Nicknamed "The Wobblin' Goblin" because they were difficult to control, and when pilots flew them at night, they occasionally got extremely disoriented and
bought the farm, especially during night air refueling.
The F-117 also gained a bad reputation during the invasion of Panama when a majority of them didn't hit their targets, and instead bombed schools and private property. First flight was on December 1, 1977 as the XST - codename Have Blue - a test platform that only vaguely looks like the F-117. The first formal flight of the Lockheed fighter version was April 1982. It remained largely secret, with the exception of an erroneous Testor's model kit in 1986 and blurry photos in Aviation Week in 1989, until the Gulf War.