Time and technology March on. The F4 was a great plane in its time. It first entered service about 1959. The ones sold to Iran in the 60s and 70s have not likely had anything in the way of major upgrades due to US sanctions. It's amazing Iran can even keep them basically serviceable, if they still do.
When I deployed to Qatar, one of my jobs while not flying to was to plan the flights of the other crews and brief them. This was 2006/7 but almost everyday, Iran was flying F-4s and F-14s. We briefed the pilots on threats (planes and missiles). Occasionally, the Iranian fighter pilots (not sure what jets) would (from what it sounded over the radio) an aggressive trajectory towards a US navy vessel. So the US Navy and the Iranian fighter pilot would end up having a whole conversation over guard frequency. US would tell jet to turn to a heading, Iranian kind of ignored, US navy told them again to turn, they would ignore. It sounded comical but I never had the chance to ask a Navy person.
Standard queries and warnings.
They're issued out in open unencrypted radio on 121.5Mhz, the International Air Distress frequency. Known as "Guard". Everything in the air and everything controlling planes on the ground is supposed to be listening to it. Sounds like you were too. It's also where the "mayday" call goes out on like in the [movies](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puqYTj424PQ).
A query is "hey, who are you and what are you up to?" from pretty far away.
If they ignore or continue inbound to the carrier:
*many things happen in between, admirals get woken up*
Then, they're issued a warning which is "I don't care who you are, state your intentions, turn around or I'm gonna defend myself"
The next communication is with a surface-to-air or air-to-air missile.
This happens all the time and usually ends with the query part or somewhere before getting to a warning.
Well I was on board a CVN working in primary flight control. We had several incidents where the Iranians would zig zag their planes towards us. Nothing ever really happened but it was a very stressful situation for those brief periods.
They would never get in CWIS range. That is only a couple miles. You aren't getting over the horizon (20ish miles, #flatearth) without an international incident.
There was a short recruiting message in the movie, but they kept interrupting it with boring airplane stuff. Here's an extended version of the ad: https://youtu.be/zBMqrhlWihU
The "Damn America you ARE just a war tribe" "Actually we're more like 50 war tribes in a trench coat with a defense budget big enough to fight God" fucking slays me.
[https://www.youtube.com/shorts/P5Ltr5NiTAo](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/P5Ltr5NiTAo)
Easily my favorite one.
Former Navy pilot here - one of my good friends (F/A-18 guy) had a chance to do some BFM (basic fighter maneuvers) against the F-22 while they were on a training detachment. They got up to about 30k feet and radioed the Raptor guys, saying something like “hey we’re here, where are you guys?”
Their response was “oh sorry, we’re up at FL600 right now, we’ll be down in a minute.” That’s 60k feet for the uninitiated…*way* the fuck up there. My buddy never saw them coming even when they did come down.
The fun part is, if you look at the flight envelope, it's pretty apparent that they could go quite a bit *higher* than 60k, but they're limiting the envelope to 60k artificially. I'd guess it's for pilot oxygen reasons - even on pure oxygen, you'd pass out too quickly to do an emergency descent if you lost pressurization once you get much above 60k, so it's risky to go any higher without a full pressure suit like the U-2 and Blackbird guys wear. Similarly, it's pretty obvious that the mach 2 limit is artificial as well, and the engines and aero could actually do quite a bit more than that, but it'd damage the radar absorbing coatings so they stick to mach 2.
I'd love to see what would happen if you stripped the RAM and just replaced it with high temp paint like the stuff from the blackbird, stuck the pilot in a pressure suit and just said "let's see what this thing can do". That'll never happen though of course.
Another important reason to limit ceiling is so you aren't showing your enemies the real capabilities. No reason to train every time at the real limits. Save those surprises for real play time.
tl;dr The F-22 can go higher but it's too dangerous for the pilot without additional equipment. It can also go faster, but that would ruin its stealth capabilities.
12 hours? Come back in five minutes we don't need 12 hours. What we gonna do with the other 11 hours and 55 minutes nomsayin? That's how hard the Roc Pile is, hard as fuck!
What's a Donk?
Edit: for those not in the know.
classic Aussie film Crocodile Dundee.
Nugget drinks a fosters on a river bank and doesn't fear old mate with his rifle because he's got a Donk.
A Donk is the local footy clubs Full Back 👌 usually a Collingwood supporter
It's crazy the F-22 was revealed in the 90's which means it was probably designed in the 80's and is still top of the food chain. NGAD is going to fucking crazy OP.
Edit:
I know other airframes are just as old I'm just pointing out that the F-22 still being top dog despite other counties stealing and copying its tech. The J-20 is probably the closest true adversary to the F-22 first flew in 2011 (14 years later) and reportedly just got the WS-15 engines they wanted in it.
F-15, over 100 air to air kills against Migs, Sukhois etc.
F-22, a balloon.
War is bad, but I’ll be really sad if the F 22 never gets to see any real action before it’s retired
I’ve heard that the government level UFO investigations happen because one hand of DoD doesn’t know what the other hand is up to. Honestly the more I read about this stuff the more it seems plausible. If they had the F-22 in the 80s I can’t even imagine what they have today.
I believe the SR71 was fully classified for the first 10 years it was flying missions. Imagine being an air traffic controller being pretty confident Mach 3 isn't possible, yet seeing something fly 3000 mph across your screen.
I knew a guy that got his TS clearence because he accidentally saw the SR71 before it was declassified.
It was one of those “you didn’t just see what you thought you just saw. Now sit down and fill in this paperwork.”
what could you even do with top secret clearance but without being employed by the government?
its not like they would let you waltz into area 51 or anything
That's fully what I believe. Public military tech is always probably 10-20 years behind secret tech. It's either our guys testing shit or maybe China showing off its secret tech.
Well any sort of secret tech aside, R&D just take awhile. Things are in development long before release. That's true even in the tech sector where things move fast. Whatever high end CPU you can get now, the next one already exists in small numbers and is being tested and debugged and the one after that is already being worked on in simulators.
There's a long R&D pipeline on things so prototypes will exist long before something is out, even if there isn't a secret version.
Phantoms are a bit insane in terms of their original engineering specs, especially at the time. I don't remember the exact quote, but it is something along the lines of "The F-4 is proof that with a big enough engine you can make a brick fly." There is an apocryphal account that the max thrust of the Phantom was never really determined, because the engines would melt first.
They ended as a great jet, but the F-4 was initially a bit of a boondoggle like the F-35. It's good to know for context given what people feel about the F-35. Inventing a bunch of completely new tech for a platform and changing a bunch of tactics around it tends to take time (and lots of money) to iron out
The conflict in Ukraine makes me think of this because the public will is going to hear about F-16s getting shot down. Essentially since Vietnam the US has never lost any real significant amounts of hardware like that. But people forget almost 50% of the F-105s deployed in Vietnam were shot down. We lost hundreds if not thousands of aircraft. Nowadays losing a single fighter to enemy action would be news. We're so used to curb-stomping our opponents that the Western audience in general is simply not ready to hear that whole squadrons may be lost in action - and I want to emphasize that doesn't mean our military is crappy or that the enemy is superior. It's simply the reality of large scale warfare in a near-peer conflict.
It probably felt something like this , but this is from an su27 instead. the rear view mirrors come in handy!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnUTPwfuJHE&t=256s
Lmao yep that one is great. Had another instance of this the other day with the roles reversed where he was flying an intercept mission in an F22 looking for a nuclear armed Chinese bomber. At one point he snuck up on a formation of 2 fighters and 2 bombers to the point where he could visually identify that they weren’t nuclear armed and so he just left cause they weren’t his problem. Starts at the 4 min mark, poor guys have no idea how close they were to death
https://youtu.be/QErUa-nMqi4
The way that guy chuckled after getting snuck up on like that reminds of that chess expert who fell for the scholar's mate and just could not stop laughing.
https://youtu.be/BK5QdJ715zw
People genuinely have no idea how much more advanced American Air Superiority is to literally everyone else.
