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It's come to my attention that in addition to the F-117 everyone acknowledges that they had shot down, Serbian military records list a shoot-down of a B-2 , which crashed in Croatia, using a similar method - booting up the radar extremely briefly during a NATO bombing mission. Saw loads of targets - one of them was ~ 15km away, looked very peculiar. Fired two S-125 missiles at it. The plane immediately started evading but was damaged by either or both 60 kg blasts, and then crashed just outside of Serbia, in Spačva basin.
Here's the fairly pretty interesting in-depth account on how it supposedly went down. It opens up with claiming that after may 20, 1999, all B-2 bombing missions of Serbia ceased, that the Spirit of Missouri was withdrawn from combat operations on May 20 and also presents a possibly verifiable claim that a section of near border woods in Croatia had an unusually heavy military presence.
At the end is they also present a Serbian hypothesis that the 2008 crash of B-2 in Guam was staged by crashing a remote-controlled B-2 test article that was secretly assembled at Guam, crashed via stall at takeoff and then passed off as the plane lost in '99.
Found this interesting bit of information on Quora, from a Serbian.
/images/1751914589569709.webp
EDIT: interesting info on in New York Times from 1991.. Full article.. I was previously unaware B-2 was ever found insufficiently stealthy in tests.
The obvious question to as is If the Serbians successfully shot down a B2 (r a second F117) why weren't they plastering pictures of the wreckage all over the media the way they did with the first F117? The simplest explanation would seem to be that they didn't actually down the aircraft in question.
The serbians probably fired a missile, saw an explosion, and assumed that meant a kill when in reality the aircraft in question made it safely back to base, with a few "sparrows" in the wing.
The claimed there was a hit but the plane was only damaged, lost power or control (e.g. hydraulics leaking after hits) and then fell into Croatia. You know, the country with which they've fought a brutal war 7 years earlier.
If you're young this may seem a little odd -why would a guided missile miss... but the missile was cutting edge 1960s technology, employing 60 kilograms of high explosive to offset accuracy issues inherent in high powered but still analog command guidance over distances of up to ~40 km. It doesn't have a computer or radar seeker or anything, it's guided by commands from the user, like a huge and particularly malevolent RC toy.
We know from the reports (e.g. the other F-117 damaged and limping back to base) that the 1960s missiles, which were designed to be used against high flying and large enemy bombers were obviously not hitting stealth planes dead on and the first missile that shot down the F-117 even failed to fuse. There'd have been nothing left from an F-117 or any other plane after a close hit,
If two stealth planes were hit in the war, with one destroyed, the odds of another, much larger stealth plane getting damaged by fragments seem fairly good. Stealth planes inherently have worse flight characteristics and B-2 is a much larger, long range plane which, especially if loaded, cannot evade as well as the other war planes used against Serbia at close range back then.
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