The F-117 is a joke. Can’t be flown without an escort. A truly worthless plane. It is subsonic. 
If the opposition has a jet in its air force, it is toast.
Didn’t F-117s make the first attacks on Baghdad?
I think the first hits were from cruise missiles.
If F-117s were flown it was a publicity stunt. Think about it, a subsonic ‘bomber’ with no weapons.
It was orginally adverised as the ‘stealth fighter’ till someone noticed it had no air-to-air weapons, so then they had to start thinking about putting bombs inside it, where there was no room.
You mean like the B-25s in the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo?
[QUOTE=Gack]
he F-117 is a joke. Can’t be flown without an escort.
[/QUOTE]
It can’t be flown at all since it was retired in (IIRC) 2008. 
You really don’t know much about this stuff, do you?
It was a ground attack aircraft and never a fighter. from Wiki: During the Persian Gulf War in 1991, the F-117A flew approximately 1,300 sorties and scored direct hits on 1,600 high-value targets in Iraq[1]
This plane was designed around laser guided missiles.
Gack - please cite that the F-117 has no weapons and must be escorted by other aircraft.
Good grief ! It has no weapons, look at it. Why not? Because pods hanging beneath the wing screw up stealth. It didn’t have guns (I don’t think). What’s left?
It’s subsonic.
It was designed, or at least sold, as a ‘fighter’.
At some point, you have to use your noggin, what can you do with a subsonic plane designed sold as a ‘fighter’ and converted to a bomber? Ans: nothing. Fly it for publicity. If you need a link, I can’t help you.
But, to heck with that, let’s get back to my original question - is there any public info on the ‘stealthiness’ of the F-35? My guess, not a bit. The reason - it’s a gigantic scam.
That’s just the ‘micro’ scam if you will. The macro scam is spending x zillion dollars designing another plane to fight ‘dogfights’ and win WW II all over again. We don’t need fancy planes to bomb Vietnam, Iraq, Iran, etc., we can just send in cruise missiles until the defenses are wiped out and then fly at will. If we get into a ‘war’ that is something other than a mechanized slaughter, i.e. there is an opposition, it will be fought with ICBMS, not ‘dogfights’.
But still - the main question - is there any data on the ‘stealthiness’ of the F-35?
It was not converted into a fighter, it was always a ground attack aircraft.
I have no idea why it was called a “stealth fighter”, perhaps because fighters are used for ground attack.
It was always an attack aircraft, not an air superiority fighter. It didn’t need a gun because that wasn’t it’s mission. Saying it was a ‘publicity stunt’ shows profound ignorance of what it’s role was, and what it actually accomplished. It was meant to be a test bed but was actually usable, in the small numbers it was produced in, in the role it was intended to fill. And it’s a freaking moot point now, since the things haven’t been in service for years now and it was several generations of stealth back.
[QUOTE=Gack]
But, to heck with that, let’s get back to my original question - is there any public info on the ‘stealthiness’ of the F-35? My guess, not a bit. The reason - it’s a gigantic scam.
[/QUOTE]
But the guess of someone who knows nothing is worth, well, nothing.
Laser guided bombs from an internal bomb bay.
You’ve been around a while, and still you resort to posts that are nothing but personal attacks. My my.
If you have any info, why not give it, otherwise …
That’s it. That was all that was left, so they went with it.
Now suppose you’re flying a mission in a F-117, I’ll guess that you have to fly reasonably low to aim a laser guided bomb, and someone on the ground sees you and alerts the country X air force. What then?
Well supposedly the stealth works and the enemy aircraft can’t get a missile lock on you, and since you’re attacking at night they can’t see you visually either. So you drop your bombs and then head back to base. The figures posted above for plane losses over Iraq seem to confirm that the stealth did work.
If country X can get one plane into the air you will be a sitting duck for an infrared missile, like the Sidewinder.
A defenseless non-maneuverable ‘ground-attack’ aircraft is a non-starter. It couldn’t be a fighter, it couldn’t be a bomber, they tried that too, so they ended up with a ‘ground-attack’ aircraft. Then they wisely retired it.
Except that never happened, a) because the f117 also has tech that lowers its infrared signature b) you have to know approximately where the f117 is in the first place to target it with infrared and because its night and has no radar signature you can’t get close enough in the first place.
Its quite possible that future advances in radar will make stealth less and less of an advantage, but all the research into this is classified. For now all the evidence we have is that against countries like Iraq / Iran / Syria etc stealth tech does work.
If Russia and China has new types of radar that can detect Stealth planes, they aren’t telling us and they aren’t selling the tech.
Do you need an explanation of what a “cite” is? Because none of those words qualify as a citation.
Nope.
Even if you only fly the plane at night, which is absurd to start with, you can still see a ‘ground attack’ aircraft with your eyes. Then, it is toast.
It has been classified for 20 years. Why? I claim it is classified because the whole thing is a scam. A ‘micro’ scram as described. Within a ‘macro’ scam as described. Of course they have data, but translating it into an operational advantage, even if you give them a WW II scenario, is a no go. In a WW III scenario fighters don’t figure. The only scenario we can consider is flying against 3rd world countries, which is what we are doing, and we don’t need stealth for that.
Well, thanks for pointing it out!
I think you ought to tell the folks at the New York Times, or at least the National Enquirer.
I have no idea what you’re trying to argue here. No F117A’s were ever downed by infrared missiles and as they are now retired we will never know if they were vulnerable or not. Regardless the f177A did have some measures to reduce IR signature as does the F22 and the F35.
Here’s an article talking about the limitations of the stealth in the F35 and it also talks about the infrared reduction measures.
http://manglermuldoon.blogspot.jp/2013/01/canada-and-f-35.html