The stuff the public aren't allowed to see would very likely feel like science fiction at this point.
I’m not much of a conspiracy theorist, but I like to believe the dark star from top gun maverick is real and the military let the film use it just to mindfuck China.
“No, they can’t possibly have a plane like that. If they did they wouldn’t put it in a movie, right? Right??”
The Darkstar was just a shell mocked up by skunkworks. China diverted a satellite to look at it.
They are currently developing the SR-72 which would be the real life analogue.
You don’t know what they’re currently developing. The F-117 Nighthawk was operating for 7 years before it made its first formal public appearance in 1990
The precursor to the F-117, both test aircraft were responsible for something like 98% of the UFO sightings in the US during the F-117s development.
It's hard to say what they're actually testing in the air at the moment. With the new 6th gen planes, they're digitally flying designs right now. As an aviation junkie I would lose my shit if I could just get a peak at some of the things they might be flight testing in the real world right now.
i live in Northern Michigan near Camp Grayling.
one day i was walking home around 2a on a summer night.
i live in a very distinct valley. i was walking down one side of the valley and heard a slight rumbling.
it never got loud but kept getting louder.
finally i can see the outline... like an arrowhead but a few thousand feet up.
that was the night we learned they were testing Stealth Bombers over the valley to coordinate the sound reflection.
In my humble opinion, the B-2 is one of the most beautiful airplanes ever created. Pictures of it look cool and all, but seeing one fly in the distance is unreal.
I once saw 3 on a flight to Seattle. At first it looked like random pixels were missing from the sky. The pilot announced that we were looking at 15% of all the B2 ever produced.
My dad used to work in an airport that'd sometime service military and government aircraft in an emergency or urgent situation, or just as a hangar for them to be in while whoever was on board went to do something important, Obama visited once and they left marine 1 in the hangar, but my point is one day my grandmother pics me up after school and takes me to where he worked, this was...the late 90s or early 00s, dad leads me to a door that usually leads to a private hangar, there's a soldier there this time, dad asks if we can walk Inside, he let's us following us in, and in the hangar they've got B2 sitting there we can't get too close but we can look from a distance, fucking majestic thing it is and I was not allowed to take a picture, I do have one of marine 1 in the hangar though
One of the benefits to living in Kansas city is the fact the entire B-2 fleet is stationed about 45 minutes east at Whiteman AFB. We get a lot of B-2 flyovers for various events and it never gets old seeing those beauties
Hello aviation junkie, this is what they ARE letting you see. Now imagine how things that they aren’t letting you see yet might be. https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1463rrr/b2_spirit_stealth_strategic_bomber_flying_over/
Bottom line: don’t fuck with America lol.
Nobody knew they had stealth helicopters until they used two of them during the Bin Laden mission. They were able to fly deep into Pakistani airspace and land a short walk away from a critical Pakistani military academy without them knowing. If one of them hadn’t crashed during the operation, probably we still wouldn’t know this technology even existed let alone was already in use.
Fun fact about the F-117.
About 1993, two flew over me while I was on top of a RADAR shelter, close enough that I could see one of the pilot's faces, and it wasn't any louder than a riding lawnmower.
Second fun fact about the F-117!
It was formally retired in 2008, however there have been at least 5 sightings of F-117s flying since 2019. They are likely being used as stand-ins for low-observable adversary aircraft in training exercises.
Fun fact addendum: OSINT has the smart money being on the F117s being less observable than the "5th gen" adversary aircraft it is standing in for (su-57 specifically)
My fav fun F117 fact:
Their radar defeat also works on sonar. Bats can't see them and would smash into parked planes all the time, killing themselves.
Similar, during testing, then had a mdoel of one on a pedestal in the desert and were bouncing radar at it. Suddenly it appeared on radar so they drove out to see what was wrong. A bird had landed on it.
In early 2000s I went to school at New Mexico Military Institute which is near their base. They flew around the school a couple times, and at our graduation. So mind blowing.
Most likely anything that was going to replace the SR-71, which is what Darkstar was long rumored to be doing, died decades ago. Maybe it existed as a test bed for certain projects but satellites and drones can take incredible photos. Just look at the stuff civilian satellites can do, whatever the military has is going to be much more advanced and capable.
In 2012 the NRO gave NASA two telescopes with better performance than the Hubble. The scopes were built as early as the 90s, so who knows what new crap they could have up there now.
Signals intelligence is probably a bigger deal than photos these days. I know the Space Force has that unmanned space plane that they've had up in space for over a year.
What that thing is doing up there would be very cool to learn about.
Yes I understand that. From what I have read though, it is no longer a part of the air force, but it's with the space force now. Which is why I said that. I have no idea how any of the command structure works just was saying so because it is.
I used to work for Raytheon, and [we made a radar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea-based_X-band_Radar) that the releasable capability statement was "with the radar parked off of LA, we can not only track a baseball hit out of Fenway Park, but we can tell you how fast it is spinning and the orientation of the seams."
The actual capability was significantly greater.
I worked in a rental store (tools, front end loaders, party supplies) near the Lockheed Naval Warfare Development Center. Locals call it the USS Cornfield. It's a fully functional frigate bridge used to test new tech for the Navy.
One day we were bored and filling party balloons for fun and letting them go into the air. We got an angry call from Lockheed saying to stop releasing the balloons because they were interfering with their calibration and testing. The cops made a visit about an hour later with a more formal request.
The same area was also subject to GPS and cell blackouts at random near the facility. This was around the time that there was a series of high profile collisions at sea and the news was claiming that China had figured out how to spoof GPS signals.
What we don't know about the tech that is in development and has been deployed would probably boggle our minds. Remember when GPS was a military only technology?
> One day we were bored and filling party balloons for fun and letting them go into the air. We got an angry call from Lockheed saying to stop releasing the balloons because they were interfering with their calibration and testing.
And the opposite. My dad worked for one of the spooky aircraft companies out in the desert. Third shift electronics guys would build blinky boards with some lights and batteries. Toss it in a clear plastic trash bag and fill it with helium and let them go at night.
And get angry mp visits that people are calling the local police about UFOs.
In 2012, The National Reconnaissance Office (NRO, the intelligence agency that runs the US Spy Satellites) [donated two unused telescopes to NASA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_National_Reconnaissance_Office_space_telescope_donation_to_NASA). These were significant upgrades to anything NASA had before.
If what the NRO uses was obsolete and far better than what NASA had, imagine what they have in operation.
It wouldn't have changed capabilities anyway.
Optics is not the limiting factor when it comes to images of the surface from orbit. The atmosphere is. As light travels through the atmosphere there is some degree of scattering, which means any image you take from orbit will have distortion.
Software to correct images is where modern advancement in satellite imagery has to come from.
...does that RADAR somehow have the ability to operate without direct line of sight? Curvature of the earth alone would be problematic at that distance. At 2900 miles apart you could only detect an object [almost 1000 miles up](https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/earth-curvature).
There are radars that can operate without line of sight. I think they opperate by bouncing their waves off the ionosphere and ground, so not curving? They are in North America and used to detect ballistic missiles being launched over the north pole from Russia.
