It means some of them were in fact detected but by then it was already too late to do anything about it. They aren't invisible, they just don't have a traditional aircraft signature on radar and instead looks like a small flock of birds going MACH 2. (Oversimplified, it doesn't actually look like a flock of birds either. It just looks like noise on an unfiltered radar coverage) EDIT: The closer the stealth aircraft is to the radar station, the more detectable it becomes. Until it buzzes a tower, at which point i would say it's definitely detected.
This is an interesting case. The only reason it was detected was because the bomb bay door was opened which greatly increased the Radio Cross Section (RCS) thus allowing them to detect the F117 on radar.
It was invisible. The problem is that the pilots got sloppy and began flying the exact same routes every day. They also stopped the practice of making radical course and altitude changes once their bomb bay doors were closed. Even something as brief as the bomb bay doors being opened is enough to give a radar the aircraft's course altitude and speed. What happened was that some smart Serbian air defense officer noticed the pattern and located a radar so that it would track the aircraft the moment the bomb bay doors opened. He then did some math and determine a time and location the plane would be at if it didn't change altitude, speed or course. He then salvoed a volley of missiles at that location. And since the pilot didn't change course after dropping the bombs he arrived at that location at the same time the missiles did.
1:10 for the last time, the Ho 229 was NOT designed to be a stealth aircraft. It was a flying wing because of their superior fligt characteristics such as less drag and therefore faster and more efficient than conventional planes. But NOT for stealth use.
You’re right it wasn’t purposely designed for stealth, but the design did end up being very stealthy for its time, even if that isn’t what they were going for. In 2008 Northrop Grumman estimated it’s RCS to be 60% less than that of the typical WWII aircraft like the Messerschmitt Bf 109 despite it’s overall surface area and wingspan being physically larger than the Bf 109’s.
@@xxyyzz8464it’s a fly being design compared to propeller craft, of course it’s going to have a lower RCS comparing it to even the gloster meteor that 60 percent advantage got reduced to near zero because you don’t have a giant propeller moving wind around 😂
@@h4per_txt565 No, even without propeller’s, those airframes have a higher RCS just due to their shaping which allows radar waves to he reflected back towards a radar, whereas this design reflected a lot of the radar energy away from the transmitting radar (even if that wasn’t their intention for shaping it this way). You should read a textbook on Radar Cross Section Design before you laugh, because I’m laughing at you and your ignorance of the field right now. 😂
Well the truth is is that the Ho 229 was *unintentionaly* Semi-Stealthy. Because of the Flying Wing design itself yes. That's the only mistake of the video. BUT, if it was given more time to expirment with.. The Germans could have discovered it's lower Radar Detection and realized what they just created. Ultimately developing the project into the First Stealthy Jet-Aircraft! The Horten Brothers of this aircraft said that they actually planned to add Radar absorbent skin coating using Charcoal.. But experts apparently say that they actually didn't plan that and only realized it after US development of Stealthy Jets in the 80s.. Not like they couldint have figured it out back then with more experimentation into the Ho 229 project..
If a radar signal bound off-planet Jupiter the signal would be absorbed due to plasma its atmosphere. This concept of technology can be used on aircraft in the future.
they have thought about it, but it has some big drawbacks. It's super hard to maintain a plasma layer around a jet without it just washing away . Second you would need an absurd amount of power to keep the plasma shield intact. And lastly it would make the pilot blind because it would also block his radar and other detection equipment, so now you're invisible but can't engage the enemy.
Further than that, it would create a huge electromagnetic signature that would be unlike anything that isn't a stealth plane covered in plasma. We already have missiles that can auto-target aircraft by the electronic signature their avionics suites use, sometimes to such a high degree that you can track supposedly-stealthy planes like the B-2 Spirit of F-22 across national borders.
The ho 229 was never built with stealth in mind as it’s low rcs can be attributed to it’s flying wing design as there was no model that could predict how radio waves would bounce of planes further adding to this there are plenty of other aircraft such as the f 104 or the valcurey bomber which both had lower then usual rcs but they were both never built with this in mind
They started lowering the pilot's seat so really only the pilot's eyes and the top of his head could barely be seen in the canopy. That changed everything. You can do this with earlier aircraft just by scrunching down in your seat real good, so the enemy can't see you.
