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ipnon

This is technically the first combat kill by the F-22.

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I wonder if the pilot gets to paint a balloon silhouette on his plane.

To say nothing of the nicknames and jokes they'll hear for the rest of their life....

"Balloon Boy No Hoax"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVbV_Sis99o&t=1s

Definitely had a different theme in mind for this event

https://youtu.be/qvfWRGzvP50

I don’t think F-22 pilots get to paint their aircraft. It would destroy the stealth coatings, which are so specialized they are measured to the milligram when removed (to ensure an adversary hasn’t taken some for analysis).

Where do stories like this come from? Simple logic would tell you there is no possible way to weigh an aircraft coating to a milligram and verify that it matches a somehow measured precise amount applied to the aircraft. The concept is ridiculous.

I’m embarrassed to say I got this “fact” from a HN comment.

Weighing the scrap (as one of many controls) to make sure it isn't tampered with during downstream disposal is pretty likely, even if comparing against the original coating weight isn't too practical.

it is in-fact common in the plating industry to predict/assess coating thickness via weight of product before & after the process; if you know the density/weight of the coating material then strong predictions can be made about the coating thickness given the known uniformity of the plating/anodize process.

Whether or not that's done as a forensic measure after the fact, I don't know. It doesn't seem all that out of the possibilities of reality; but I don't know how they would know whether or not the cause was espionage or a particularly hard-headed birdstrike.

I can definitely see how that could make sense as a QA measure in manufacturing, where you can really control the process and everything that happens to it.

But fly the plane once, and you're not going to be able to make any realistic predictions on what the weight of the coating might be after it's been at Mach 2.0 at 50k feet (or what ever the numbers are, I have no idea) for who knows how long. Simply too many variables.

Paint it on the inside

New KPI finally shows data in AF dashboard. Efficiency (cost per kill) = number of kills / cost of program.

I can imagine the pilot making “pew pew, ack ack ack!” Noises as he pretends to dog fight something in the world’s top dog fighter for the first time.

Wish it was a drone that shot it down. Then it would be the first unmanned aircraft dog fight.

It wouldn’t be the first. Drone on drone fights happened in Ukraine.

Here's one:

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/this-drone-versus-dron...

First one above 10.000 meters, then? Fight, with no fighting back, though? Also, as to no fighting back: destruction between different states, since blowing up your own balloon, rocket or satellites for testing purpose has (probably/surely) happened before.

Shooting at an unarmed, passively floating baloon can hardly be called a "combat" :)

four more kills and the pilot becomes an ace?

How can you know that?

You "can't" know, due to the nature of the secret warfare kill here or there, but generally:

Acknowledged and unacknowledged kills are counted separately, and it's OK to call it the first kill in the sense of acknowledged kills.

(That's my understanding anyway)

Barring some kind of secret engagement that never made the news (which is unlikely, given the F-22's role), it's true.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_shootdowns

I wonder if the pilot won a stuffed animal?

Edit: ceejayoz: JINX!

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