Tacit Blue was built to answer a narrower question than its predecessor. The military wanted an aircraft that could loiter near a front line, look deep behind it with radar, and not be shot down for doing so. That meant an aircraft that could transmit without being detected, and be looked at without being seen.
Northrop, which had lost the Have Blue competition to Lockheed, built it. Its engineers abandoned facets. Tacit Blue was the first stealth aircraft designed with curved surfaces: a deep, slab-sided fuselage with a rounded top, a single flush inlet on its back, straight wings and two outward-canted tails.
“Arguably the most unstable aircraft man had ever flown.”
It stayed in the air by way of a quadruple-redundant fly-by-wire system. The people who worked on it called it the Whale. Some called it the alien school bus.
§ 01135 flights
It first flew on 5 February 1982 at Groom Lake, Nevada, with Northrop test pilot Richard Thomas. Over the next three years it made 135 flights and logged about 250 hours. Ken Dyson, who had ejected from the second Have Blue, flew it too.
The program ended in 1985. Its radar work fed into the E-8 Joint STARS, and its curves into the B-2 Spirit. The aircraft was kept in storage until it was declassified on 30 April 1996, and then put on display at the National Museum of the United States Air Force in Dayton, Ohio. It remains there, in public, looking exactly as strange as it did in secret.