The horten 223 was not intended to be low observable(stealth). It was a design intended to be a bid for the Amerika bomber program. The flying wing design was for efficiency not for stealth. Wooden part of the construction as well as the shape were unintentional but useful contributions to the stealth profile of the plane. It was only discovered after it was captured by the allies. It was never the end goal.
I know that a russian guy (Peter Ufimtsev) presented the stealth tech on a paper in russia and their airforce thought this is useless, then years later lockhead engineers started to create such aircraft with the same prescription from the russian inventor, but you don't even mention in this video..... It is a very well known story in the world of people who genuinly know about military history...
Peter Ufimtsev was a physicist, not an inventor. His paper wasn't on stealth tech but on electromagnetic diffraction. It was the Lockheed engineers who applied his work to then develop it into stealth technology. Undeniably his work in physics is the foundation stealth technology is built on though.
MrPhilsterable you do realize that innovators are physicists, and that people who apply something based on other science is not considered that they invented it..
@@glorious_help As a physicist I disagree. There is a big difference between being an inventor or engineer than being a physicist. All three are innovators in a sense, and there is a lot of overlap if you're an experimental physicist (which he wasn't) but they're not equivalent accomplishments.
Stealth technology isn't a magic bullet. The biggest problem is that involves a tradeoff: You can hide in some radar frequencies, but not in all, and that works mostly because long range radars (the kind stealth planes can detect) aren't precise; so now some countries are moving towards signal processing to improve their capabilities. Also more systems are trying to work as a network with different strategies: You have some long radars to figure out when the stealth plane is, you try to detect it though their radio emissions, you try to use sensitive equipment in other locations as passive system to radar or other kind of bands that are disrupted, heat detection, etc. Of course stealth can help you a lot with a good strategy, but it's also limited though physics.
@@reallifelore2174 Hi! 😅 While stealth has its limitations, it isn't also the worst surprise. The US probably knew about this and many of the airplanes and cruise missiles like the JASSM also relies in other techniques like electronic countermeasures, terrain following, emission control, etc; to be as near as possible of the target before getting caught. Also there's that irony of this being one of two own goals the USSR had in this area, by releasing the groundbreaking paper on reflection of electromagnetic waves without noticing its value, so the US could use it to develop the planes to strike them. The other being inadvertently selling the titanium for the SR-71.
@@EduardoEscarez The US still has the advantage in that we have been operating stealth aircraft for 40 years. Over that time period we have developed a lot of stealth technology and tested it. Not all of that technology was used. So we have a really good idea of how close a stealth aircraft can get to a radar before it can be detected. And this gives us a defensive advantage also. We have been testing stealth technologies for 50 years and as a result we know the strengths and weaknesses of each of the tech. This means that any stealth aircraft being developed by other countries are using tech that we know about and have tested. So we have an advantage in detecting stealth aircraft as well.
Germany never actively pursued stealth tech. The stealth features of the Ho-229 where an unintentional byproduct of the flying wing design. There are many conspiracies surrounding the Ho-229 and all of them have been debunked.
If I remember correctly the Ho 229 was not developed as a stealth aircraft the flying wing design was for efficiency and they tried to make a long range bomber on the same concept never worked out
That Plasma plane at the end already exists, the F-22 and F-35 use it on the front of their wings along with other small areas but those planes are late 90’s Tech, what they have today thats not perfected yet, 6th Gen will be fully Plasma coated and unmanned, the graphic of a plasma bubble is just a way to show it in their graphic choice, its really a very small molecular coating over the entire drone fighter/bomber, it looks like the B-2 Spirit but a bit more streamlined, much better engines, and the plasma will help it surpass speeds that humans cant take without blacking out, they already have perfected a torpedo that uses this tech to fly through the water at a crazy speed, the next 10 years tech is gonna be nuts...btw the new spy sats that the ULA just launched from Vandenberg are thought to be spy sats with a 2.5 meter reflector, but thats not what they are, they will help with the communication to these new planes globally, 2 more will be launched by next year and heres the best part, the real reason SpaceX just went and increased their new starlink sat #’s to over 4000 is to also use them to communicate with the new jets, what they say and what they do are always 2 very opposite things! Zuma made it, its up there just fine and was the first sat test bed for communicating with these unmanned plasma jets on a small scale to test out their systems! Funny how a Vulcan IV Heavy launch gets next to zero hype but a Falcon Heavy that is awesome was out dated before its first launch really! How many people even knew a ULA spy sat on a Heavy orange fireball throw away rocket launched just 24 hrs ago? Ima bet no one did but yet they did!
