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Comment by acd | Hacker News Reader

The stealth the anti radar feature is visible on long wave radio. Something that was likely sold as a feature to the tax payer but does as far as I understand work that well in practise.

Pierre Sprey F16 and A10 co-designer speaks about F35 and specifically about dog fight 04:00 in the video. Stealth capabilities 06:00 in the video. http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x203cgj_pierre-sprey-co-des...

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I cringe when people say stealth doesn't work because [whatever]. The point of stealth isn't to make you invisible on enemy radar. It's to make the detection range smaller.

In air-to-air conflict that means getting the jump on the other guy and getting off a shot before he knows you're there.

In strike missions that means reducing the range at which you can be detected, making it easier to employ decoys effectively, and forcing your enemy to rely on the fanciest, most expensive, most powerful, and most up to date radars. When your enemy only has a handful of the types of radars he needs that's an extra point of vulnerability.

Stealth isn't the proverbial "I win" technology, but it's a huge advantage.

And that Sprey video comes up every single time the F-35 is mentioned. He's still living in a world that doesn't exist any more.

Isn't stealth pretty much defeated for the last 40 years? I recall reading that Soviet ground radars were perfectly capable of detecting US stealth planes, as well as there being a crash of a stealth plane which was then recovered by the enemies of US.

I think there's only been one stealth aircraft detected and shot down in history and that was because they got a fix on it when the bomb doors were open rendering it non stealthy. Stealth isn't perfect but it makes hitting the things pretty hard.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_F-117A_shootdown

And that stealth drone that was captured by the Iranians..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93U.S._RQ-170_incid...

Stealth is not a boolean property. What you can do on the ground with giant arrays of huge antennas and/or supercomputers is way ahead of what can be done in a fighter plane, and that is way ahead of what can be done in the seeker of a small-diameter missile.

True, although today all three often constantly talk to one another.

see replay to TeMPOraL below

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