I’d be interested in the Chinese angle, any cites for me?
When the missile into the Chinese ambassy thing happened, I told the Chinese graduate students that I work with, that shit happens. The US didn’t target the Chinese --it was a bad map and the pilots didn’t know who they lauched at.
Now I wonder if it wasn’t. The Chinese grad students insisted it was deliberate.
These Chinese students also insisted that the Chinese fighter pilot downed in the spy plane incident did nothing wrong to be brought down.
I asked: was it even possible that the Chinese pilot made a mistake?
I was told NO, by the chinese students. I thought that was BS, myself. The Chinese guarateed me that the mistake was 100% the fault of the american plane.
I asked again, was it even possible that the Chinese pilot made a mistake?
Again, I was told NO. IT’S Not Possible THat the CHINESE PILOT was at fault.
This is what the chinese grad students believed without question. (At least the one I knew)
My response was that I DON’T BELIEVE EVERYTHING my goverment tells me, why should you?
From about 4 Chinese grad students in the US, I was told that my [US] goverment tellls me lies, but theirs doesnt.
We need bigger sampling, but I feel that they [Chinese Grad Students] are clueless with what they can say…
Look at the bottom where they talk about “Passive Coherent Location” and the off the wall theory that the Chinese rushed the system to Yugoslavia to try it out.
Now, as to the believability of Chinese grad students, well, that’s something else entirely.
I remember reading about the F117 loss at the time. The F-117 is not a fighter - it is a bomber, the “F” designation was originally meant to hide the true purpose of the plane. The real advantage is that it can approach the target virtually undetected by (then current) radar. However, once it begins a bomb run, or deploys any kind of equipment (like a laser designator), it must open the bomb bay doors and the complciated interior is a wonderful radar target. They haven’t figured a way around that just yet, but being exposed for just a minute or two over the target is better than being exposed an hour or two on the way in.
It is not particularly manueverable, but it was not designed to be. Nor is it very fast - it wasn’t designed to be. It is perfectly visible to the naked eye. In fact, maybe too visible. One of the stories I read is that the manufacturer spend millions and millions or dollars to determine what color the paint should be to fool the human eye, especially at night. They painted the prototype this color - a grayish/mauve, not the flat black you see today. As soon as the macho air force generals saw it, they said they wanted nothing to do with a “pink” airplane and demanded it be painted black.
That’s sort of true, but definitely not the main issue.
Radar signals need to reflect back a certain amount of energy to be detected as a plane. Things with really small radar signatures are screened out by the radar firmware or software so that the screen isn’t filled up with signals reflected by birds, and such.
Stealth technology is designed to reduce the reflected radar signals (generally of a specific frequency range) that go back to the target.
That doesn’t mean that it’s invisible - but say, a B52, gives a signal off that can be detected from hundreds and hundreds of miles. The B2, at that range, wouldn’t even reflect back any readable energy. At 20 miles, it would reflect back a little, but may not be distinguishable as anything other than a bird or somesuch. But at, say, 2 miles, (these numbers are coming off the top of my head), enough signal is reflected to be recognized at least as a plane.
So while stealth doesn’t make a plane invisible, it greatly reduces the range at which radars can actively track targets. This means that we can’t just fly it anywhere want at any time - we still have to be smart about how we deploy it against enemy air defenses. The f117 incident, as far as I know, was stupid planning. We used the same attack route at the same time over several days.
The actual way they detected the plane is, to my knowledge, not officially clear. I talked to some people about it at the time that weren’t active military but definitely knew the subject, and they mentioned that some countries were working on a passive detection system that used reflect cell phone signals to track stealth aircraft. Sounds odd - but the geometric patterns on stealth aircraft are designed to reduce reflections of certain wavelengths - notably, weapons tracking radars. Since cell phones operate on different frequencies, the return signal isn’t subdued effectively.
This isn’t as effective as a military tracking radar by a long shot - you can’t guide a weapon by it. But such a method WOULD tell the Serbs that the the airplane crossed a general vicinity - and if they were out tracking it all over the country, and figured out one plane was traveling the same route, they could set up an ambush.
I was under the impression that they just covered the sky in AAA fire at the appropriate time - but the link above claims it was a missile. This strikes me as unlikely as mobile radars tend to be relatively unsophisticated and it seems unlikely that they could track even a close stealth plane - but I’d have to do some research to comment more on it.
It’s a light bomber. The “F” designation was an attempt to mask it with the rest of the F-110 series planes so it didn’t look like anyhting suspicious should a Soviet spy find it mentioned in any documents.
It’s role is precision strike against ground targets, and so it’s manueverability is pretty much irrelevant. Engines are optimized for range and the ability to diffuse heat, rather than speed.
moocher can you give us more on the Chinese angle. The two planes crashed and the smaller plane was totaled. Do they really think that our big, slow plane can out maneuver their fighter?
I’m not moocher but here is a BBC article with views from both sides. From what I heard elsewhere, the Chinese fighter flew up behind the wing of the US plane too quickly and had to raise it’s nose to avoid a big collision, this caused it to hit the US plane.
As for the stealth, I’ve heard in Desert Storm that the British Royal Navy could see them 150 miles (and scrambled planes after them, before the Americans admitted they had a stealth in that area)and the Iraqi forces could see them from 30 miles. I’ve heard tow reasons why the Serbs managed to shoot down the F117 - they used several radars all covering the same area, and the pilot left the bomb-bay doors open.
To a large degree. Remember, though, that “stealth” isn’t a yes/no characteristic, but a matter of degree. Radar cross-section is one of many parameters that go into the balance when designing a military aircraft. The F-117 sacrifices a large degree of many things to get the minimum radar cross-section consistent with still being able to fly. The JSF, and all the other systems mentioned here, have their own balances of characteristics.
Low observability (LO), the more general term, also includes thermal signature, visibility, and noise generation. All of these go into the mix too, along with speed and payload and so forth.
The Lockheed F-22, now renamed the F/A-22 Raptor, is in production and about to enter USAF service. Final production totals are in question, though. Perhaps you’re thinking of the Northrop F-23 that lost to it in the flyoff competition - it had a lower radar cross-section, and a more graceful appearance, but too many other limitations.
