The War Thunder leaked documents list just got longer again

We’re not making this up, I swear

Would you look at the time, it’s once again leak o'clock over at the War Thunder forums. Yes, for real: Another user of the free-to-play war game leaked export-restricted military documents in a forum post on the game’s official community site, Niche Gamer has reported. This leak’s victim: The flight manual of the F-117 Nighthawk, a stealth aircraft manufactured by Lockheed.

The Nighthawk was the first stealth attack aircraft designed and operated by the United States and is now retired from active service, only being used for training purposes. One of the 64 F-117 that were built was shot down over Serbia during the Kosovo War. The US had already claimed back then that the technology used in the planes was outdated and didn’t even bother to destroy the wreckage to prevent its adversaries from studying the material.

The F-117 Nighthawk, a now retired stealth attack aircraft / Staff Sgt. Aaron Allmon II for defenselink

The flight manual contains technical data like the position of sensors on the plane, specifications of the engines, and firing angles – things the user in question, who has been banned from the forum for his post, thought might be useful for developer Gaijin Entertainment to make the game more realistic.

This comes not even one month after a War Thunder player leaked Eurofighter Typhoon flight manuals on the forum. On that occasion, forum moderators merely removed the post that had the PDF file with the flight manual attached, while this time they completely deleted the thread.

Just like the manual for Eurofighter, these documents about the Nighthawk are not classified in the usual sense, but export-restricted, which still makes them prohibited from being distributed outside of a specific area – and wouldn’t you know it, the internet is not one of the spaces you can simply post this stuff in without consequences.

You’ll be amused to know that War Thunder’s Wikipedia page actually has a complete list of these document leaks now, which should give you an indication of how often this has happened by now. The F-117 and the Eurofighter Typhoon joined an illustrious list of vehicles caught up in these past leaks, which includes main battle tanks such as the British Challenger 2 and the French Leclerc, the European Tiger attack helicopter, and the F-16 fighter jet.

After that latter leak one Reddit user made up a story about someone being rejected from a job at Raytheon on the grounds of playing War Thunder, but the company told GLHF that it doesn’t consider playing War Thunder a security risk.

War Thunder is available on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and mobile devices.