The roller coaster opened on April 1, 2000 at California's Great America in Santa Clara, California - the first Vekoma Flying Dutchman coaster built in the United States. The ride mechanism was a strange one. Riders boarded sitting upright. The seats reclined back, and the cars rotated until passengers hung face-down beneath the track, flying. Two thousand seven hundred sixty-six feet of steel rolled through five inversions including a vertical loop and double corkscrew. The lift hill stood 115 feet tall. The trains topped 51 miles per hour. But the ride suffered. Its electrical box, which monitored the seat-rotation restraints, was mounted on each train rather than in the electrical room. The result was constant stress on components and constant downtime. By August 2003, the park announced Stealth would close to make room for a water park.

Paramount Parks decided to relocate the ride rather than scrap it. Carowinds needed a flying coaster. Smurf Island - a 1.3-acre children's area that had been built in 1984 and closed in the 1990s - sat empty next to the Carolina Sternwheeler riverboat. The location worked. The trains and track were trucked across the country to North Carolina. Engineers redesigned the electrical box and worked through the prototype bugs that had plagued the California operation. The original plan included keeping the Carolina Sternwheeler as themed scenery, but the boat was damaged during the relocation and scrapped. On January 15, 2004, Paramount announced the ride's new name: Borg Assimilator, the first Star Trek themed roller coaster in the world.

The Borg theming was committed. A giant gray-and-black sphere - the Borg cube redesigned, presumably for safety - sat near the coaster's entrance, themed as a crashed Borg ship that had landed at Carowinds. Audio queues piped the Borg Collective's signature lines through the queue. The ride mechanism itself fit the theme uncomfortably well: passengers were strapped down, restrained, locked into position, and assimilated into the flying configuration before the train left the station. The coaster opened March 20, 2004. Then Cedar Fair bought Paramount Parks in 2006, lost the Paramount licensing in the deal, and had to strip every movie and television reference from the park. Star Trek went first. For the 2008 season, the ride was renamed Nighthawk - a placeholder name with no theme at all - and repainted yellow and blue.

The ride layout was unusual even by flying-coaster standards. Once restrained, the train tilted backwards into the lay-down position and was dispatched. It rolled backwards out of the station, turned left, and climbed the 115-foot lift hill. At the crest, it dipped into a Lie-to-Fly twist - the train rotating so riders flipped from facing the sky to facing the ground - then dropped into the first descent at 51 miles per hour. An overbanked Horseshoe Curve led into a Fly-to-Lie element, then into a 66-foot vertical loop pulling 4.3 G's. Another Lie-to-Fly, another Fly-to-Lie, two consecutive corkscrews, and a right turn onto the brake run. Five full inversions plus four half-inversions in the transitions. The trains were small, the capacity low, and the lines long.

On December 18, 2024, Carowinds announced the permanent closure of Nighthawk along with the Drop Tower and the Scream Weaver flat ride. By the end of March 2025, demolition crews had removed the track and structure, leaving only the station building behind. In May 2025, the National Roller Coaster Museum announced it had received one of the Nighthawk trains for preservation - the first piece of the Vekoma flying coaster experiment that began at Great America in 2000 to enter a museum collection. The coaster outlived two corporate parents, three names, two parks, and one entire television-park-tie-in era. Its retirement marked the end of the first generation of flying coasters in North America.