Quiet Bird: Boeing’s secret 1960s stealth plane concept

Boeing has decided to reveal a little secret from the past. The aircraft manufacturer has recently revealed their super-secret 1960s stealth plane experiment: the Model 853 ‘Quiet Bird’, a US Army observation airplane study.

What is sometimes called “invisible” aircraft is actually visible to the naked eye but can’t be caught on radar. This means that the aircraft can enter the airspace of a country without being traced, allowing for “stealth” attacks. Boeing’s ‘Quiet Bird’ was one of the first test studies of this kind of aircraft, which in later years would be intensely explored to create a number of aircraft such as the F-22 Raptor fighter and the B-2 Spirit bomber.

As explained by Boeing, which released the photos to the website Foxtrot Alpha, the ‘Quiet Bird’ was at first proposed to be an observation airplane study. As it could not be detected by radar and other sensors, the manufacturer didn’t expect a great performance. The main goal was to learn how to make an ‘invisible’ plane.

Patents on equipment and techniques that were created for the Quiet Bird and later applied in other projects were kept secret until the 90’s. The model built by Boeing is reduced scale prototype, with about half the size needed to make a loaded and manned flight. After a series of wind tunnel and detection sensors tests, the project gave way to more advanced studies and the model was destroyed in the 70’s. The lessons learned from this prototype were extremely valuable for the development of some of the biggest advanced aircraft we have nowadays.