Turns out that the scientific paper that set out the theory of stealth was written by a Russian scientist and published in a Moscow science journal. The paper was so dense and obtuse, though, that nobody recognized what he was saying except an engineer at the Skunk Works, who then convinced the management there to pursue it. The rest is history.
Later, when the Soviet Union collapsed, this same Russian scientist got himself a job at a university in California (he was clearly a smart guy), and when the Skunk Works people found out, they looked him up and told him what his research had meant to them. The guy responded that his paper and the ideas it put forward got exactly zero interest at the time from the Soviet authorities.
Amazing.
The Serbs, using off the shelf and largely obsolescent radars and SAM's, shot down one F-11A, and so badly damaged another it was scrapped.
ReplyDeleteThe Russians and Chinese have had 30 years to work on the problem, and have their own stealth. One has to wonder if stealth actually works today.
NATO flew 38,000 sorties and the serbs managed to shoot down a total of three jets and three helicopters, and a some drones. The F-117 lost went in without ECM support and flew a previously used route. NATO restricted the routes their aircraft could use to attack targets because the serbs would park their assets next to civilian areas hoping NATO would hit them as collateral damage and provide bad press about blowing up a hospital or similar, so attacks were made only in certain directions. The serbs were both clever and lucky with the F-117 hits…and the stealth tech has come a long way since then.
DeleteI may well make a few comments. From the remarks above it sounds very much like the idiots running the air campaign in Serbia learned exactly nothing from our B52 bombing campaigns in N. Vietnam. Ingress, Egress, same altitude, from same direction, again and again and again.
DeleteThe REAL story about stealth is that Lockheed engineers at the Rye Canyon facility were testing radars. They aimed them at the Magic Mountain theme park's golden golf ball tower which was large faceted gold ball with a restaurant inside. The radar returns were too small for the size of the target, which got the engineers thinking about faceted aircraft body's. The stealth fighter was the result. Now it can be told.
ReplyDeleteAlso (and probably before the Magic Mountain thing) radar operators had trouble detecting B-35 and B-49 bombers during development tests. They know they had a low-radar-return aircraft, but until Pyotr Ufimtsev developed Physical Theory of Diffraction (and Air Force intelligence translated to English), they didn't know how to pursue it.
Delete~ Doctor Weasel
I read where the use of ceramic composites have improved stealth technology whereby the F-22 appears as the size of a golf ball on a radar screen and the F-35
ReplyDeleteas that of a small bird. What I don't know for sure is can a missile hone in on a golf
ball or a small bird.
"The guy responded that his paper and the ideas it put forward got exactly zero interest at the time from the ....... authorities.".
ReplyDeleteLook up Frank Whittle.
I'm presently reading 'Skunk Works' too. A good read. Funny how a book written over 25 years ago has a resurgence......
ReplyDelete"so dense and obtuse ... that nobody recognized what he was saying"
ReplyDeleteSounds like some of my engineering professors at UCLA in the late '70's.
I'll bet the Russians didn't pursue it because it is an expensive dead end
ReplyDeleteThe computing technology of the time was not really able to fully support using the ideas in that paper, they had to be approximated, Which is why the F117 ended up looking so angular. Since then, computing, power and software has advanced greatly, which is why the B-2 Leader stuff aircraft have much smoother services.
ReplyDeleteRussian scientists seem to come up with some brilliant ideas they formed pretty much completelyin their heads, because their computing tecnology was so weak. Their technology infrastructure was never strong enough to let them fully implement their ideas, which is a problem they still have. in fact I’m sure it’s actually much worse now.
That should say “which is why the B2 and later stealth aircraft…”
Deletethey used to fly these hotrods around White Sands Missile Range at treetop levels. I was standing on the roof of a three story structure and looking down at the top of the plane. they flew standard jets in formation with the black plastic birds so the RADAR had something to follow.
ReplyDeleteSomeone please explain why a B2 looks like it ran off the runway . . .. . .
ReplyDeleteYep, and from the Shadows of the Wings, looks like one of the Gear has Collapsed. As a Jet Mechanic, not much is more Arduous and Hatefull than Recovery of a Big Plane that went 'Off-Roading', even that close to the Pavement. Best way is 2 Big Cranes, Set, Lift and Swing, Repeat until Pavement is reached. If it's still on the Wheels, Digging, Jacks and Timbers, and More Timbers and Steel Matting to roll it out.
DeleteBeyond a certain amount of Damage, it's an Insurance Write-Off, so pump out the Fuel, get the Chop-Saw and Drag the pieces out.
Sounds like my work right before I retired. Nothing evenly remotely on that scale, though.
ReplyDeleteRegarding the first pic, seems that a simple set of springs has cost a few million dollars in damage.
ReplyDeletehttps://theaviationist.com/2022/03/18/weak-landing-gear-springs-caused-the-b-2-spirit-to-skid-off-runway-at-whiteman-afb-in-september/
What really jumped out at me is this
“Over the history of the B-2A, there have been eight previous cases of a dual failure of the #1 and #4 hydraulic systems in flight,..."
Failure of one hydraulic system in a civilian aircraft is rare, and to have two systems fail simultaneously is unacceptable. In a military aircraft that might sustain damage from enemy fire and cost over $900M each this is beyond incompetence. Someone, or several someones, should be taken out and shot.
Al_in_Ottawa
I was at Cairo West when the USAF taxied a B1 into the armaments building and knocked off 4 feet of the wing. Ooops.
ReplyDeleteOne of the interesting things I learned near the end of the Cold War was that the Intel community gave a lot of unclas open source Russian and other Pact printed materials to reservists who could score some retirement points by translating it and sending it back to the IC they got it from. One of the ones I caught in the act was translating a technical Russian document. I asked if he spoke Russian and his reply was nope, he just used a Russian/English dictionary and winged it. I shudder to think what anything he translated looked like and can only imagine what it would look like if it was dense mathematics.
ReplyDeleteDense mathematics is its own language
ReplyDeleteDense is a different problem!
DeleteForeign Technology Division of the US Air Force (now known as National Air and Space Intelligence Center) invented machine translation of language in the 1960s (now available all over the internet) and used it to translate any Russian, Chinese, etc. texts they could get their hands on. Pyotr Ufimtsev wrote the book Physical Theory of Diffraction that explained how to compute a radar cross section of an object. He extended physical optics into a better theory, much as geometric optics had been developed into geometric theory of diffraction. Air Force passed Ufimtsev's book around to labs and defense contractors, then Lockheed and others ran with it. When Ufimtsev came to the US in the 1990s, he found out for the first time that there was a US translation of his book. I met the guy when he addressed our class at Air Force Institute of Technology.
ReplyDelete~ Doctor Weasel
Back when they started to publish info about the F-117 I read an article in Aviation Week & Space Technology, which revealed that they came up with a special coating for the cockpit "glass", which absorbed or diffused enemy radar. Without the coating, the radar return on the enemy's screen - reflecting off of the pilot's helmet, through the glass - would have been larger than the return for the whole remainder of the aircraft. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation-absorbent_material
ReplyDeletehow about the scientists that invented the paint coating. they painted one car and drove past police radar gun and....." they can't see us....we're in the Spirit World "
ReplyDelete