Cold War to F35: The Unlikely Journey of Stealth | INTEL

the f-35 the pinnacle of stealth technology it can destroy enemy targets before they even know it's there but how did we get to this point this episode is all about stealth [Music] real stealth technology began in the Cold War USA and the Soviet Union were locked in a battle to gain influence and control around the world with this came the arms race and the space race both sides making incredible efforts to gain the upper hand with new technologies but to gain that upper hand over enemies you need to know what they're doing in the 1950s that was easier said than done the Soviet Union had a complex network of radar stations and anti-air missiles it was an impregnable fortress so the United States had lockheed belt a new surveillance aircraft it was a job for the companies skunkworks their team in charge of advanced developments the u2 wasn't fast or stealthy but it could fly above radar and missile defenses there was flowin over the Soviet Union China Vietnam and Cuba but it turned out the Americans had underestimated the Soviet radar they'd been tracking it since day one and were quietly designing a missile that could shut it down in 1960 pilot Gary Powers was shot down in a CIA u2 over the Soviet Union he ejected and survived but it was an embarrassment for the West and Gary Powers was paraded around the Soviet Union as evidence of Western aggression for the Americans even before one was shot down it was clear they would need a long-term replacement for the u2 but now they needed it more than ever the job fell to aeronautical and systems engineer Kelly Johnson who led Lockheed's skunk works the team got their name because their first offices were nearly uninhabitable due to the smell from a nearby plastic factory but the aircraft the team s conquest developed was an incredible feat of Engineering and even today it looks like something from the future a combined high-altitude with speed and stealth the only combination that could make flying safely over the Soviet Union possible the iconic sr-71 the Mach 3 spy plane flown in America that existed really in the 60s that was the beginning of stealth the sr-71 vote for the US Air Force could fly at mach 3.2 at altitudes of more than 85,000 feet a blackbird at top speed was moving at nearly two and a half thousand miles per hour what was exceptional about the Blackbird was its engine it was developed with an engine that could fly on afterburner for a very long time now rich gram the sr-71 pilot that we have on display in the museum and who flew this aircraft behind me describes it as if you've got a garden hose and you put your thumb over the end of the hose the water goes much quicker and it's effectively the engine the j58 which is behind me over there that had that ability to always be on that powerful stream that made it go so fast so this is still the fastest air-breathing jet and and here's a look at the engines that made that possible there's some really awesome graffiti in here on the inside of where the landing gear goes you can see people's names Lockheed engineers were innovating in all areas of the aircraft's design its shape designed for extreme aerodynamics happen to reduce radar signature as that it's black paint which was only there to help decrease its temperature the cockpit got so hot during flight that pilots used to warm their meals up by pressing them against the glass after it landed the metal would contract leaving gaps that fuel would leak out off and Blackbird pilots wore helmets and orange suits making them look more like astronauts the whole aircraft was made out of titanium as aluminium would lose its strength at high temperatures to get the titanium the CIA had to do underground deals with the USSR the very country the plane is being made to spy on the sr-71 Blackbird proved to be untouchable and its speed records still haven't been beaten today when they flew over Vietnam more than 800 anti-air missiles were fired at them to no effect and although it officially never flew through Soviet airspace it flew around the country's borders with powerful side facing cameras and radar gathering Intel at the time the Blackbird was unbeatable it flew above the Soviet Meg 25s max altitude make it flies fast but only for a few minutes whereas the Blackbird could cruise for errors at Mach 3 in the 80s to make 31 along with new surface-to-air missiles started to reduce the Blackbirds impunity but a blackbird was never shot down in the end it became a victim of reliability and cost not the enemy catching up 12 out of 32 black books were destroyed in accidents and satellites and unmanned drones could be used for gathering intelligence the costs of keeping such an aircraft operational with the support that goes with it was just too high defense spending and started to consider whether the Blackbird was still very viable to run arguments against it were it was so costly to maintain an aircraft like this it was also the fact that new technologies have started