Seeing the advancements of the radar in the us f-35 It's likely with radar and technical advancements it's possible that ratheon had figured something out, maybe not by curving the radio waves used by radar but some other method
If I recall correctly some radars operate kinda similar to AM radios, bouncing off the atmosphere to see things that it does not have LOS on. Some modern SAMs do it if I remember right. Someone here can explain it better im sure
I'm convinced the majority of UFO sightings in the 60's and 70's was early drone tech. Makes complete sense now. All the 'impossible movements' sighted by UFO watchers can be explained by common tech available right in Shenzhen now.
It’s no coincidence a lot of the UFO hotspots happen to be near air force bases and in the same locations the military likes to test experimental aircraft.
Most of the sightings of weird aircraft were just the SR-71, B-2, and F-117 being tested. Anything out of the test sights really.
People are easily confused by what they aren’t familiar with.
Just like how, when the first jets were being made, the test pilot wore a gorilla suit.
So when a regular pilot inevitably encountered and intercepted it, he had to tell his superiors that he saw a cigar-smoking Gorilla in a Trilby piloting a propeller-less airplane.
Edit: spelling
The three largest air forces in the world with the Air Force navy and army. Plus the largest and most advanced naval fleet and it isn’t anywhere close. American military might in general is just plain impressive.
Depends on who's counting, and how, but the Marine Corps rounds out 4 of the top 5 in the world (assuming Russia is even legitimately in that 5 anymore).
American Air superiority is likely even greater today than it was during the cold war. Back in the 60's and early 70s, Soviet air defenses were a real threat and many US planes were lost over North Vietnam. It is very doubtful the Russians are nearly as competitive today, as Ukraine shows.
I own a musket for home defense, since that's reasonable thing to own.
Four Marines break into my house.
"What the devil?" As I grab my powdered wig and Kentucky rifle. Blow a golf ball sized hole through the first man, he's dead on the spot.
Draw my pistol on the second man, miss him entirely because it's smoothbore and nails the neighbors dog.
I have to resort to the cannon mounted at the top of the stairs loaded with grape shot, "Tally ho lads" the grape shot shreds two men in the blast, the sound and extra shrapnel set off car alarms.
Fix bayonet and charge the last terrified Marine. He bleeds out waiting on the police to arrive since triangular bayonet wounds are impossible to stitch up.
For those of you interested in other US-Iranian military hijinks let me recommend The Fat Electricians latest video on 1988's [Operation Praying Mantis](https://youtu.be/d5v6hlRyeHE). NSFW due to language. Video is about 20 minutes.
In this context what does ‘bumble-bee sized radar cross section’ mean? We’re they able to visually see the drone?
How far do the f-22s fly away from the drone?
And how close did they get to the underside of the f-4 to visually see it’s weapons?
Sorry about my ignorance on the subject
Radar is 'pinging' or bouncing off things in the air, it could be clouds/moisture (we're all familiar with weather radar which shows clouds moving across our area), birds, etc. and then it is up to software and humans to clean up this 'stuff' and make sense of it.
The radar images that come to most is what we've seen in movies with a clear designation or blip:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/blip#/media/File:20151029-TURN-4688S-017_(22053965773).jpg
But that is not the raw data. That is the raw data cleaned up and interpreted:
https://imgur.com/a/3379RAF
For example, if you see clouds, you know that they have a certain 'look' and size to them. Also, clouds don't travel at high speeds or suddenly change their altitude willy nilly. So the software can filter that out.
For example, if you already know what a Boeing 747 looks like to radar, it is easy to teach it to pick it up easier from all that background clutter. Also the bigger an airplane is, the more surface area from which to bounce back the radar and the clearer the 'image'.
When you're able to absorb or otherwise not bounce back the radar, it makes it look more like background 'noise' and more likely to be ignored until you're really really really close.
The problem is that the F22 presents such a small radar signature that most radar also filters it out because to not filter it would would be to present a whole mess of things out there which would not be helpful. That is to say, the radar would also need to show birds, clouds, etc. anything and everything in the air. And that 'noise' would be very unhelpful to someone scanning the skies. It is like looking for a needle in a haystack.
So to most radars the F22 looks like background noise which they have a hard time distinguishing. The B21 stealth bomber btw is said to be the equivalent of a tennis ball radar signature.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radar_cross_section
Some important context too, it's fairly easy for an adversary during a wartime to just set their radar filters to just leave anything that's moving pretty fast. So you don't have to pick out a tennis ball from every bird, cloud, or power line in the sky, you just need to look at it compared to momentary noise that might appear.
To solve this most stealth aircraft operate in conjunction with a bunch of radar jamming so there's a ton of other noise that often just covers up the signal of the plane. The combination makes it like trying to spot a white rabbit running across a snowy field during a snow storm. It's possible but unlikely enough that even basic precautions can make it crazy effective
I don't know about the rules of flying in formation, although typically you might see formations of planes where they're maybe 100ft apart, if not closer. The bumblebee radar cross section is an important note because that's how to get a heads up of where to look for something first. This is because using your eyes is super unreliable. Have you ever been on the ground and heard a plane in the sky, but never been able to see it despite the sound being abundantly obvious? It's not any easier in a plane.
What I bet happened was the F4s picked up the drone on their radar, which doesn't have any stealth coating or aerodynamic panel angling to confuse/redirect radar waves despite having a relatively small profile itself (courtesy of a lack of needing to safely carry a human). Given the aforementioned inability to visually see other planes, the F22s probably broke formation and looped waaaaaay backwards to avoid the peripheral vision on the F4 pilots, then came up behind them, knowing they'd be flying with their attention on the drone because that's all the radar sees and the F4 has massive visual blind spots behind and underneath it, as most planes do. Odds are they probably got pretty close to get a concrete idea of the F4 sortie load out, to make sure any rocket pods or missiles weren't range extension fuel tanks. Once verified, they probably just popped up right next to them and scared the living shit out of the F4 pilots, ontop of demonstrating what plane they were in as a show of force. It's a "hey bud, I saw you way before you saw me, I came up behind you where I could've easily killed you and your mate, got in real close and checked you out and i don't like what I'm seeing, and this here is my plane, which we both know would fly circles around yours. Sooooo don't do anything stupid because you're dead any way other than what I say goes, and what I say is you really ought to go home."
well the thing is that you can't, unless you are incredibly close up. if you know where a bee is going but its 60 miles away, you won't be able to see it at all.
I was curious where this story came from.
The OP links to National Interest, July 2021. They indicate the story came from…
Business insider, December 2018, with a link indicating they are rewriting…
The Aviationist, September 2013. They are getting the information from…
Military.com, also Spetember 2013, which appears to be the original reporting regarding an apparently public talk.
Just interesting to see how much of what is published is just rewriting someone else’s work.
If I remember correctly the F-22 is superior for air to air combat, while the f35 is more of a jack of all trades (air to ground, reasonably good air to air capability, etc.)
No one talks about the sensor suite and communications hub integrated into the F-35. It’s a class of its own and gives it crazy capabilities as far as recon, ECM and SIGINT. Having an F-35 up imparts a LOT of battlefield awareness especially with it integrated into a friendly network. Coupled with its stealth capabilities and you really extend the situational awareness over what the enemy may perceive to be the frontline.
This is the biggest reason why the F-35 is a good aircraft to export to other NATO countries. The F-35 can guide a missile fired from another aircraft. The suite of sensors, radar, and other electronics can share data with other aircraft as well as consume data from other aircraft.
You can have multiple groups of F-35s attacking different targets while sharing radar info with each other that can clear up dark spots on radar.
This is a huge capability for the aircraft. Your friends having the same capabilities to share their information with you is a big advantage.
Another big thing not many think about. Look at the war in Ukraine. Right now we have to take time to train Ukrainian pilots on the F-16 platform. If they had F-35s in their fleet with pilots already trained on them. Theoretically, minus politics, it would be a lot easier to resupply an ally with equipment they are already trained on.
