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Boeing Bird of Prey Stealth Fighter
An anonymous submitter writes: "Revealed: Boeings new secret stealth bat-plane! For years stealthchasers (those guys who sneak around secret USAF test bases in search of secret aircraft) knew the Bird Of Prey existed. They knew it was being tested over the secluded Nellis Air Force Base ranges in Nevada. They knew what hangar it was being secreted away in at Nellis (on the northeast corner) and they even managed to obtain a squadron patch depicting the aircraft itself!... but the government still denied its existance until today. At a ceremony at Boeing's St Louis plant their super-secret Bird Of Prey batplane was revealed today for the world to see and marvel at. You can view exclusive photos of it at popsci.com and projectblack.net."
I was always under the impression that the Bird of Prey was a Romulan design, as first revealed in the TOS episode "Balance of Terror". I don't recall the Klingon version appearing until "Star Trek III: The Search For Spock", and the canonical explanation was that the Romulans and Klingons had entered into a sort-of free-trade agreement for sharing technology....
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Boeing has a news release with other photos, details, and a movie. The movie is downloading real slow right now though. They've got an image of the plane on their home page, so it's being hyped up quite a bit.
It did look pretty cool, though.
The highlight of the ceremony however, was the free ice cream they gave us all.
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According to the PopSci site, Klingon.
And you thought you were joking, didn't you?
The F-117 was first used in combat in Panama in December of 1989. The Pentagon admited it existed in November of 1988.
But note the project timing, 1992-1997. This may have been a test vehicle for Boeing's bid for the Joint Strike Fighter program. (Boeing lost to Lockheed-Martin on that program.) Boeing built two announced test aircraft for that program, the X-32A and X-32B. Those were aimed at the carrier-landing and VTOL requirements. The Bird of Prey may have been a third test aircraft, to test stealth aspects.
Frankly, I don't think Boeing really needs to prove anything with this plane to the Air Force, or any other branch of our government. They'll continued to get contracts because of the consolidation of the defense industry and the government's need to support (at least) mild competition when it buys military equipment.
And, if it is a PR campaign, they couldn't do better than produce a plane that looks so damn cool...however with a "a maximum speed of 300 mph and a maximum altitude of 20,000 feet" I doubt it's going to enter production anytime soon, stealth or not...
Try the Huntress.
Mod Karma -1: I sed bad wurds. If I cep my mouf shut, I wud be at riyses.
Click here for the correct URL (there's a space in the one above).
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
There is an article here from Popular Science (Nov. 2000) which is about the 'Bird of Prey' aircraft. They article says that the aircraft has a 'switch blade' wing design. Of course, this is all from the hear say and rumors of the time ;-) Still a fun read.
;-)
Here is another 'version' of the article with more diagrams and speculation
I've set up a mirror of both the projectblack story and the quicktime movie of the plane in flight. http://www.msu.edu/~brownd41/mirror/batplane/index .html
Looks a lot like Boeing's unmanned fighter prototype, the X-45 which is going to have missiles in an internal bay, I think (pop it open briefly to fire).
Or they do what they are doing on the F-22, take all missiles internally or mounted externally in pods with similar radar dissolving charateristics.
With the F-22, and the JSF as well, the plan is to make it stealthy by hiding the missiles in payload bays (the F-22 has a belly bay and a bay on the side of each air intake), and once air dominence has been acheived, then the aircraft can mount external ordinance.
Actually, there is an even easier way: bistatic radar. You basically need to seperate the sender and the receiver, do some fancy math and use highly sensitive radar. There have been consistent stories that the steath planes used in the Gulf war were pretty visible on UK shipes with modern phased array radar, too. Of course a lot of that technology is boyond the reach of what are basically developing countries like Irak, Afghanistan and North Korea. But Siemens might have an even easier solution to detecting stealth bombers.
