Aggressor“Ghost” camouflage F-16C Block 30 Fighting Falcon 64th Nellis
Hill Air Force Base painters completed an elaborate transformation on an F-16 Fighting Falcon, giving it the now-popular “ghost” paint scheme.
The 576th Aircraft Maintenance Squadron painted the jet at the request of the 64th Attack Squadron at Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada, which is participating in training with the Air Force and other branches of the air force during Red Flag exercises.
The paint scheme is intended to replicate an adversary’s fighter jet. Sukhoi Su-57
Aircrews from the United States, allies, and partner nations regularly train against accurate and realistic threats, including aircraft painted to replicate what pilots might see in air combat.
This was the first time the 576th AMXS paint shop painted a jet with the design, which was created through a crowdsourcing contest held on social media in 2019.
“The paint shop at Nellis made one of these planes last year and asked us to paint it,” said Jim Gill, 576th AMXS flight production manager. “They sent us pictures and gave us the pattern, but there were no instructions. We had to make it ourselves.”
Gill said the digital pattern came on a roll of stencil stickers that were three feet wide and six feet long. It’s a six-foot piece of tape that had to be overlapped and placed exactly in place to line everything up.
Paint supervisor Dallas Porter said they laid the stencils out on tables and the shop floor trying to figure out where everything went, and sometimes they didn’t line up the way they thought they would.
“Laying it out on flat ground was great, but once you get there with those angles, things start to twist and move,” Porter said. “It’s harder to have the 90-degree angles and turns, but it gets everyone involved, working as a team.”
. The Ghost scheme is the first to replicate the digital camouflage seen on the fifth-generation Su-57. Note how the topside digital pattern is mirrored on the underside.
F-16C Block 30 Fighting Falcon 64th Nellis “Aggressor Ghost”
| Ghost scheme | |||||
| FS 35450 | FS 35109 | FS 36628 | FS 35109 |
Color camo
| FS 35109 | Aggressor Blue | Camo (Aggressor) | – | – |
| FS 35450 | Air Superiority Blue | Camo (F-15A, Aggressor) | – | – |
| FS 36628 | Light Arctic Gray | Camo (Aggressor) | – | – |
| FS 36375 | Light Ghost Gray | Camo (Compass Tanks F-16) | – | – |
SUKHOI SU-17 M