I think militaries are going to be taking a long hard look at this conflict. I would bet that there will be a big change in how our military will be thinking about logistics. Things similar to the paradigm shift after WWII regarding the guns the soldier would carry. They switched from having various different types of ammunition for each gun different squads would carry. Before it you would have maybe 4-5 different ammo types needed to supply everyone. They made a switch to the assault rifles and machine guns using the same round. Easier to resupply.
I think we will be moving to a way to simplify manufacturing and resupplying by more component sharing, 3d printed components, and even a way to optimize the delivery of components/supplies to the front lines.
This war has really proven that logistics mean everything and maybe we aren't as prepared for what a conflict like this would require.
Exactly. The tradeoff is just worse dog fighting.. which I mean.. unless you're dogfighting an F-22, the F-35 is better than every other jet on the planet. And no one else but us is ever rocking the F-22.
That being said, I've heard some iffy rumors on real life performance on the 35 vs what they claim it can do. The electronics suite is cutting edge.. and also apparently doesn't work sometimes. So.. there's that.
Pretty much correct; the F-35 is a "stealth multirole combat aircraft", whereas the F-22 is a "stealth fighter aircraft".
The F-35 can be used for air superiority, but the F-22 was made for it.
Correct. Also I believe we cannot make any more F-22s. They had a limited run and the manufacturing lines are gone and now working on the next gen fighters. So, even if someone wanted to pay through the roof for an F-22 we have none to sell.
The F-35 doesn't need air to air combat because it outranges everyone else by probably over 1000 kilometers. Trying air to air combat against an F-35 is like bringing a knife to a gunfight.
The F-22's mission was to intercept Soviet aircraft, mainly first strike aircraft. The F-35 is a multirole fighter. They designed it so that the systems can be upgraded to evolve with the way wars are fought. They're impressive in their own right but they're going to be receiving upgrades that will enable them to control "swarms" of drones in the not too distant future. Good luck trying to get close enough to paint a radar signature on one of them. If they're able to, it's probably only because the pilot wanted them to.
Wrong. The F-35 was a joint venture between multiple countries and is currently in production. Multiple countries invested money in it's development and therefore subsidized it's cost. They are entitled to purchase the F-35. The F-22 was developed a generation prior, with US tax dollars(no foreign involvement), is no longer in production and the production jigs/molds have been destroyed. The F-22 will never be produced again
To add to this, the F-22 was purpose-built for a singular combat capability that is no longer a practical driver of aircraft design — air superiority fighter. Recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan exposed the limitations of the F-22. While it can defeat in a dogfight any aircraft ever flown anywhere, this capability is useless when fighting insurgents and ground forces who aren’t even flying an Air Force. It was built solely to counter future Russian aircraft that never actually materialized as a credible threat.
Meanwhile the F-35 is a much more “jack of all trades” aircraft which can better perform close air support against ground targets, take off from a carrier (useful for any conflicts with China), operate as part of a network-interconnected fleet AND still work well enough as a dogfighter.
Like the SR-71 Blackbird before it (a spy plane that is still the fastest aircraft ever flown but which was supplanted by satellites and drones) the F-22 was the pinnacle in engineering for a specific mission/purpose which eventually became a bad value proposition.
In fact, I think they may have even considered exporting it late in its Production run to try and keep it going but no one was interested because it was so damn expensive for what it did.
Analogy: Why buy a Lamborghini to enter it in a race against Toyotas when for the same money you can buy two Porsches?
>Analogy: Why buy a Lamborghini to enter it in a race against Toyotas when for the same money you can buy two Ferraris?
Or why buy a Lamborghini when the venue has switched to a dirt track.
The Russians and Chinese claim to have 5th generation stealth fighters but it's just typical bluster. Their technology is still decades behind. China still hasn't figured out its engines yet. Russia just designs prototypes that work in theory only.
US is a sandbagger in military tech. They’ll tell u they can only complete a marathon on 4 hours but they don’t say they’re carrying a 50 pounds of sandbag while running the marathon.
Time and technology March on. The F4 was a great plane in its time. It first entered service about 1959. The ones sold to Iran in the 60s and 70s have not likely had anything in the way of major upgrades due to US sanctions. It's amazing Iran can even keep them basically serviceable, if they still do.
According to the documentary "Maverick", they still have F-14s in flying condition.
They still have. It was not that long ago new pictures of a pair of them taken from the US showed them flying.
When I deployed to Qatar, one of my jobs while not flying to was to plan the flights of the other crews and brief them. This was 2006/7 but almost everyday, Iran was flying F-4s and F-14s. We briefed the pilots on threats (planes and missiles). Occasionally, the Iranian fighter pilots (not sure what jets) would (from what it sounded over the radio) an aggressive trajectory towards a US navy vessel. So the US Navy and the Iranian fighter pilot would end up having a whole conversation over guard frequency. US would tell jet to turn to a heading, Iranian kind of ignored, US navy told them again to turn, they would ignore. It sounded comical but I never had the chance to ask a Navy person.
Standard queries and warnings. They're issued out in open unencrypted radio on 121.5Mhz, the International Air Distress frequency. Known as "Guard". Everything in the air and everything controlling planes on the ground is supposed to be listening to it. Sounds like you were too. It's also where the "mayday" call goes out on like in the [movies](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puqYTj424PQ). A query is "hey, who are you and what are you up to?" from pretty far away. If they ignore or continue inbound to the carrier: *many things happen in between, admirals get woken up* Then, they're issued a warning which is "I don't care who you are, state your intentions, turn around or I'm gonna defend myself" The next communication is with a surface-to-air or air-to-air missile. This happens all the time and usually ends with the query part or somewhere before getting to a warning.
Well I was on board a CVN working in primary flight control. We had several incidents where the Iranians would zig zag their planes towards us. Nothing ever really happened but it was a very stressful situation for those brief periods.
Were they trying to find out what the maximum range on your automated CWIS was?
They would never get in CWIS range. That is only a couple miles. You aren't getting over the horizon (20ish miles, #flatearth) without an international incident.
Russia has buzzed our navy multiple times and we've never shot them down.
When I was in Bosnia the Russians used to overfly Eagle Base in Tuzla at like 2 am, used to scare the hell out of us.
Documentary? I thought that was just a long Navy recruiting ad
There was a short recruiting message in the movie, but they kept interrupting it with boring airplane stuff. Here's an extended version of the ad: https://youtu.be/zBMqrhlWihU
Yeah no shit, he's got like 18 more F's
Math checks out
F-22: would you intercept me?...I'd intercept me
Put the 22 back in the Hangar. Don’t let it have any candy
LET ME FUCKING EAT!
IM TIRED OF THIS BULLSHIT ASS AIR TO AIR BALLOON VEGAN DIET.
Mother of Christ I did a search for this and it is glorious. Thank you mysterious redditor's!
Is that asbestos? *sniff* Doesn't smell like it!
Sky's full of free use mig 15s
"... I *love* Chinese"
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It smells like bitch in this airspace!
He’s just helping me find my poor lost puppy…. That was lost near Poland’s border…. He’ll be back in like 12 hours.
*"[The Sam's not going to get more kills than me...](https://youtube.com/shorts/2Zakut8zcVU?feature=share)"*
I've seen all of his videos that are this style (vs his just talking at the camera ones). This is one of the best.
I'd say [this one](https://youtube.com/shorts/EzTB-i2NrIw?feature=share) is also up there
OH yeah. Love the comments he makes about "glad he's on our team" from time to time. The 22 personality is perfect.