Still on the search for why modern stealth aircraft can have stealth with plenty of curvature, even though the video says that the b2 is as flat when it has plenty of curvature... not to mention fighters and the rah66
If an advance hostile civilization alien is capable of flying between stars in a short time frame to visit earth, humans would not stand a chance in a world war.
AFIAK "First combat use of stealth aircraft" wasn't in 1991 Pretty sure that's Operation Just Cause, Panama, December 1989. Maybe there's some technicality I'm not aware of?
So, if Radar is just radio signals bouncing off things in the sky, how do they go about preventing flying birds from making it seem like a shit ton of planes are in the sky? Wouldn't the radio signal bounce off flying birds too?
Flew the 380 to Munich from Miami and the 777 to Buenos Aires from Miami and I will let you know that the triple seven was more comfortable and a better ride all together no direct ventilation on the 380
RCS is different in different signal frequency. The current stealth tech development focus in x band signal which is used in smaller air based fire control radar and missile seeker. However, the stealth performance is worse against lower frequency signal like s band, L band and UHF band which are used in larger surface based fire control radars, Early warning radars and anti stealth searching radar.
I get that they're invisible to radar but... couldn't someone just looking up at the sky just see them? Those planes look like they would stand out quite a lot unless extremely high and above clouds.
I’m no expert at all, but I assume this is why: if you are scanning for a plane in the sky, then you can find it because radar signals return. But it doesn’t really work in reverse I’d assume unless the sky was like a radar returning blanket. If the sky isn’t returning radar, and the plane isn’t, you won’t be able to detect if a signal hasn’t returned because I’d assume it would just detect the entire sky.
Instead of trying to reflect electromagnetic radiation in any form. It's trying to cut down on sound resonating from the inside of the sub to the outside. Other than that they're pretty similar.
Stealth doesn't make an aircraft invisible to radar. Stealth is low observability, but the object can still be observed. It essentially reduces the time an adversary has to be able to detect and respond to a threat.
re: the first 30 seconds How do we know that they were "nearly undetected?" Do we have confirmed evidence that Iraqi radar was operating and that it didn't detect them? I mean, the Iraqis couldn't detect the F-15s, the F-16s or the F-18s any better, as I recall. Conversely, I also remember a large number of stories where a single Iraqi Mig 25s managed to evade between 5 to 8 F-15s, or where Iraqi jets were able to shoot down american fighter jets... And I'm pretty sure the Iraqis didn't have stealth tech on their old Mig 25s... I guess my point here is: The Gulf War showed that the super UN-stealthy Mig 25 was able to operate against allied forces in a "nearly undetectable" way. At least under optimal conditions. So why do we think that F-117 was any stealthier than the overtly un-stealthy Mig-25? The Serbians certainly didn't find the F-117 hard to detect. I think the largest confounding variable here is that under wartime conditions, radars aren't always on. For example, when the Iraqis (in their jets) heard the F-14s activate their (interceptor) radars, the Iraqis would immediately turn their radars off, to avoid being spotted by what they assumed was the more powerful radar of the F-14. It's not unreasonable to think that ground operators might shut off their own radar for similar reasons, or to avoid HARM munitions targeting them. So, the question is: "How do we know, under real, war-time conditions, how stealthy any jets are?" Particularly when they all seem to be stealthy and they all seem to be un-stealthy at different times and under different conditions...
