How Does Stealth Technology Actually Work

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defending the country remained silent their Radars fruitlessly searching the skies for unseen Intruders little did the Iraqis know that they were up against an entirely new type of weapon an aircraft designed to be almost invisible to radar allowing it to penetrate deep into enemy territory and strike a critical targets with impunity known as the Lockheed F-117 Nighthawk this revolutionary stealth fighter would go on to fly 1 250 sorties and drop more than 2 000 tons of bomb on Iraq without a single aircraft being shot down helping bring Operation Desert Storm the un-backed expulsion of Iraqi forces from Kuwait to a Swift and decisive inclusion since then the f-117's Revolutionary technology is proliferated throughout the world's militaries completely reshaping the face of Modern Warfare but how does this technology work how is it possible to render an entire modern jet aircraft nearly invisible well strap in as we dive into the fascinating history and Technology of stealth in the early days of military Aviation little attention was played to stealthiness anti-aircraft defenses were primitive and it was more important for aircraft to be easily recognized as Friend or Foe by ground forces and other aircraft for this reason during the first World War aircraft were prominently marked with national Insignia like British and French tricolor Andals or the German Balkan Crews but as the war progressed an aviation technology improved greater emphasis was placed on camouflage both on the ground and in the air most Nations thus adopted various camouflage schemes generally consisting of pale blue or tan lower surfaces to blend in against the sky and green or brown upper surfaces to match the ground below what unusually elaborate scheme was the lozenge camera flage used by the luftwick crafter or imperial German air force this consisted of a pattern of four or five-sided polygons in a variety of colors including blue gray green black purple and even pink and it were pre-printed on fabric that was used to cover aircraft wings and fuselages these disruptive patterns were intended to break up the aircraft outline against the ground and the sky and were printed in a number of versions for use on upper and lower surfaces and for day and night operations however even late into the war many fighter pilots issued camouflage for garish color schemes indended to Aid unit cohesion displaying national pride and individuality and intimidate the enemy for example Pilots of Jagdish vader1 the famous Flying Circus commanded by top German Ace manfrin Ron Richthofen aka the Red Baron painted their aircraft bright crimson while those of Jaster 6 opted for zebra-like black and white stripes despite this the Germans did make the first attempt to build a truly stealthy aircraft in 1916 they replaced a fabric covering of a Forker E3 monoplane fighter with sheets of an early transparent plastic called Salon creating something that looked like the ancestor of Wonder Woman's invisible jet unfortunately testing revealed that while the aircraft was indeed difficult to spot against a clear sky in Cloudy conditions light reflecting off the shiny cell and skin actually made the aircraft even more visible so back to the drawing board while the Germans did not pursue this approach any further in 1935 the Soviet Engineers Sergey koslov tried building his own transparent aircraft to modify the yakolev air for reconnaissance plane known as the koslov PS however the Soviets ran into the same problems as the Germans two decades before and this project too was soon scrapped in the interwar period relatively few advancements were made in the field of aircraft camouflage indeed the growing doctrine of airpar championed by theorists like Italian Army may Joe gilio duhay held that modern bomber aircraft flew too high and fast and were too heavily armed to be shot down allowing them to attack their targets with impunity this conceit which British prime minister Stanley Baldwin described as the bomber will always get through made camouflaging an aircraft's approach redundant however several outside finger circles saw the advantages of aerial camouflage and tried to tell the military on their theories among these was New Hampshire artist Albert Henderson Thayer who after observing and painting countless animals in the wild came up with a theory of camouflage known as counter-shading according to Thayer the dark upper and light lower coloration of most animals serves to camouflage them against their environment by countering the effects of light and Shadow normally direct sunlight makes an animal appear light above and dark below counter-shattering however darkens the light areas and lightens the dark reducing the animal's contrast against its background and making it appear flat auras there himself described the effect in his 1909 book concealing coloration in the animal kingdom animals are painted by Nature darkest on those parts which tend to be most lighted by the sky's light and vice versa the fact that a vast majority of creatures of the whole Animal Kingdom wear this gradation developed to an exquisitely minute degree and a famous being hard to see in their homes speaks for itself Thayer's conclusions are now disputed with modern zoologists arguing that not all counter shading in animals is related to camouflage and that certain color schemes are instead intended for display warning or thermoregulation purposes nonetheless based on his observations In 1902 Fair found a patent on the use of counter shading to camouflage ships at Sea and during the first world war tried to convince the U.S Navy to adopt his methods but the Navy was uninterested and ignored him shortly before the second world war zoologist Hugh Cott to cut the cause and tried to sell the British Armed Forces on the concept of counter shading unfortunately cot had The Misfortune of Being the Protege of John Graham Kerr a biologist who during the first world war had argued with artist Norman Wilkinson over the effectiveness of Dazzle camouflage a scheme to paint ships in bold black and white stripes to break up their outlines and protect them from submarines and for more on this bizarre form of camouflage please check out our previous video why were so many British and American warships in World War One painted like zebras in 1939 Norman Wilkinson was serving as the British Army's inspector of camouflage and thus held enormous influence over how military vehicles and Equipment were painted despite this hugot was invited to take part in an experiment in which two 12-inch Railway guns were camouflaged one using cot's counter-shading method and the other using conventional techniques the guns were then photographed from the air from different angles according to Observer Peter Forbes the contrast was