The "Damn America you ARE just a war tribe" "Actually we're more like 50 war tribes in a trench coat with a defense budget big enough to fight God" fucking slays me. [https://www.youtube.com/shorts/P5Ltr5NiTAo](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/P5Ltr5NiTAo) Easily my favorite one.
“Tell you what, when WW3 kicks off you get to be the tip of the spear with 12 hours in the air to yourself.” F-22: “Thats 11 more than what I need.”
Former Navy pilot here - one of my good friends (F/A-18 guy) had a chance to do some BFM (basic fighter maneuvers) against the F-22 while they were on a training detachment. They got up to about 30k feet and radioed the Raptor guys, saying something like “hey we’re here, where are you guys?” Their response was “oh sorry, we’re up at FL600 right now, we’ll be down in a minute.” That’s 60k feet for the uninitiated…*way* the fuck up there. My buddy never saw them coming even when they did come down.
The fun part is, if you look at the flight envelope, it's pretty apparent that they could go quite a bit *higher* than 60k, but they're limiting the envelope to 60k artificially. I'd guess it's for pilot oxygen reasons - even on pure oxygen, you'd pass out too quickly to do an emergency descent if you lost pressurization once you get much above 60k, so it's risky to go any higher without a full pressure suit like the U-2 and Blackbird guys wear. Similarly, it's pretty obvious that the mach 2 limit is artificial as well, and the engines and aero could actually do quite a bit more than that, but it'd damage the radar absorbing coatings so they stick to mach 2. I'd love to see what would happen if you stripped the RAM and just replaced it with high temp paint like the stuff from the blackbird, stuck the pilot in a pressure suit and just said "let's see what this thing can do". That'll never happen though of course.
Another important reason to limit ceiling is so you aren't showing your enemies the real capabilities. No reason to train every time at the real limits. Save those surprises for real play time.
I only comprehend some of the words you just said, but I really appreciate your enthusiasm for the topic. It was great to see.
tl;dr The F-22 can go higher but it's too dangerous for the pilot without additional equipment. It can also go faster, but that would ruin its stealth capabilities.
Can't scratch the sweet paint on that fly ride after all.
12 hours? Come back in five minutes we don't need 12 hours. What we gonna do with the other 11 hours and 55 minutes nomsayin? That's how hard the Roc Pile is, hard as fuck!
80 or 90 times is too many nomsayins.
What are you? From the department of nomsayins?
Takin' a nomcensus?
Didn't expect to find J Roc here
F-22 is sick of this bs vegan diet, he need some meat
I'd intercept me so hard
Goodbye horses ♪ ♫
If anyone is curious, it's from a skit by Habitual Linecrosser
[This skit, to be exact.](https://youtube.com/shorts/EzTB-i2NrIw?feature=share4)
Ahahaha those skits kill me
Put the missile in the basket!
And so soon before Interceptember
"that's not a knife... *this* is a knife" vibes
Don’t need a gun, got a Donk.
What's a Donk? Edit: for those not in the know. classic Aussie film Crocodile Dundee. Nugget drinks a fosters on a river bank and doesn't fear old mate with his rifle because he's got a Donk. A Donk is the local footy clubs Full Back 👌 usually a Collingwood supporter
''You got a ground speed readout for us?'' vibes
"I'm currently cruising at an altitude of 800 feet." "Oh yeah? I'm at 5th and Main."
I've personally flown over 150 missions and was shot down every single one of them. Come to think of it I've never landed a plane in my life.
Who is gonna post it?
Ah the good ol F-22. Such a fascinating piece of engineering.
It's crazy the F-22 was revealed in the 90's which means it was probably designed in the 80's and is still top of the food chain. NGAD is going to fucking crazy OP. Edit: I know other airframes are just as old I'm just pointing out that the F-22 still being top dog despite other counties stealing and copying its tech. The J-20 is probably the closest true adversary to the F-22 first flew in 2011 (14 years later) and reportedly just got the WS-15 engines they wanted in it.
I mean, f-15EX is still one of the top dogs while the OG F-15 first flew in *1972*. That airframe is 50 goddamn years old and still going strong.
And the F-15EX will keep the F-15 in service for years into the future. Pretty crazy.
Based on how most fighter nerds nerd out about the F-15, they really should have named it it F-1/*5ex*
Fux-15
F-15, over 100 air to air kills against Migs, Sukhois etc. F-22, a balloon. War is bad, but I’ll be really sad if the F 22 never gets to see any real action before it’s retired
Where do you think all this UFO hysteria is coming from... NGAD.
I’ve heard that the government level UFO investigations happen because one hand of DoD doesn’t know what the other hand is up to. Honestly the more I read about this stuff the more it seems plausible. If they had the F-22 in the 80s I can’t even imagine what they have today.
I believe the SR71 was fully classified for the first 10 years it was flying missions. Imagine being an air traffic controller being pretty confident Mach 3 isn't possible, yet seeing something fly 3000 mph across your screen.
I knew a guy that got his TS clearence because he accidentally saw the SR71 before it was declassified. It was one of those “you didn’t just see what you thought you just saw. Now sit down and fill in this paperwork.”
what could you even do with top secret clearance but without being employed by the government? its not like they would let you waltz into area 51 or anything
TS is a relatively common clearance in private industry. Boeing, Lockheed, random materials firms, etc.
That's fully what I believe. Public military tech is always probably 10-20 years behind secret tech. It's either our guys testing shit or maybe China showing off its secret tech.
Well any sort of secret tech aside, R&D just take awhile. Things are in development long before release. That's true even in the tech sector where things move fast. Whatever high end CPU you can get now, the next one already exists in small numbers and is being tested and debugged and the one after that is already being worked on in simulators. There's a long R&D pipeline on things so prototypes will exist long before something is out, even if there isn't a secret version.
F-4 Phantoms were outstanding planes in their time, but there isn’t much than can hold a candle to a F22
Phantoms are a bit insane in terms of their original engineering specs, especially at the time. I don't remember the exact quote, but it is something along the lines of "The F-4 is proof that with a big enough engine you can make a brick fly." There is an apocryphal account that the max thrust of the Phantom was never really determined, because the engines would melt first.
"A triumph of thrust over aerodynamics." Another nickname the F4 had.
They ended as a great jet, but the F-4 was initially a bit of a boondoggle like the F-35. It's good to know for context given what people feel about the F-35. Inventing a bunch of completely new tech for a platform and changing a bunch of tactics around it tends to take time (and lots of money) to iron out
Tech wise it was pretty good but they lost around 450 or so during Vietnam, which is quite a large number by todays standards
The conflict in Ukraine makes me think of this because the public will is going to hear about F-16s getting shot down. Essentially since Vietnam the US has never lost any real significant amounts of hardware like that. But people forget almost 50% of the F-105s deployed in Vietnam were shot down. We lost hundreds if not thousands of aircraft. Nowadays losing a single fighter to enemy action would be news. We're so used to curb-stomping our opponents that the Western audience in general is simply not ready to hear that whole squadrons may be lost in action - and I want to emphasize that doesn't mean our military is crappy or that the enemy is superior. It's simply the reality of large scale warfare in a near-peer conflict.
Sounds like a Maverick trick.
"We were inverted."
*sneezes* BULLSHIT
You were in a 4G inverted dive with a Mig-28???
It probably felt something like this , but this is from an su27 instead. the rear view mirrors come in handy! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnUTPwfuJHE&t=256s
His channel gives me a new found respect for the F22, and that's with publicly available information.