This info was given to me by an air force PR-type guy a year ago, so I'll tell ya what I remember from it:
Conventional radar *can* detect stealth craft. Most of the stelath craft around these days reduce the cross section of the plane, not masking it completely. So if the enemy has a net of radar sites surrounding its capital city, then you can make it easier to navigate between radar sites. So they either have to pack in the sites a lot tighter or just try and get the most out of the ones they have.
the F-22 is what we can deploy and have deployed right now.
Not quite. There are only 6(?) airframes so far. No operational squadron. The initial base has been decided, but they're not there just yet.
Some of your points have merit, others don't.
Stealth planes by virtue of their shape and RAM (radar absorbent material) will optimally absorb and reflect off certain frequencies. So they HAVE to be designed against optimal frequency radars- since the one country that could destroy us was the USSR, it made sense to design them to defeat USSR systems. And given the fact that Russian SAMs are still a huge threat (especially the S-300), we will probably continue to design with them in mind.
That having been said, even if one were using multifreq radars the fact remains that these shapes will make the stealth planes low-observable and thus darn hard to hit.
There is no such thing as infrared radar (used to be IR homing beams but that is a different beastie). There are IR sensors and IR targetting systems (which is probably what you meant), and defenses against that is built into the planes (note the exhausts are generally on top of the plane and the planes fly subsonic thus no afterburner to light up the sky).
There were those who claimed during the Gulf War that the F117s could be spotted by French radar. Turns out they were spotted when they had their gear down or otherwise made themselves visible for air safety reasons.
Stealth will be an expensive obsolesence, especially when LIDAR goes into wide use. Computing power also makes other opportunities possible as noted in other posts. Also, with enough cheap Mig-25/31s or UAVs airspace can simply be covered by enough eyeballs.
Consider the cost, however of the lost aircrews from 'cheaper' alternatives, or how some campaigns wouldn't happen at all if we were going to lose more of our pilots during aerial attacks (thus yielding more dead Kosovars, for instance), or the ultimate cost of a Soviet Union that did not have to spend itself into oblivion to deal with it's PVO paranoia. This is more like spending on battleships, it will be obsolete but it's done some good in the meantime and the alternative of not having them was unacceptable.
________________________________________ History Must Not Fall Into The Wrong Hands ___________________________________
The YF-23 had a sorta violin shape from underneath..and 10 years ago? 1992-1993, that'd be about the time it was being tested.
"Yes they did, and in Serbia they surprised everyone by taking down a Stealth bomber"
Actually it was an F-117 Stealth Fighter, not a B-2 Stealth Bomber. And from the reports I heard from the news, at the time it went down, a reporter witnessed a barrage of many missiles flying up towards its location. Basically, the Serbians simply proved that if you fire enough shots one will hit on sheer chance. Also, many SAMS use a proximity warhead... I can't get into details about the blast radius or anything, but a dozen missles blowing up near a fighter will take it down without a single missile scoring a direct hit.
slashcode adds a spaces to your post so that no word is longer than 40 chars. This is done on purpose to defeat the page-widening trolls. It's part of the extensive Lameness Filter (tm) which everybody runs into at some point.
The -117 got shot down because the planning staff was asleep at the switch. The same route was used several days in a row. The shooters got a lucky shot in, but they had anticipated where the jet was going to be.
Random routes to the same spot might have precluded the shootdown.
Yes and no. The principles of stealth are extremely complex and hard ot understand for even the experts but I will try to explain it a little here, from what i understand.
... so much so that a number of nations (US) don't even bother. And these things can be dealt with other ways - protect your capital with anti-stealth radars eh? Fine. We will send 14 wild weasal sites and take em out.
Basically you can never make an aircraft 'disappear' off of radar for a number of reasons. Radar works by sending out frequency pulses and then reading the returns . The key is to reduce those returns to nearly nothing by reducing the planes RCS (radar cross section? something like that). You do THAT by doing a large number of simple things. First you make sure that no matter what no flat on angle is presented to the beam, instead you want everything to be angled as to deflect as much as the energy away from the aircraft as possible (think of the f-117A). You also shield the turbine intakes behind multiple radar absorbing screens, wierd angles in the ductwork, etc (believe it or not one of the biggest sources of radar returns are the turbine blades in the engines). You also plaster the thing with radar-absorbing material.
