Navy Lifts Veil on Stealthy Ship Invisible to Radar
After a decade of secrecy, the U.S. Navy has unveiled its seafaring version of the Stealth fighter plane, called the Sea Shadow.
The 160-foot-long ship was engineered by Lockheed Corp.’s Advanced Development Projects unit in Burbank, better known as the “Skunk Works,” which also designed the F-117A Stealth fighter. Indeed, analysts say Sea Shadow looks like the F-117A on pontoons, having the same angular shape intended to make it invisible to radar.
“It’s an important program,” said Norman Polmar, a naval analyst and author in Alexandria, Va. “With increasing number of countries having advanced sensors and weapons, you want to make your ship as stealthy as possible.”
Sea Shadow though, isn’t a prototype for a future fleet of ships.
Rather, the Navy says only a single ship was built to test a variety of technologies, including sea-keeping, automation and control of a ship’s many “signatures”--characteristics that lend themselves to detection.
Some of the technologies from Sea Shadow have already been incorporated in other ships, notably on some destroyers.
“A lot of the Stealth characteristics are being applied to modern ships and will likely be used for future ships as well,” said Ben Rich, who worked on the project before retiring as president of the Lockheed Skunk Works.
The Skunk Works, which has since moved to Palmdale, developed the basic design of the ship.
Lockheed’s Missiles & Space unit in Sunnyvale began building Sea Shadow in 1983. The ship’s first test run was in 1985.
Soon after, the Navy conducted preliminary testing at night. In 1986, the vessel was stored in a covered floating dry dock moored in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Then on Easter Sunday last month, the Sea Shadow burst onto the scene when the black-painted ship emerged from its hide-out for three weeks of day-time testing off Santa Cruz Island before journalists and other observers.
The Navy wouldn’t release results from the three-week test in April, and has said that the brief window of open information on Sea Shadow is now closed.
But Michael Dornheim, an editor at Aviation Week who watched the Sea Shadow on a radar, reported that the ship “has been demonstrated to be essentially invisible on radar, although the ship’s presence can be detected by its wake in calm seas.”
A ship’s wake refers to the trail or track left in water by a moving boat.
“As far as I know the tests were successful,” retired Lockheed executive Rich said.