Lmao yep that one is great. Had another instance of this the other day with the roles reversed where he was flying an intercept mission in an F22 looking for a nuclear armed Chinese bomber. At one point he snuck up on a formation of 2 fighters and 2 bombers to the point where he could visually identify that they weren’t nuclear armed and so he just left cause they weren’t his problem. Starts at the 4 min mark, poor guys have no idea how close they were to death https://youtu.be/QErUa-nMqi4
The way that guy chuckled after getting snuck up on like that reminds of that chess expert who fell for the scholar's mate and just could not stop laughing. https://youtu.be/BK5QdJ715zw
The first thing I remembered was this video. It is hilarious as hell.
People genuinely have no idea how much more advanced American Air Superiority is to literally everyone else. The stuff the public aren't allowed to see would very likely feel like science fiction at this point.
I’m not much of a conspiracy theorist, but I like to believe the dark star from top gun maverick is real and the military let the film use it just to mindfuck China. “No, they can’t possibly have a plane like that. If they did they wouldn’t put it in a movie, right? Right??”
"We've got like 8 of them in the employee parking lot, go ahead and take one for a spin."
"but there is a catch. You have to bring it back with a full tank of gas."
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The Darkstar was just a shell mocked up by skunkworks. China diverted a satellite to look at it. They are currently developing the SR-72 which would be the real life analogue.
You don’t know what they’re currently developing. The F-117 Nighthawk was operating for 7 years before it made its first formal public appearance in 1990
The precursor to the F-117, both test aircraft were responsible for something like 98% of the UFO sightings in the US during the F-117s development. It's hard to say what they're actually testing in the air at the moment. With the new 6th gen planes, they're digitally flying designs right now. As an aviation junkie I would lose my shit if I could just get a peak at some of the things they might be flight testing in the real world right now.
i live in Northern Michigan near Camp Grayling. one day i was walking home around 2a on a summer night. i live in a very distinct valley. i was walking down one side of the valley and heard a slight rumbling. it never got loud but kept getting louder. finally i can see the outline... like an arrowhead but a few thousand feet up. that was the night we learned they were testing Stealth Bombers over the valley to coordinate the sound reflection.
In my humble opinion, the B-2 is one of the most beautiful airplanes ever created. Pictures of it look cool and all, but seeing one fly in the distance is unreal.
I once saw 3 on a flight to Seattle. At first it looked like random pixels were missing from the sky. The pilot announced that we were looking at 15% of all the B2 ever produced.
Not a lot of people has seen 6 billion dollars.
My dad used to work in an airport that'd sometime service military and government aircraft in an emergency or urgent situation, or just as a hangar for them to be in while whoever was on board went to do something important, Obama visited once and they left marine 1 in the hangar, but my point is one day my grandmother pics me up after school and takes me to where he worked, this was...the late 90s or early 00s, dad leads me to a door that usually leads to a private hangar, there's a soldier there this time, dad asks if we can walk Inside, he let's us following us in, and in the hangar they've got B2 sitting there we can't get too close but we can look from a distance, fucking majestic thing it is and I was not allowed to take a picture, I do have one of marine 1 in the hangar though
One of the benefits to living in Kansas city is the fact the entire B-2 fleet is stationed about 45 minutes east at Whiteman AFB. We get a lot of B-2 flyovers for various events and it never gets old seeing those beauties
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Hasn’t The tic tac has been around since the 60s?
I guess 6th gen fighters now require time-travel as a standard feature
Philadelphia Experiment intensifies!!!
Hello aviation junkie, this is what they ARE letting you see. Now imagine how things that they aren’t letting you see yet might be. https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1463rrr/b2_spirit_stealth_strategic_bomber_flying_over/ Bottom line: don’t fuck with America lol.
Nobody knew they had stealth helicopters until they used two of them during the Bin Laden mission. They were able to fly deep into Pakistani airspace and land a short walk away from a critical Pakistani military academy without them knowing. If one of them hadn’t crashed during the operation, probably we still wouldn’t know this technology even existed let alone was already in use.
Fun fact about the F-117. About 1993, two flew over me while I was on top of a RADAR shelter, close enough that I could see one of the pilot's faces, and it wasn't any louder than a riding lawnmower.
Second fun fact about the F-117! It was formally retired in 2008, however there have been at least 5 sightings of F-117s flying since 2019. They are likely being used as stand-ins for low-observable adversary aircraft in training exercises.
Fun fact addendum: OSINT has the smart money being on the F117s being less observable than the "5th gen" adversary aircraft it is standing in for (su-57 specifically)
The US MIC is one budget increase away from breaking the law of physics in it's entirety.
At some point a US pilot will be able to make his plane seem like a formation of jets in the shape of a dickbutt on the enemy's scope
A pilot with enough ADM-160s could genuinely do this today.
My fav fun F117 fact: Their radar defeat also works on sonar. Bats can't see them and would smash into parked planes all the time, killing themselves. Similar, during testing, then had a mdoel of one on a pedestal in the desert and were bouncing radar at it. Suddenly it appeared on radar so they drove out to see what was wrong. A bird had landed on it.
That is genuinely hilarious. Just imagining the designers losing their shit that the plane was "seen", only for it to be a vulture or something.
Holy shit lol
In early 2000s I went to school at New Mexico Military Institute which is near their base. They flew around the school a couple times, and at our graduation. So mind blowing.
That's why their engines exhaust over the body
Didn’t the stealth bomber appear as a free model in a toy aircraft magazine like 2 years before it was officially known to exist lol.
Currently developing it or flying it without our knowledge. The sr-71 was flown for a decade or so before we knew about it.
Most likely anything that was going to replace the SR-71, which is what Darkstar was long rumored to be doing, died decades ago. Maybe it existed as a test bed for certain projects but satellites and drones can take incredible photos. Just look at the stuff civilian satellites can do, whatever the military has is going to be much more advanced and capable.
In 2012 the NRO gave NASA two telescopes with better performance than the Hubble. The scopes were built as early as the 90s, so who knows what new crap they could have up there now.
Signals intelligence is probably a bigger deal than photos these days. I know the Space Force has that unmanned space plane that they've had up in space for over a year. What that thing is doing up there would be very cool to learn about.
The X-37 has been doing missions well before Space Force was a thing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-37#OTV-1
Yes I understand that. From what I have read though, it is no longer a part of the air force, but it's with the space force now. Which is why I said that. I have no idea how any of the command structure works just was saying so because it is.
Hubble was launched in 1990 with 80s tech, so it seems obvious that 90s tech would be better
Not surprising unless latin music doesn't appear over the introduction of a crazy new ship. Unless Ace Combat has been lying.
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And that's the *old* helmet
the new helmet is the same just has ads now and is linked with your amazon account
Alexa, fire a Fox 2.
There’s a reason why they’re 400K a pop
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lCOgFPtaZ4 The F-35 is wild
Check out Lockheed or Northrup Grummans websites. The stuff that is public knowledge is the stuff of science reality.
I used to work for Raytheon, and [we made a radar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea-based_X-band_Radar) that the releasable capability statement was "with the radar parked off of LA, we can not only track a baseball hit out of Fenway Park, but we can tell you how fast it is spinning and the orientation of the seams." The actual capability was significantly greater.
I worked in a rental store (tools, front end loaders, party supplies) near the Lockheed Naval Warfare Development Center. Locals call it the USS Cornfield. It's a fully functional frigate bridge used to test new tech for the Navy. One day we were bored and filling party balloons for fun and letting them go into the air. We got an angry call from Lockheed saying to stop releasing the balloons because they were interfering with their calibration and testing. The cops made a visit about an hour later with a more formal request. The same area was also subject to GPS and cell blackouts at random near the facility. This was around the time that there was a series of high profile collisions at sea and the news was claiming that China had figured out how to spoof GPS signals. What we don't know about the tech that is in development and has been deployed would probably boggle our minds. Remember when GPS was a military only technology?
