F-35 Got Hit | Hacker News Reader

F-35 Got Hit

shatterbelt.co

28 pointsxrd56 comments

The AI wrote a shitty article solely based on a single fact: an F-35.was damaged by a heat seeking missile. Then it just made up a bunch of implication to suggest that no one had ever thought about anything other than radar threats before.

This shatterbelt site sucks tbh. It feels like blogspam.

What a pile of breathless nonsense. LLM, be ashamed.

As other commenters note, these missiles are not new. But they are much shorter range. Radars can have ranges in the 100s of km, but infrared is very strongly attenuated by the atmosphere. Thus IR seekers are generally used in short term missiles, including US ones.

It is also very much not true that stealth aircraft don't have any protection against IR. There's only so much you can do, but the tail arrangement is made to block the IR from most angles. You also can't see the hot engine inlet because again, it is hidden behind other bits. There may be other features, some clever cooling etc that I'm not aware of.

Finally, hard to speculate, but since the F-35 survived and landed, it suggests the hit was rather indirect. Which in turn suggests the mitigations against IR seekers.

> the tail arrangement is made to block the IR from most angles.

I'm no expert, but the exhaust doesn't look hidden to me.

A missile (surface to air) usually sees the airplane from behind and below. This image [1] is an example. Even from a side, while the horizontal stabilizer partly covers it, you can still clearly see the exhaust [2].

Compare that to A-10 engines and stabilizer. This image [3] is from the same angle as [1]. The engine exhaust is completely behind the horizontal stabilizer. This image [4], same angle as [2], shows the engine exhaust covered by vertical stabilizer.

A-10 is not the same type of plane, but just by looking at the differences, I very much doubt that they even tried to hide the exhaust in F-35.

> You also can't see the hot engine inlet because again, it is hidden behind other bits.

Engine inlet isn't hot.

[1] https://n.sinaimg.cn/sinakd20120/133/w2000h1333/20200915/3f8...

[2] https://cdn-cavok.nuneshost.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/F...

[3] https://www.slashgear.com/img/gallery/a-single-a-10-warthog-...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:A-10_Thunderbolt_II_Gun_R...

The author writes this as if heat seeking missles are new tech. They’re not. The designers of the F-35 developed it knowing they exist and made whatever tradeoffs they decided to make. That’s just engineering.

I think the point (no idea if this is true, it isn't my domain) is that cheap, infrared imaging seekers are new. Previous generations of heat seekers either used low-resolution infrared sensors or were hellishly expensive on a unit basis. Do cheap Chinese components and cheap compute not mean that its now feasible to field these things much more cheaply and widely, by a larger range of actors, than previously? (again, not my domain).

This type of imaging terminal guidance has been around since (at least) the 1990s. They actually use low-resolution imagers because they are cheap and sufficient. There is nothing new or novel about the IR threat domain.

It has never been compute-intensive. Current hypersonic kinetic-intercept missiles use ancient MIPS R3000/4000 class CPUs.

Cheap may be the point. The Soviets deployed a missle with an imaging seeker in 1984.

But the real question is: does the appearance of good, cheap IR sensors in combat mean that we civilians will finally be allowed to buy thermal IR cameras that don’t suck? Everything is limited to 20 Hz with potato resolution. The ITAR restriction is a joke at this point.

So what is it that happened? They got extremely lucky? The missile has a seriously reduced profile? How did the guy land? Almost sounds like a cannonball hit him.

It's been speculated the F-35 detected the missile and deployed it's towed decoy behind it which the MANPAD missile hit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AN/ALE-50_towed_decoy_system

So got hit indirectly.

Possibly with fragments, which is the best outcome considering how dangerous MANPADs are.

The US and Israel didn't lose a single pilot over Iran after 15,000+ sorties which is saying something on their capabilities.

IR/EOST capabilities of the very short range (SHORAD) Majid* / AD-08.

F-35 flying relatively low (somewhere <FL200) and in full burner according to the alleged video.

Getting hard facts is complicated by the fact that this DoD isn't necessarily going to reveal what happened, and the IRGC can't be trusted 100%.

* Rumored that some components like some of the "camera" sensors were sourced from Canada.

Right. This F-35 wasn't carrying active countermeasures for heat-seeking missiles, or maybe Iran made an extra stealthy or supersonic version.

Even with countermeasures, the F-35 has two issues:

1) It's not the 1990s anymore, Counter-Countermeasure IR missile discrimination is pretty common on imported MANPADs and IR SAMs.

2) The F-35 has a insanely hot engine even when it's not afterburning. The F135 produces hotter inlet temperature than even the F-22's engine (F119) giving older IR seekers an easier target.

