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Boeing publishes photos of secret 1960s stealth plane experiment
"Quiet Bird" model echoes modern stealth fighters, but it never took wing.

by Sean Gallagher - Sep 24, 2015 6:57pm CEST
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The "Quiet Bird"—Boeing's secret project designated Model 853—on a trailer at Boeing's Wichita research center in 1962.


More than two decades before the first flight of the F-117A "Nighthawk" stealth fighter—and two years before Russian mathematician Pyotr Ufimtsev would publish a paper first defining the physics that would drive development of stealth aircraft—engineers at Boeing's Wichita, Kansas, facility performed tests on an experimental design that might have been the first stealth aircraft ever. According to images and information just recently released by Boeing, the company performed testing on a stealth aircraft prototype in 1962 and 1963. Designated as Model 853 by Boeing and known as "Quiet Bird," the prototype never flew. However, it demonstrated the effectiveness of design and construction approaches that would later be applied to stealth aircraft.
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Built with a non-metallic skin of a "variable density" material, the Quiet Bird model was tested and refined during radar cross-section tests at Wichita over two years. According to Boeing, the Quiet Bird was originally built as a prototype for an Army scout plane study. This factor, given the inter-service politics defined by the 1948 "Key West Agreement" (PDF) that put jet fixed-wing aircraft purely in the domain of the Air Force, may have doomed it from the start. And the military was apparently not all that interested in stealth technology in the early 1960s, according to the notes Boeing published with the images. "The tests reportedly achieved excellent results in reduced radar cross section, but it was a bit ahead of its time and did not generate interest from the military," Boeing's archivist noted. (The SR-71 Blackbird surveillance plane, which is also a product of the 60s, was designed to some degree to reduce radar cross-section, but it relied on speed.)

However, some of the design elements of the Quiet Bird may have influenced Boeing's AGM-86 Air Launched Cruise Missile. And the project fueled other work within Boeing on non-metallic and composite construction.