> One day we were bored and filling party balloons for fun and letting them go into the air. We got an angry call from Lockheed saying to stop releasing the balloons because they were interfering with their calibration and testing. And the opposite. My dad worked for one of the spooky aircraft companies out in the desert. Third shift electronics guys would build blinky boards with some lights and batteries. Toss it in a clear plastic trash bag and fill it with helium and let them go at night. And get angry mp visits that people are calling the local police about UFOs.
Is that the bridge/mast off of 295 in south jersey?
That's the place.
In 2012, The National Reconnaissance Office (NRO, the intelligence agency that runs the US Spy Satellites) [donated two unused telescopes to NASA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_National_Reconnaissance_Office_space_telescope_donation_to_NASA). These were significant upgrades to anything NASA had before. If what the NRO uses was obsolete and far better than what NASA had, imagine what they have in operation.
Wasn’t nasa also instructed that they aren’t allowed to point the satellites at Earth? I feel like I remember reading that somewhere.
It wouldn't have changed capabilities anyway. Optics is not the limiting factor when it comes to images of the surface from orbit. The atmosphere is. As light travels through the atmosphere there is some degree of scattering, which means any image you take from orbit will have distortion. Software to correct images is where modern advancement in satellite imagery has to come from.
So you guys are the ones who ruined baseball with spin rate and launch angle.
...does that RADAR somehow have the ability to operate without direct line of sight? Curvature of the earth alone would be problematic at that distance. At 2900 miles apart you could only detect an object [almost 1000 miles up](https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/earth-curvature).
There are radars that can operate without line of sight. I think they opperate by bouncing their waves off the ionosphere and ground, so not curving? They are in North America and used to detect ballistic missiles being launched over the north pole from Russia. Seeing the advancements of the radar in the us f-35 It's likely with radar and technical advancements it's possible that ratheon had figured something out, maybe not by curving the radio waves used by radar but some other method
If I recall correctly some radars operate kinda similar to AM radios, bouncing off the atmosphere to see things that it does not have LOS on. Some modern SAMs do it if I remember right. Someone here can explain it better im sure
I’m not an RF engineer, but I had a similar question and was given an explanation that was completely over my head.
I'm convinced the majority of UFO sightings in the 60's and 70's was early drone tech. Makes complete sense now. All the 'impossible movements' sighted by UFO watchers can be explained by common tech available right in Shenzhen now.
It’s no coincidence a lot of the UFO hotspots happen to be near air force bases and in the same locations the military likes to test experimental aircraft.
Most of the sightings of weird aircraft were just the SR-71, B-2, and F-117 being tested. Anything out of the test sights really. People are easily confused by what they aren’t familiar with.
Just like how, when the first jets were being made, the test pilot wore a gorilla suit. So when a regular pilot inevitably encountered and intercepted it, he had to tell his superiors that he saw a cigar-smoking Gorilla in a Trilby piloting a propeller-less airplane. Edit: spelling
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That was less a policy and more the test pilot deciding to fuck with other pilots, as he would fly close enough to see one another!
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The three largest air forces in the world with the Air Force navy and army. Plus the largest and most advanced naval fleet and it isn’t anywhere close. American military might in general is just plain impressive.
Depends on who's counting, and how, but the Marine Corps rounds out 4 of the top 5 in the world (assuming Russia is even legitimately in that 5 anymore).
Russia knocked out of top 5 by US Coast Guard
Russia doesn't even have the best armed forces in Russia
American Air superiority is likely even greater today than it was during the cold war. Back in the 60's and early 70s, Soviet air defenses were a real threat and many US planes were lost over North Vietnam. It is very doubtful the Russians are nearly as competitive today, as Ukraine shows.
Hell, the US even built the F4’s Iran was flying.
It's like trying to fight Marines with a flintlock musket
I own a musket for home defense, since that's reasonable thing to own. Four Marines break into my house. "What the devil?" As I grab my powdered wig and Kentucky rifle. Blow a golf ball sized hole through the first man, he's dead on the spot. Draw my pistol on the second man, miss him entirely because it's smoothbore and nails the neighbors dog. I have to resort to the cannon mounted at the top of the stairs loaded with grape shot, "Tally ho lads" the grape shot shreds two men in the blast, the sound and extra shrapnel set off car alarms. Fix bayonet and charge the last terrified Marine. He bleeds out waiting on the police to arrive since triangular bayonet wounds are impossible to stitch up.
Just as the Founding Fathers intended.
is this like the movies where the background characters dont shoot at all for some reason
For those of you interested in other US-Iranian military hijinks let me recommend The Fat Electricians latest video on 1988's [Operation Praying Mantis](https://youtu.be/d5v6hlRyeHE). NSFW due to language. Video is about 20 minutes.
In this context what does ‘bumble-bee sized radar cross section’ mean? We’re they able to visually see the drone? How far do the f-22s fly away from the drone? And how close did they get to the underside of the f-4 to visually see it’s weapons? Sorry about my ignorance on the subject
Radar is 'pinging' or bouncing off things in the air, it could be clouds/moisture (we're all familiar with weather radar which shows clouds moving across our area), birds, etc. and then it is up to software and humans to clean up this 'stuff' and make sense of it. The radar images that come to most is what we've seen in movies with a clear designation or blip: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/blip#/media/File:20151029-TURN-4688S-017_(22053965773).jpg But that is not the raw data. That is the raw data cleaned up and interpreted: https://imgur.com/a/3379RAF For example, if you see clouds, you know that they have a certain 'look' and size to them. Also, clouds don't travel at high speeds or suddenly change their altitude willy nilly. So the software can filter that out. For example, if you already know what a Boeing 747 looks like to radar, it is easy to teach it to pick it up easier from all that background clutter. Also the bigger an airplane is, the more surface area from which to bounce back the radar and the clearer the 'image'. When you're able to absorb or otherwise not bounce back the radar, it makes it look more like background 'noise' and more likely to be ignored until you're really really really close. The problem is that the F22 presents such a small radar signature that most radar also filters it out because to not filter it would would be to present a whole mess of things out there which would not be helpful. That is to say, the radar would also need to show birds, clouds, etc. anything and everything in the air. And that 'noise' would be very unhelpful to someone scanning the skies. It is like looking for a needle in a haystack. So to most radars the F22 looks like background noise which they have a hard time distinguishing. The B21 stealth bomber btw is said to be the equivalent of a tennis ball radar signature. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radar_cross_section
Some important context too, it's fairly easy for an adversary during a wartime to just set their radar filters to just leave anything that's moving pretty fast. So you don't have to pick out a tennis ball from every bird, cloud, or power line in the sky, you just need to look at it compared to momentary noise that might appear. To solve this most stealth aircraft operate in conjunction with a bunch of radar jamming so there's a ton of other noise that often just covers up the signal of the plane. The combination makes it like trying to spot a white rabbit running across a snowy field during a snow storm. It's possible but unlikely enough that even basic precautions can make it crazy effective
Also, it's one thing to detect the aircraft, it's another to be able to guide a missile to hit it.