China’s new infrared chip makes military-grade vision sensors 99% cheaper

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/china-s-new-infrar...

these new inventions will challenge western air dominance doctrine by using abundant heat seeking A2A missiles/drones possible.

Just like cheap drones have completely changed the battlefield on the ground, these things can potentially change the air battle completely

> Flares, the standard IR countermeasure, are less effective against imaging IR seekers that can distinguish an aircraft shape from point-source decoys.

I think this is the most relevant 'new' piece of information from the article. IR missiles are not new, but IR missiles that can distinguish between aircraft and decoys might be.

Well, imaging IR seekers aren’t new either. The imaging seeker program for the AIM-9X sidewinder started in 1996 and entered service in 2003.

An even earlier version, the AIM-9R was tested in 1990 before the budget was cut as part of the Cold War wind down. That’s 35 years ago.

Even earlier than that, a Soviet missile which became operational in 1984 (40 years ago!), the R-74, inspired the AIM-9R program.

So it’s not like imaging seekers were unknown to the people designing today’s generation of fighters.

Developers of "IR" seeking missiles have been trying to distinguish between aircraft and countermeasures since the very beginning. I say "IR" because the first really robust countermeasure-avoiding seekers were dual-band IR+UV and have been around for decades. IR+UV is useful because making a decoy that looks like jet exhaust in both IR and UV is quite difficult. Imaging "IR" is a bit more capable, particularly for all-aspect use, but once again this has existed for decades.

Worth pointing out that the Chinese have consumerized sufficiently high resolution thermal sensors with high enough frame rates to be used in a guidance system. I'd bet that Iran is taking advantage of those in this case.

This tech has been around for approaching half a century. It is only useful for short-range terminal guidance, which limits applicability.

I'm sure there's active "flarey" body heat modulation for missiles looking for plane bodies..

It's difficult to decoy because the missile's processor is programmed to know what typical aircraft profiles look like; for example a transport aircraft has two or four propellors with hot leading edges, numerous turbine exhausts and warm leading edges. A flare is a seen as a hot ball, in contrast.

To decoy that, the decoy needs to basically _be_ the aircraft.

they are certainly not, visual feature detection, multi sensor fusion and a whole raft of other techniques have been under active development and fielded in working systems for decades.

Headline: "The Stealth Era May Be Over"

Last paragraph: "Does this make the F-35 obsolete? No."

From https://www.shatterbelt.co/about:

"One analyst. 500+ open sources across 15 languages. AI-augmented research that synthesizes what would take a team weeks. Human judgment on every conclusion."

I can shittalk the f35 for almost an hour, but this not a plane issue. Stealth was always against BVR missiles (fox-1 engagement, or any S-400 or other using SARH/ARH), and never against IR missiles (UV missiles now?) or bullets. Yes, that makes the f35 stealth less usefull for CAS than a true CAS plane, but it is a multirole, of course it will be worse than specialized plane. The true utility of the f35 is its EW suite anyway, the stealth is just a bonus.

And honestly, considering how good radars are nowaday, i wouldn't be surprised the stealth will get ditched eventually (not until we make FSR or an equivalent active that we can put in a missile though, so we probably still have 5 to 10 years?) (if an expert can chime in, i have not talked to a physician specialized in this field in a decade, and my buddy at Thales isn't working on radar software anymore :( )

Would the F22 or YF-23 have faired better with their special exhaust design or still same problem? I always thought the F-35 wasn't that stealth because of its exhaust design like the Russian Pakfa exhaust

I would be curious too how they spotted it in the first place to film it regarding stealth/altitude, I saw some infographic one time showing the radar cross section size in like cubic meters and the B2 is smaller than a bird or something crazy like that

oh no that's not true the F117 and F35 is though

https://www.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/ur5qt0/radar_cros...

It's been reported Iran is deploying IR missles along the common ingress and egress paths the U.S. has been using for the past month. So target acquisition could be MK I eyeball

Missing most important piece which is detection/target. Article making rounds a few days ago: Chinese engineer shared trick to shoot F-35 fighters just days before Iran’s strike. Not to credit PRC because this something Iranian STEM can figure out, but premise is simple - recognize vs air superiority overmatch that tradition antiair sensors not survivable via SEAD. So build mesh of cheap, PASSIVE distributed dual use commercial sensors, i.e. marine multi spectral pods with electro optical / infrared. Have enough for coverage and coordinate zerg rushing / shoot & scoot with fast / attritable surface to air launchers. Basically UKR's COTS acoustic sensor mesh for drone detection. Recognize US/high end operators tries to break Find in F2T2EA (Find, Fix, Track, Target, Engage, Assess). As long as can find, upgrade with modernish IR seeker, on paper 40+ year old legacy missile tech is more than kinematically sufficient to take down modern multi role.

