OVER THE MEDITERRANEAN SEA, OFF THE COAST OF LIBYA
 THE NEXT AFTERNOON

The flight had originated from Arkansas International Airport, Blytheville, Arkansas. The crew had filed an ordinary IFR flight plan with the FAA, with Bangor, Maine, as its destination and McDonnell Douglas DC-10 as its aircraft type. About twenty minutes before reaching Bangor, with unusually good weather all across the northeast United States, the crew descended below eighteen thousand feet, canceled its Instrument Flight Rules flight plan, and elected to proceed using Visual Flight Rules. The handoff was routine. Once the flight descended below three thousand feet it disappeared off radar, lost in the ground clutter of the White Mountains of eastern New Hampshire. As far as American air traffic controllers were concerned, it was a successful and completely routine trip. They did not check to see if the flight made it to Bangor, nor were they required to do so.

In fact, the aircraft never descended at all. The crew was able to electronically alter the Mode C altitude readout of its air traffic control radio transponder, making the controllers think it had descended for landing. The controllers never had a “skin paint,” or hard radar return, on the aircraft—they were relying only on the transponder to get the aircraft’s position. The aircraft actually stayed at thirty- nine thousand feet, heading eastward on a great circle route to take it over the north Atlantic Ocean.

Once the transponder was turned off, the aircraft became invisible—because it was not really a DC-10, but a modified U.S. Air Force B-52H Stratofortress bomber nicknamed the EB-52 Megafortress, owned and operated by Sky Masters Inc. as a government research and testing aircraft, designed as a stealth technologies demonstration aircraft. Its skin and major structural components were made of composite fibersteel, not metal, covered with radar-absorbent materials; instead of a large cruciform radar-hungry tail, its control surfaces were smaller, swept backward, and radically tilted in a low V-shape to minimize radar reflections. Even though the aircraft weighed nearly half a million pounds and its wingspan was longer than the Wright Brothers’ first airplane flight, it had the radar cross-section of a bird.