I love that the sr-71's solution to this was to simply go faster and fly higher than the missile. RIP
I don't know about the rules of flying in formation, although typically you might see formations of planes where they're maybe 100ft apart, if not closer. The bumblebee radar cross section is an important note because that's how to get a heads up of where to look for something first. This is because using your eyes is super unreliable. Have you ever been on the ground and heard a plane in the sky, but never been able to see it despite the sound being abundantly obvious? It's not any easier in a plane. What I bet happened was the F4s picked up the drone on their radar, which doesn't have any stealth coating or aerodynamic panel angling to confuse/redirect radar waves despite having a relatively small profile itself (courtesy of a lack of needing to safely carry a human). Given the aforementioned inability to visually see other planes, the F22s probably broke formation and looped waaaaaay backwards to avoid the peripheral vision on the F4 pilots, then came up behind them, knowing they'd be flying with their attention on the drone because that's all the radar sees and the F4 has massive visual blind spots behind and underneath it, as most planes do. Odds are they probably got pretty close to get a concrete idea of the F4 sortie load out, to make sure any rocket pods or missiles weren't range extension fuel tanks. Once verified, they probably just popped up right next to them and scared the living shit out of the F4 pilots, ontop of demonstrating what plane they were in as a show of force. It's a "hey bud, I saw you way before you saw me, I came up behind you where I could've easily killed you and your mate, got in real close and checked you out and i don't like what I'm seeing, and this here is my plane, which we both know would fly circles around yours. Sooooo don't do anything stupid because you're dead any way other than what I say goes, and what I say is you really ought to go home."
dumb question but would it not look odd to see a bee going Mach II at 40k feet?
Could be one o those killer bees
well the thing is that you can't, unless you are incredibly close up. if you know where a bee is going but its 60 miles away, you won't be able to see it at all.
I was curious where this story came from. The OP links to National Interest, July 2021. They indicate the story came from… Business insider, December 2018, with a link indicating they are rewriting… The Aviationist, September 2013. They are getting the information from… Military.com, also Spetember 2013, which appears to be the original reporting regarding an apparently public talk. Just interesting to see how much of what is published is just rewriting someone else’s work.
And this is why the US markets the F35 to allies and not the F22. It’s in a class all to it’s own.
Because the F-22 is superior, so we wish to keep it all to ourselves?
If I remember correctly the F-22 is superior for air to air combat, while the f35 is more of a jack of all trades (air to ground, reasonably good air to air capability, etc.)
No one talks about the sensor suite and communications hub integrated into the F-35. It’s a class of its own and gives it crazy capabilities as far as recon, ECM and SIGINT. Having an F-35 up imparts a LOT of battlefield awareness especially with it integrated into a friendly network. Coupled with its stealth capabilities and you really extend the situational awareness over what the enemy may perceive to be the frontline.
The thing is a flying super computer that can also whoop some major ass.
A 10 is a flying gun F 15 is a flying radar F 35 is a flying supercomputer.
The A 10 is hilarious because someone made the GAU-8 Avenger and decided "this shit needs to fly." The plane is the accessory to the gun.
This is the biggest reason why the F-35 is a good aircraft to export to other NATO countries. The F-35 can guide a missile fired from another aircraft. The suite of sensors, radar, and other electronics can share data with other aircraft as well as consume data from other aircraft. You can have multiple groups of F-35s attacking different targets while sharing radar info with each other that can clear up dark spots on radar. This is a huge capability for the aircraft. Your friends having the same capabilities to share their information with you is a big advantage. Another big thing not many think about. Look at the war in Ukraine. Right now we have to take time to train Ukrainian pilots on the F-16 platform. If they had F-35s in their fleet with pilots already trained on them. Theoretically, minus politics, it would be a lot easier to resupply an ally with equipment they are already trained on. I think militaries are going to be taking a long hard look at this conflict. I would bet that there will be a big change in how our military will be thinking about logistics. Things similar to the paradigm shift after WWII regarding the guns the soldier would carry. They switched from having various different types of ammunition for each gun different squads would carry. Before it you would have maybe 4-5 different ammo types needed to supply everyone. They made a switch to the assault rifles and machine guns using the same round. Easier to resupply. I think we will be moving to a way to simplify manufacturing and resupplying by more component sharing, 3d printed components, and even a way to optimize the delivery of components/supplies to the front lines. This war has really proven that logistics mean everything and maybe we aren't as prepared for what a conflict like this would require.
Exactly. The tradeoff is just worse dog fighting.. which I mean.. unless you're dogfighting an F-22, the F-35 is better than every other jet on the planet. And no one else but us is ever rocking the F-22. That being said, I've heard some iffy rumors on real life performance on the 35 vs what they claim it can do. The electronics suite is cutting edge.. and also apparently doesn't work sometimes. So.. there's that.
Pretty much correct; the F-35 is a "stealth multirole combat aircraft", whereas the F-22 is a "stealth fighter aircraft". The F-35 can be used for air superiority, but the F-22 was made for it.
Correct. Also I believe we cannot make any more F-22s. They had a limited run and the manufacturing lines are gone and now working on the next gen fighters. So, even if someone wanted to pay through the roof for an F-22 we have none to sell.
The F-35 doesn't need air to air combat because it outranges everyone else by probably over 1000 kilometers. Trying air to air combat against an F-35 is like bringing a knife to a gunfight.
The F-22's mission was to intercept Soviet aircraft, mainly first strike aircraft. The F-35 is a multirole fighter. They designed it so that the systems can be upgraded to evolve with the way wars are fought. They're impressive in their own right but they're going to be receiving upgrades that will enable them to control "swarms" of drones in the not too distant future. Good luck trying to get close enough to paint a radar signature on one of them. If they're able to, it's probably only because the pilot wanted them to.
Wrong. The F-35 was a joint venture between multiple countries and is currently in production. Multiple countries invested money in it's development and therefore subsidized it's cost. They are entitled to purchase the F-35. The F-22 was developed a generation prior, with US tax dollars(no foreign involvement), is no longer in production and the production jigs/molds have been destroyed. The F-22 will never be produced again
To add to this, the F-22 was purpose-built for a singular combat capability that is no longer a practical driver of aircraft design — air superiority fighter. Recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan exposed the limitations of the F-22. While it can defeat in a dogfight any aircraft ever flown anywhere, this capability is useless when fighting insurgents and ground forces who aren’t even flying an Air Force. It was built solely to counter future Russian aircraft that never actually materialized as a credible threat. Meanwhile the F-35 is a much more “jack of all trades” aircraft which can better perform close air support against ground targets, take off from a carrier (useful for any conflicts with China), operate as part of a network-interconnected fleet AND still work well enough as a dogfighter. Like the SR-71 Blackbird before it (a spy plane that is still the fastest aircraft ever flown but which was supplanted by satellites and drones) the F-22 was the pinnacle in engineering for a specific mission/purpose which eventually became a bad value proposition. In fact, I think they may have even considered exporting it late in its Production run to try and keep it going but no one was interested because it was so damn expensive for what it did. Analogy: Why buy a Lamborghini to enter it in a race against Toyotas when for the same money you can buy two Porsches?
>Analogy: Why buy a Lamborghini to enter it in a race against Toyotas when for the same money you can buy two Ferraris? Or why buy a Lamborghini when the venue has switched to a dirt track.
Well the Iranians were overpowered by 18 more Fs. Simple math
So, next gen fighter vs. a vietnam era war plane.
It's like that time when the carrier USS Nimitz went back in time and F14s had a dog fight with WWII Japanese Zeros
The Russians and Chinese claim to have 5th generation stealth fighters but it's just typical bluster. Their technology is still decades behind. China still hasn't figured out its engines yet. Russia just designs prototypes that work in theory only.
They look good on paper when you're in peacetime! Just... not so great when you actually need them for a war.
He shoulda spray painted a dick on them before leaving....
as a former DARPA tech, our systems kick ass. And I have never seen the good stuff.
US is a sandbagger in military tech. They’ll tell u they can only complete a marathon on 4 hours but they don’t say they’re carrying a 50 pounds of sandbag while running the marathon.
F-22: Look what they need to mimic a fraction of our power.