The Air Force Retired the F-117 in 2008. The Smithsonian Just Got Its First One, While Others Still Fly in Nevada

The jet the museum chose is F-117A 85-0818, “The Overachiever,” the only Nighthawk to fly combat in all four of the type’s major campaigns.

On the night of Oct. 6, 2026, an Air Force Reserve C-5M Super Galaxy lowered its ramp at Washington Dulles International Airport and unloaded a wingless black fuselage. It was F-117A serial 85-0818, and it is the first F-117 Nighthawk the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum has ever owned.

The museum announced the donation on Sept. 14 and plans to put the jet on the floor of its Udvar-Hazy Center in late October. The odd part is the timing: the Air Force retired the F-117 in 2008, yet some of its sister jets are still flying from a remote Nevada airfield.

Why the Smithsonian Waited 18 Years for a Retired Jet

A retired airliner can fly into Dulles and taxi to the museum. An F-117 cannot, because the stealth features that made it famous are still classified.

So the Overachiever went back to where it was built: Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works in Palmdale, California. Jeff Corbets, who led the restoration, told Air & Space Forces Magazine that a team of more than a dozen specialists spent late January to early August 2026 stripping the jet’s secrets out.

They dug out the radar-absorbent coating to reach the bolts beneath it, then bead-blasted the rest down to bare metal. The real edges on the wings and rudders came off and were replaced with what Corbets called “all new fake edges.” Classified components in the cockpit were removed too.

What stayed is most of the cockpit. Corbets put it at about 95 percent of the avionics, including the screens, the displays and the ejection seat. “To even the educated observer, it would look like an operational F-117,” he said.

The magazine put the refurbishment at $1 million. Skunk Works did a similar job in 2019 for the Nighthawk now at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California.

The Overachiever’s Record, and Its Last Trip

Tail 85-0818 first flew in 1986, according to The Aviationist. The Air Force gave it the nickname for one reason: it is the only F-117A that flew in all four major conflicts where Nighthawks saw combat.

Those were Operation Just Cause in Panama (1989), Desert Storm in Iraq (1991), Allied Force over Yugoslavia (1999) and Iraqi Freedom (2003). The jet flew its last Air Force sortie and was withdrawn in 2007, a year before the fleet’s official retirement on April 22, 2008.

The fleet’s record frames the jet’s. Lockheed built 59 production F-117s, and in Desert Storm the type flew about 1,300 sorties, per the Air Force’s fact sheet. The Air Force says it was the only U.S. or coalition aircraft to strike targets in downtown Baghdad.

Its final flight, in October 2026, was as cargo. Reservists from the 512th Airlift Wing at Dover Air Force Base, Delaware, loaded the fuselage and both detached wings into a C-5M on Oct. 5 for a 2,254-mile (3,627 km) crossing.

Accounts of the load differ. Air & Space Forces Magazine put the fuselage and wings at about 24,000 pounds (10,900 kg), while the Air Force’s release, quoted by Stars and Stripes, gave 29,500 pounds (13,400 kg). Either way, it was a light load for a transport rated for 285,000 pounds (129,300 kg) of cargo.

The hard part was the tie-downs. A miscommunication during the restoration left the jet short of anchor points, so the crew raised each landing gear strut about four inches (10 cm) and clamped collars to them instead. At Dulles, the ramp came down at 8:38 p.m., and the jet was on the tarmac by 9:16 p.m.

Why a “Retired” Stealth Jet Never Left the Sky

The Overachiever never came back from retirement. Many of its sisters did, and that is the strange second half of this story.

When the F-117 stood down in 2008, Congress was not convinced the newer stealth jets were enough. It ordered the Air Force to keep the Nighthawks in “flyable storage,” and 52 of them went back to the Tonopah Test Range in Nevada, about 150 miles (240 km) north of Las Vegas.

Flyable storage meant a small cadre of pilots kept current, and jets were taken out now and then and flown. Since at least 2020, F-117s have turned up openly at exercises such as Red Flag and Northern Edge, and the Air Force released its first official photos of post-retirement flying in 2021.

The Air Force does not say what they do. Observers believe they play stealthy adversaries for fighter pilots and stand in for cruise missiles in tests.

The intent to keep them is on paper. A 2023 Air Force request for information sought contractors to keep an unspecified number flying until at least 2034, and in 2024 the service moved to certify the F-117 to refuel from the new KC-46 tanker.

That work shows up in the sky. On Sept. 30, 2025, photographer Matt Hartman caught two F-117s refueling from a KC-46 over the Los Angeles area, as The Aviationist reported.

The jets that replaced it owe it their design. The F-22 and F-35 on our list of the best stealth aircraft in the world “really built on the foundation that was set by the F-117,” museum curator Michael Hankins told Air & Space Forces Magazine.

Where the Overachiever Goes Next

The jet is being reassembled in the museum’s Mary Baker Engen Restoration Hangar. The museum has said only that it goes on public display in late October, with no exact day announced as of Oct. 20.

Hankins said the plan is to park it in the Cold War and modern military section, beside the F-15 Eagle it flew with in Desert Storm. It joins a collection that already holds an SR-71 Blackbird, the Enola Gay and the Space Shuttle Discovery.

It is not the first Nighthawk in a museum. The Aviationist counts it as the 16th F-117 or YF-117 released for public display, and others already stand at the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force in Dayton, Ohio, and the Reagan Library.

The supply is shrinking on schedule. Of the 59 built, about 45 were still in the inventory as of January 2023, and the Air Force was releasing only two or three a year for demilitarization.

That leaves an unusual split. The only F-117 that flew all four wars now sits behind a rope in Virginia, while jets with quieter records keep flying over Nevada, and the Air Force has not said which of them will be the last to land.