Black Manta

Black Manta may be the only Black Aircraft so far to have been photographed. Steve Douglass has a video recording of an exercise at White Sands Missile Range which would seem to show a craft unlike any "Existing" plane.

Black Manta is believed to be a Stealth Reconnaisance aircraft, designed to relay information on targets to attack planes like th e F-117 Nighthawk or the F-111. It is supposed to have bee usedn in this role during the Gulf War. There may be evidence for this in the "Team Stealth" patches that many F-117 pilots have been seen wearing.
In the late 1970s the US Air Force initiated the COMPASS COPE program to develop a tactical, survivable recon UAV. The mission envisioned for the COMPASS COPE aircraft would seem familiar today- they are nearly identical to that of the GlobalHawk UAV, and in many ways the two aircraft are similar. Boeing beat out Teledyne Ryan for the COMPASS COPE contract, only to have the program terminated soon after the competition ended in 1979. Around the time that COMPASS COPE was canceled the Air Force had several aerospace companies study an Advanced Remotely Piloted Vehicle. This would a "mid sized" RPV with limited stealth features and missions including recon, EW, and strike. Soon after the contractor studies were complete the Air Force ended the program.
Beginning in 1978 Northrop began to study how to apply low observables experience gained from the HAVE BLUE (and later TACIT BLUE) programs to a number of roles, ranging from cruise missile carriers to loitering recon platforms. A number of older studies of flying wing and span loader aircraft were dusted off and models were tested on indoor ranges to determine if any aircraft configurations had a "natural" stealth quality- the HAVE BLUE program had left a very bad taste in Northrop's mouth. They had nothing new lined up to keep money coming in and the Lockheed XST had beaten their design by a considerable margin- largely due to Lockheed's experience with material from the Oxcart program and the ECHO 1.0 software package.
Northrop had little experience with the kind of computing required to predict RCS (ironically, Northrop employees started most of the world's major computer and semiconductor companies, such as IBM) so they had to make due with trial and error and commercial radar absorbent materials.

At DARPA's request Northrop, in 1978, began studying a stealthy radar-carrying plane under the Battlefield Surveillance Aircraft Experimental (BSAX) program. A long and tedious design process ensued, and at one point DARPA wanted to open the program to other competitors- but at Northrop's suggestion did not. If Lockheed entered the program with all of its experience behind it Northrop would lose the contract, and be out of military work for at least the early 1980s. At the same time Northrop was working on its own to develop new projects that would be of interest to the Department of Defense.

3 TR-3A Black Manta's in Formation

One of these was Tacit Rainbow, a loitering anti radiation missile. Another concept was the Tactical High Altitude Penetrator, or THAP. Building on the experience of Jack Northrop and a great number of studies from NASA and the Air Force, Northrop had been looking at flying wing "span loader" aircraft for military use with great interest in the late 1970s. Recent advances in materials and flight control technology made an advanced span-loader more possible than ever. Missions ranging from super heavy lift transports and tankers to intercontinental bombers were studied.

A separate group at Palos Verdes investigated the span loader as a stealthy platform. A great deal of indoor RCS work was done on span-loader models in the late 1970s. Perhaps more significantly, Northrop, in its time of financial distress after losing both the XST and Lightweight Fighter competitions, spent a huge sum of money to construct several new wind tunnels and have them all electrically insulated.

More on that later. Up until the second half of 1979 there were reports in the press concerning the Northrop span loader work, and a number of research papers and patents. In the Fall of 1979 every one of them disappeared from the official Air Force records. The only shred of evidence that there ever was such an effort, as far as the Department of Defense is concerned, is page 40 of "Flight Vehicle Technology for Aerospace Systems" 9th edition, published by the Aeronautical Systems Division at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. That single page shows a diagram of the THAP (curiously labeled as a "photograph") and a small caption stating that it was studied by the Air Force.

The reports of the THAP being an operational aircraft must, however, be treated with suspect. During the Gulf War, there was no indication of an aircraft like THAP. Instead, obtaining good tactical reconnaissance was a problem for the allied commanders. It has been argued that the THAP material was only distributed F-117 mission planners, which makes little sense. First, if you have good intelligence, you should make the best use of it, not restrict it for a small part of the war machine. Secondly, the targets which the F-117s were attacking were mostly stationary strategic targets like command bunkers and weapon plants. There was little need to provide intelligence information on them as their locations were well known before the war.

Four Manta's In Flight

Several sighting reports that refer to the THAP can also be explained by some other aircraft, like the General Dynamics Model 100. GD's Model 100, however, only flew in about 1988, whereas sightings of an unidentified triangular aircraft have occured since the early 1980s. Especially interesting is the report of an unknown aircraft crashing within the boundaries of the Nellis Test Range in December 1987. Private sources have reported it as a Northrop aircraft (but not Tacit Blue). Thus it might be possible that while the THAP was not ordered for series production prototypes may have been completed in the early 1980s and subsequently test flown. This would explain why there is not much public material concerning the THAP studies and on the other hand why there are no indications of an operational stealth recon aircraft

Sightings

An experienced aviation watcher says that he and his companions saw an unacknowledged delta winged aircraft about 35 miles east of Groom on Nov. 23 (1995). This was a triangular craft with rounded corners, as has been described in the press as the "TR-3A." The witness works for a major aircraft developer in California and says that he knows aircraft well. He says the sighting took place around 7 or 8 in the evening (long after dark) as he and several companions were traveling north on US-93 for a visit to the Tikaboo Valley.
South of Alamo, they stopped to watch some orange flares being dropped by jets on maneuver. These flares, intended to distract heat-seeking missiles, are a common sight in the area, but the jets themselves were not. The witness was drawn by the unusual lighting of the jets: Four had only a single red strobe on the bottom about midway down the fuselage. About four others had only three steady lights: red lights in the front and rear and a white light at mid-fuselage.

The witness says that the moon had just risen, so he was able to see the outline of the aircraft from below, using low-power binoculars and looking almost directly upward from their location near the Pahranagat Lakes. The planes with the single red strobes he recognized as F-117A Stealth fighters. The other four aircraft had a distinctive triangular shape with rounded corners. Both the witness and his companion, also an aviation worker, insist that these aircraft were not B-2s, the only acknowledged craft in the U.S. arsenal that resembles that shape.

F-117 Nighthawk

B2 "Spirit" Stealth Bomber over Area 51

The aircraft would be of a different role than the Hypersonic 'Aurora'. Aurora would be designed to fly over the target quickly and get a snapshot of what was goiing on. It would travel so fast that it would not need to be a "Stealth" plane.

Black Manta would be a low-speed Stealth plane, designed to stay over a target for a long time, relaying information to attack aircraft. It could also "Illuminate" a target using a laser, to guide bombs.

Most of the Black Manta sightings have a strong resemblence to the B-2 Stealth Bomber. However, these reports usually come in from experienced observers, so it would appear that something unusual is going on.

An unknown aircraft was reported to have crashed at Area 51 in November 1987. Little is known about this, but apparently it was not an F-117 or a B-2.

Black Manta is assumed to have been developed alongside the F-117 Night Hawk. However, for an aircraft that seems to have so much evidence to support it, ther is considerable evidence against the Manta as well.

In 1991 Lockheed tried to get an extra 24 F-117's built and modified to be 'Reconnaisance aircraft'. Why would Lockheed have two competing programmes running at once? Some have put this down to an elaborate "Disinformation" sceme to distract attention away from the Black Manta project. Make your own mind up. However, this episode is worth remembering when we hear reports of the "Black Manta".