thedrive | Tonopah Test Range Airport, located along the northern edge of the sprawling Nevada Test and Training Range,
may not get all the pop culture attention that nearby Area 51 gets, but
in many ways, it is just as fascinating. It was born out of a program
that saw American fighter pilots secretly flying captured MiGs against their fellow aviators.
Not long after that program spun-up, the remote installation was
greatly expanded to house the F-117 Nighthawk force during the early and
deeply classified part of its career. It has since housed the semi-mothballed F-117 fleet following its official retirement more than a decade ago. It was also the original home of RQ-170 Sentinel. Today, the high-security base continues to support a number of secretive programs, as well as testing at the nearby range. Now, highly unusual activity around a dozen hangars at the shadowy installation has been caught on satellite.
The
image in question was snapped at around 10:15 AM local time on December
6th, 2019 by one of Planet Labs' PlanetScope satellites that image the
vast majority of the earth daily. The three-meter resolution image shows
the front row of the southern-most 'canyon' of hangars,
which were originally built for the F-117 program, with seemingly
identical craft sitting in front or at least protruding out of the
hangars. These are also the hangars that appear to house at least one secretive aircraft,
which has been spotted peeking out in multiple prior satellite images
in the past. But the December 6th image is unique in that we could not
find a similar phenomenon after checking hundreds of similar images that
span months of time.
It appears that some program was uniquely
active that day with a small fleet that makes up the contents of those
hangars being involved.
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