Description

Oklahoma has been quietly shaping American air power since before "stealth" was a word anyone was allowed to say. ODIA welcomes Craig Baucke, author of The HIDE Project, to Tulsa — where a secret 1960s program shaped stealth drones, cruise missiles, and the B-1B — to connect that hidden history to the state's very public defense future. 

Long before the F-117A made stealth famous, a small and little-known team in Tulsa, Oklahoma was already solving the problem. In the early 1960s, North American Aviation quietly assembled a group of engineers — internally known as HIDE — to make the Hound Dog cruise missile harder to detect. What started as one program grew into a decades-long, largely classified body of work touching stealth drones flown in Vietnam, stealth-related submarine technology, and contributions to the B-1B bomber.