
aircraft being tested in South Africa have persisted for years just as
the now-confirmed German-assisted firing of an Israeli cruise missile
off South Africa's coast on one of the Dolphin subs.

Confirmed? Sez who? I've seen viogorous denials of these alleged cruise
missile tests, but no evidence that they actually happened.

Israeli reports of those tests have been available for the last 2
years. Sightings of the German Firefly II have occured numerous times
over the Overberg Test Range.


Rob