to develop satellites could achieve what black birds could and as we've seen recently new aircraft and new unmanned aerial vehicles like the predator behind me were coming to the fore as methods of reconnaissance the future of man's stealth aircraft wasn't in reconnaissance but instead as a tool for future fighters and ground attack enter skunkworks next project [Music] in 1975 engineers at Lockheed skunkworks found a way to decrease radar signature [Music] instead of trying to fly above radar or outpace enemy aircraft Lockheed turned their attention to beating radar itself to understand how we need to know how radar works radar sends out electromagnetic energy pulses when they hit something like an aircraft they bounce back being picked up by a receiver this returning signal is called an echo the begger the echo the peg of the aircraft radar sets use the echo to determine the direction and distance of the reflecting object or aircraft ironically a Russian researcher was to thank for the concept of beating radar a 1964 scientific paper had elaborated on the concept that visibility on radar was not based only on the size of an object but also the angle at which radar waves reflected off its edges the Russian researcher had devised a method for calculating the radar cross-section of objects determining how visible they are on radar the research paper had been read by an engineer at skunk works the team at Lockheed were the first to create an aircraft that reflected away a radar an aircraft built from the ground up for stealth the result was a jet that looked unlike any other the f-117 nighthawk very simply if I'm looking at a flat surface at right angles to the radar if something like this were one square meter it would have a radar return of a thousand square meters if I move it back just about eight degrees not very much they dropped from a thousand square meters to one square meter and if I move it down to a very shallow angle like about 20 degrees to horizontal it's now down to one ten millionth of what it was when it was up there the Nighthawk was aerodynamically unstable in all three axes and required constant flight corrections from a fly-by-wire flight system like modern ones are blended aircraft fuselage design it was all flat surfaces and the flat surfaces were - when a radar signal hit it it reflected it away or absorbed it you designed the aeroplane first off from a stealth viewpoint and you have to make pipe compromises on the aerodynamic design but if you want a stealthy aeroplane with the features you see on a stealthy aeroplane twin things highly agile in pitch good quality handling approach and and then you must go to an electronic fly-by-wire system which is programmable programmable with speed height probably weight of the airplane you can program into with characteristic changes in flight with whatever variables you want to suit the task you must have assigned by my sister's and make some from them the two prototypes earned the nickname wobbly goblins and both crashed during testing but soon after in 1981 the first f-117a had rolled off the production lines in total 64 were built an addition to its reflective surfaces the Nighthawk sported other design features now standard in stealth aircraft radar-absorbent iron ball paint magnetically charged to reduce the reflection of electromagnetic waves slit shaped exhaust pores to minimize the infrared signature of the exhaust the Nighthawk carried no radar because the radars of the time were easily detected and even had communication antennas that could be retracted trilogies radar signature its weapons all two of them were stored in an internal bomb bay obviously the Nighthawk wasn't invisible to the eye so it was painted black and fallen exclusively at night in 1990 the f-117 Nighthawk was used in the first Gulf War where they flew 1,300 sorties and scored direct hits on 1,600 high-value targets in Iraq only two and a half percent of the American aircraft in Iraq ornate hawks yet they struck 40% of the strategic targets drop in 2000 tons of precision guided munitions and striking their targets with an 80% success rate but the f-117 wasn't perfect 1999 somewhere over Yugoslavia the f-117 was widely seen as one of the most advanced pieces of US military equipment at the same time yugoslav air defenses were considered relatively obsolete but the yugoslav army managed to hit one of the stealth bombers with an anti-air missile it said the Trib spotted the aircraft on radar when its bomb bay doors opened raising its radar signature the next generation of stealth aircraft would need to be as aerodynamic and as maneuverable as conventional fighters advances in computers have made that possible supercomputers now calculate the ideal shapes for stealth aircraft meaning that the flat surfaces are gone replaced by smooth lines and curves but crucially still reflecting a way radar it was technology seen first on the b-2 bomber the Nighthawks first generation stealth technology limited its roles in capability but decades of