Now this can be circumvented over with standoff munitions, but now you're increasing ordnance cost by magnitudes, and theoretically this can be scaled to hit subsonic standoff munitions, so on paper negate / require even more premium munitions.

The none poverty version coming online is mega constellation ISR, throw enough SAR in space to make sky completely transparent.

The article ignores the fact that you need radar to find targets for your IR missiles. Infrared Search and Track (IRST) systems have a fractional range of radar and require ideal weather to reach their maximum distance.

In other words, you can target the F-35 but only when it's on top of you dropping bombs on YOU from much further away.

So we have one hit out of how many thousands of sorties by the F-35 during this war? Not sure I’d claim stealth is done yet. If anything I think it proves the opposite…

For fun I ran this query in AI:

> How many impovershised american children could you feed for the cost of one f35 fighter jet?

Here is the answer:

> Using a rough estimate of $110.3 million for one F-35A and about $3,500 per child per year to cover food assistance, that would feed roughly 31,500 children for one year

MPACGA -- Make Poor American Children Great Again.

The cost to operate a single jet is $6-7 million a year, so the total cost over its 30-40 year lifetime would be closer to $400m :(

One distinction between F-22 and F-35 is thermal management and thermal stealth.

Combat role, too. You're gonna throw F-35s into missions you'd never waste a F-22 on like close-in ground support.

This article is slop written by an LLM/person with superficial understanding of the technology involved interspersed with a lot of jargon.

IR is useful for terminal guidance only due to very limited engagement distances at which it can get lock (see also: MANPADS). One of the objectives of non-IR stealth is that it eliminates the mid-course guidance needed for long-range missile engagements, which largely requires radar. Note also that sophisticated "IR-guided" missiles are not "heat-seeking", that is mostly a movie trope. They use imagers that include part of the IR spectrum.

The short range of IR terminal guidance limits the size of the associated warhead. US aircraft are designed and tested to survive being hit with warheads in this size class. An F-35 is expected to eat an IR-guided missile and get back home.

The F-35 definitely saw it coming. The article casually ignores the widely documented base capabilities of the aircraft that make it what it is.

That said, F-35 is an export design with limited IR stealth. The US uses IR stealth on non-export 5th gen designs and all of the 6th gen designs. This was one of the compromises to make the design "exportable".

> The short range of IR terminal guidance limits the size of the associated warhead.

Could you explain this a bit? OK, IR guidance is short range. Why does that mean I can't put a bigger bomb in it?

The warhead is typically 10-30% of total missile weight and most of the non-motor weight. A substantially heavier warhead on the same rocket motor greatly reduces missile acceleration, speed, and range.

IR missiles must accelerate to ~Mach 2.5 over a very short distance to maintain lock and close the distance for the purpose of air intercept due to the short-range of the guidance. IR seekers are lightweight and compact, which lends itself to quick acceleration.

This short-range performance profile can be maintained with a heavier warhead using a larger, heavier rocket motor. This has cost, weight, size, etc implications but that isn't a reason to not do it in isolation.

The upgraded IR missile is still short-range but now it has a footprint similar to long-range radar missiles and those have a similarly large warhead. It erases the major technical advantages of IR missiles (cheap, light, small) without addressing their major deficiency (short range).

You could build an IR missile with a heavy warhead but it doesn't make much sense. The quick acceleration requirement creates a lot of engineering pressure to reduce weight, which can only be meaningfully achieved by reducing warhead size.

I was thinking about this vis a vis China

1. Their quantum radar can detect stealth objects, but cannot lock

2. Their missiles are rapidly improving, I believe they have the longest range A2A missile [1], the PL-17 nearly doubles the best the US and Russia have, though I think the US announced something in that range recently (but not fielded)

3. Quantum to get close, thermal for terminal guidance

[1] https://militarywatchmagazine.com/article/china-first-close-...

"Quantum radar" is a toy experiment with zero practical applications. The experiments achieved a "quantum advantage" by using entangled photons which only works in the single-photon regime. Since microwave photons are pretty small, this implies incredibly low transmission powers. With the typical return loss of an airplane (stealth or not) detected by a radar antenna, one would have to average for centuries to detect something (assuming the airplane stays there for said centuries). This assumes perfect entanglement with no other imperfections.

