On March 27, 1999, Lieutenant Colonel Dale Zelko of the US Air Force became the first pilot of a stealth fighter or bomber ever shot down, in fact, the only time a warplane with stealth capabilities has been shot down.
Digging Deeper
While flying a Lockheed F-117A Nighthawk on a bombing mission over Yugolslavia, Zelko had the misfortune of having his supposedly undetectable light bomber detected by supposedly obsolete radar systems and shot down when the Yugoslav air defense crews fired a battery of anti-aircraft missiles (probably about 5) at his plane, one of which exploded near enough to disable the airplane and force Zelko to eject.