Also, look at the B-2 from head on. Not much there is it? Incredibly small and you won't find a flat, head-on angle anywhere on the aircraft except.. well here is where this gets tricky. Operating at perfection in ideal conditions the B-2 is about as small a radar cross section as a hummingbird or so. Yes, it can still be detected by modern radar and it can instantly become trackable by doing a number of things (the biggest being a nice angle from the top/bottom of the plane where it's RCS is huge). What B-2, and other stealth aircraft pilots, are trained to do is approach the target from the best possible angles maximizing the time you aren't detected. Now, they can also use standoff missles with long ranges (20+km) to avoid the radar and find 'holes' in the radar coverages to launch their weapons from. Not to mention that it is presumed that the target will also be saturated with Jamming and wild weasal missions. The air force ain't stupid and wouldn't send a flight of b-2's into a potentionall hostile target enviroment unless they where fairly sure they would come out on top w/o any losses (1 billion a plane makes you do that =).
Also note that the only things that can detect B-2's/F-117A/Other stealth aircraft are only the most modern of radars. You instantly elimante 90% of the world's anti-aircraft defenses.. and the 10% that HAVE those defenses tend to be our allies. The 'tiny investment' you speak of isn't so tiny.... even the best, most advanced radar systems of western nations (which have the best, most modern radar systems) have an extremely hard time picking up stealth aircraft - and they can't be everywhere at once. Deploying a full-time AA grid is extroadanirly expensive
Finally consider the new F-22 raptor fighter. Extremely stealthy (nearly as much as a B-2) with AMRAAM fire-and-forget missles, supersonic cruise ability... quite simply nothing can touch it - and I mean nothing. They can usually detect, find, and kill a target before that target can even see them (for those of yuo paying attention they can use targeting data downloaded from a AWACS plane to lock/fire the AMRAAM so as to be undetectable).
Oh, for things like infra-red a number of techniques are used including burying the engines inside to fuselage, spreading the exhaust over a larger area, and a number of other features to make them more 'stealthy'.
The Air Force's obsession with stealth is a good thing... and I hope this answers your questions.
Weren't the first stealth aircraft announced just before Gulf War I? There was speculation at the time that we just needed an excuse to test new weapons in real combat.
If you read the article, you'd know they're announcing it because they're retiring it. It was only a prototype , a technology demonstration if you will. We won't be producing these jets.
Bzzzzt. Try again
Not true. The F-117 achieves stealth by causing the radar signal to be reflected away from the originating transmitter. Thus it is susceptible to bistatic radar.
The B-2, OTOH, also uses radar absorbing material to further reduce its radar cross section.
BTW... the problem with lower frequency radars us that they are not as precise. Furthermore the emitters are vulnerable to HARM missiles.
The use of existing transmitters (TV transmitters for example) is sneakier. You don't necessarily know which transmitters to destroy! You have to take them all out.
But then, one can also use the signals from TV satellites. This was first demonstrated at LAX in the late 60s or thereabouts. But they are low power so they require lots of receiving antenna against a low reflectivity aircraft like a B-2.
And then, of course, there are active techniques to hide a stealth aircraft. Jamming the radars is an old and crude one. Deceiving them is also old. Both are no doubt used in a big way today, but with a lot more sophistication. A radar is at a fundamental disadvantage due to the fourth power exponent in the radar range equation. A jammer is only dealing with a 2nd power term (both of these are powers of the distance).
And then there's all the stuff we DON'T know about this stuff. The physics are obvious, but the applications are not and I am sure some clever engineers on both the stealth and the detection side have done things we won't hear about for some time.
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Sorry, it was under George H.W. Bush - 1989, remember? Bush became President in January 1989, Panama was invaded December 1989.
Michel
Fedora Project Contribut