advancements have pushed the envelope further it was retired in 2008 in part due to the introduction of the f-22 Raptor a stealth fighter developed by skunk works that can also carry weapons for ground attack the f-117 that black really aggressive shaped aircraft was the best of what so little black airplane wasn't very maneuverable had to fly at night but we understood a lot about codons of the aircraft about shaping and we evolved into the f-22 and we kept retained that very low observable characteristic but put it in the aircraft Eva's monster the flaw remarkably maneuverable extraordinarily powerful before the Raptor stealth aircraft didn't have afterburners or reheat because the hot exhaust would increase their infrared footprint our flying faster than the speed of sound would produce an obvious sonic boom as a result their performance in air combat would never match that of a dedicated fighter [Music] new design techniques allow for stealthy designs without compromising the f-35 bar is much of that stealth technology from the f-22 it combines advanced stealth with fighter speed and agility the f-35 is a product of 40 years of manufacturing different generations of very low observable aircraft and it's not just the shaping every omission that comes out of our aircraft radios if you will our sensors we control every part of them that heat the back of the engine of ours we control that we know every part of what's happening behind us so we can understand whether we're highlighting ourselves in the heat regime in the infrared machine not just whether we could be seen by a radar as an example that's a whole different mindset of what stealth is then people typically would think it's every duct fastener opening on the aircraft this position are placed in a way that you're never going to contaminate that Harry Potter cloak of invisibility type a scenario that we have the f-35s radar-absorbent materials are designed to be more durable and require less maintenance than those from previous aircraft but still a product with a we're the interesting things is you you don't believe in stealth until you've flown with it or flown against it it's really difficult in a fourth-generation fighter where you see essentially see everyone in your formation to hear this voice from on high from someplace that you can understand some ghosts out there someone in an f-35 you have no idea where he or she is but the little voice tells you where to go and and what's happening out there that's when you start to believe what the power of what stealth is for many countries is the first stealth capability they've ever had stealth was once an exclusive asset evidence of American aviation progress futuristic jets that kids with built models off it was technology developed and kept secret by a small group of scientists and engineers at Lockheed Martin something we've never been able to never been able to afford u2 and especially sr-71 broke the barriers because they were scientists and engineers and could do it and they could do it without any red tape and they didn't have to tell the world and it was a specialist group of highly enthusiastic you can only do that in those environments cuz if you go through the bureaucracy over them only procurement plan to do that press it never get it the same with the bureaucracy other programs through the Pentagon never get it done so you need to shut the engineers away keep away the bureaucrats give them lots of money stealth aircraft are now worldwide countries have bought into an international political project that yes has been late and over-budget but it's a project that allowed them to take a shortcut getting stealth technology to where it is now took decades of investment and those secrets that started in a skunkworks hangar and Palmdale California are now available for a price the governments around the world thanks for watching Intel releases every month on this channel and this season is all about the technologies used in the f-35 so subscribe for more like this the next video in this series is all about short takeoff and vertical landing

Channel: BFBS Creative

Views: 70,734

Rating: 4.901823 out of 5

Keywords: sr71, blackbird, stealth, f117, nighthawk, skunk works, lockheed martin, lockheed, f35, lightning, f35b, f22, raptor, u2, b2 bomber, spy plane, cold war, fighter jets, aircraft, aviation, military, area 51, billie flynn, sr-71, simon thornton, bfbs, bfbs creative, Cold War to F35: The Unlikely Journey of Stealth, Cold War, Mig-25, Mig-31, YF-12, M-21, J58, military aircraft, aviation history, skunkworks, mach 3 aircraft, Surface to air missile, Mach 3.2, CIA, air Force, Kelly Johnson

Id: vJgw-FNa08k

Length: 19min 54sec (1194 seconds)

Published: Thu May 14 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/DesignerWatercress0]

Great video!! So informative and interesting! Thanks for sharing

[u/kindacr1nge]

Why the fuck is there a skunk on the wing?

[u/Klutzy_Cryptographe1]

Sounds like a marketing video for countries that can't fly the F22.