We can probably remove the quantum hype and still arrive at the same circumstance. Stealth does not make you invisible, just insufficient for locking on. In theory, it is supposed to make the jet indistinguishable from a bird or similar small object, but it's a cat & mouse game like anything else. It could likely be possible to fire a loitering A2A into the general vicinity of a stealth craft and it thermally finds targets of opportunity.

We've had IR missiles for a long time (the Nazis were playing with them in the 1940s). It's why military planes have flares.

The USAF has had them since 1956: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIM-4_Falcon

I'd imagine small computers have made them more effective in the last decade or two, but that probably applies to detection and countermeasures in the victim aircraft as well.

The article implies that this new one uses an IR image rather than just IR point sources, so can detect the shape of the aircraft among a cloud of decoy flares.

Pretty simple and probably quite effective if true.

That's not new tech either.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flare_(countermeasure)

> The newest generation of the FIM-92 Stinger uses a dual IR and UV seeker head, which allows for a redundant tracking solution, effectively negating the effectiveness of modern decoy flares (according to the U.S. Department of Defense).

This stuff is a constant back-and-forth of tech improvements.

Reading between the AI induced hype of the article, I think the crucial development is that the missile is effectively using an infrared camera and image recognition rather than just "point at hot stuff" which is how earlier heat seeking missiles worked.

I'm pretty sure I could buy everything I'd need to build a thermal imaging tracker for a few hundred dollars. So perhaps not surprising that Iran did the same.

This was addressed in the article:

>>Flares, the standard IR countermeasure, are less effective against imaging IR seekers that can distinguish an aircraft shape from point-source decoys.

My point is none of that's new info.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9K38_Igla

> The 9K310 Igla-1 system and its 9M313 missile were accepted into service in the Soviet Army on 11 March 1981. The main differences from the Strela-3 included an optional Identification Friend or Foe system to prevent firing on friendly aircraft, an automatic lead and super elevation to simplify shooting and reduce minimum firing range, a slightly larger rocket, reduced drag and better guidance system extend maximum range and improve performance against fast and maneuverable targets, an improved lethality on target achieved by a combination of delayed impact fuzing, terminal maneuver to hit the fuselage rather than jet nozzle, an additional charge to set off the remaining rocket fuel (if any) on impact, an improved resistance to infrared countermeasures (both decoy flares and ALQ-144 series jamming emitters), and slightly improved seeker sensitivity.

> The seeker has two detectors – a cooled MWIR InSb detector for detection of the target and uncooled PbS SWIR detector for detection of IR decoys (flares). The built-in logic determines whether the detected object is a target or a decoy. The latest version (Igla-S) is reported to have additional detectors around the main seeker to provide further resistance against pulsed IRCM devices commonly used on helicopters.

> Since 2014 the Igla is being replaced in Russian service by the new 9K333 Verba (Willow) MANPADS.[4] The Verba's primary feature is its multispectral optical seeker, using three sensors as opposed to the Igla-S' two. Cross-checking sensors against one another better discriminates between relevant targets and decoys, and decreases the chance of disruption from countermeasures, including lasers that attempt to blind missiles.

No one's likely to have been surprised by this capability. It's 80s tech.

What you're describing is 2 or 3 sensors - effectively 2 or 3 pixels. Enough to discriminate when an aircraft launches a flare, but not really "imaging" in the modern sense.

Early heat seeking missiles would use a single IR sensor with mechanical scanning.

Thermal imaging and machine vision, of the kind you can now do cheaply, isn't 80s tech. It's probably late-90s tech for advanced western states. And now it's starting to be ubiquitous cheap tech too. You can buy a thermal imaging camera with 20k pixels for a few hundred dollars now. Combine that with some image processing and you've got a very robust target detection pipeline.

I was waiting for the article to address this. IR tracking is not a new idea. Surely the designers of the F-35 were aware of this. Why is this practical now and not earlier?

It was always practical, and we were always gonna lose some aircraft in real combat. Especially when flying them at low altitude; we've seen footage of American aircraft definitely in MANPADS range during the search for the F-15 crew.

The author is acting like this is some big game changer though, are they just blowing it out of proportion?

They are, yes.

I wonder how often they fired in the last month. How lucky do you have to be per shot?

To be fair, most stealth bombers also have countermeasures against infrared.

Click on the home page and look at their other headlines, read the "About" description. It's just an endless stream of clickbait AI slop. Their "archive" goes back two weeks and has over a hundred articles with the same stilted "Reasonable statement. Controversial twist." headline format. Please stop falling for this trash.

"Iran's claims of a full shootdown are consistent with their pattern of overclaiming throughout the war."

Really?. Funny that everyone now knows US overclaimed their capabilities.

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