striking cot's gun was invisible except to the most minute scrutiny by someone who knows exactly where to look and what to look for the other gun is always highly visible though this should have Vindicated caught the demonstration embarrassed the Army and they refused to adopt kotz's ideas arguing that his scheme was too complicated to apply properly then in order to get the Troublesome zoologist out of the way the Army posted him to the Middle East but while counter shading was never formally adopted by any armed forces during the second world war baronkot's ideas nevertheless influenced camouflage Doctrine throughout the conflict most Nations fighting aircraft were painted some combination of pale blue or gray blue below and dark colors matching the surrounding terrain above roughly approximating a counter-shaded scheme in addition reconnaissance aircraft-like versions of the British supermarine spitfired American Lockheed P-38 Lightning were painted all over in a special dark Azure color known as pru blue developed by Australian inventor Sydney cotton the color helped these unarmed aircraft blend against the dark sky at high altitudes the war also saw the development of an unusual camouflage system known as the yehudi light from 1943 onwards the introduction of long-range Patrol aircraft allowed the Allies to turn the tide against German U-boats which had been decimating Merchant traffic in the North Atlantic since the very first day of the war however yubo Crews often spotted these slow-moving aircraft from several kilometers away giving them enough time to crash dive and slip away some method was thus needed to conceal these aircraft's approach allowing them to sneak up on unsuspecting U-boats developed by the US Navy in 1943 who Delights consisted of a set of electric lights attached to the leading edges of an aircraft's wings and powered by an onboard gen greater when activated these lights washed out and broke up the aircraft's dark silhouette making it harder to see against the bright sky this is similar in principle to the technique of counter-illumination used by certain sea creatures like the mid-water squid the underside of the squid are covered in light producing organs called photophores which are inactivated help lighten it to conceal its silhouette when seen from below the system's unusual name came from the late 1930s slang phrase who's yehudi used to refer to a mysterious or absent person in 1945 the hoodie lights were tested aboard a Grumman TBF Avenger torpedo bomber promisingly while a regular aircraft was detected at a range of 19 kilometers the yehudi equipped Avenger got within three kilometers around 30 seconds flying time of the test chip before being spotted too close for a U-Boat to crash dive a system called diffused lighting camouflage was also tested by the Royal Canadian Navy and consisted of a series of spotlights aimed at the sides of a ship to counter-illuminate and conceal its silhouette against the sky between 1941 and 1943 the system was installed experimental on a number of RCN vessels including the flower class Corvette hmcs remusky oh which in September 1943 spotted and intercepted the German submarine u-536 in the beta chalure in Quebec the U-Boat appeared not to see remusky approaching and the ship Moved In For the Kill unfortunately at the last moment a stray radio communication from The Shore alerted u-536's Commander Captain lieutenant scharnberg and the submarine succeeded in Crash diving and escaping despite these promising results neither hoodie lights nor defused light in camouflage we used operationally during the war though the idea may be making a comeback in 2008 researchers from the University of Kansas covered a small drone in electroluminescent panels whose color could be matched to the sky flying at 300 meters the Drone became almost invisible to the naked eye by the time such visual camouflage systems came of age however they had been rendered all but redundant by one of world war II's game-changing technological inventions radar developed independently by the Germans and the British in the late 30s radar short for radio detection and ranging works by emitting a beam of microwaves which bounce off the Target and detected by the radar receiver allowing the target's position and speed to be measured For the First Time radar allowed incoming aircraft to be detected far beyond Visual and auditory range giving ample warning of an attack and sufficient time for anti-aircraft offenses to be deployed indeed the British chain home radar system and its Associated Ground Control interception Network the doubting system was a pivotal factor in allowing the Royal Air Force to defeat the German luftwaffe during the 1940 Battle of Britain meanwhile the German camo line a network of freyr and Wurzburg Radars radar-controlled searchlights and anti-aircraft guns and night Fighters made the Skies over Germany deadly for RAF bombers attempting to pound Nazi industry in submission early attempts at radar countermeasures however Focus not on making aircraft less detectable but rather on jamming and confusing the radar itself the simplest of these countermeasures was codenamed window which consisted of thin strips of aluminum foil dropped in bundles out of aircraft these clouds of aluminum returned massive radio Echoes overwhelming and blinding the German radar operators window turned out to be one of the allies's most effective secret weapons being used to devastating effect during the firebombing of Hamburg in July 1943 and the massive deception campaign in the lead-up to the D-Day Landings in June 1944 and for more on this please do check out our previous video operation Bodyguard the grand deception that made D-Day possible modern versions of window known as chaff are still carried by military aircraft today and along with high temperature infrared flares are launched in order to defeat radar and infrared guide to anti-aircraft missiles the Allies also developed a number of active electronic jamming systems including moonshine cigar grocer and jossel which broadcast powerful Radio Systems intended to overwhelm German radar and night fighter Radio Systems while no World War II aircrafts were deliberately designed to be invisible to radar a few managed to achieve this ability by accident including the British to Haviland mosquito light bomber due to wartime metal shortages the mosquito was built on most entirely of laminated plywood which happened to be transparent to German radar while the mosquito's large metal engines and propellers still returned radar Echoes the wooden airframes gave the aircraft the radar cross section of a much smaller aircraft making it much harder to detect and track a fundamental term when discussing self-technology radar cross-section or RCS refers to the size of a spherical metal reflector that would return the equivalent radar echo of a particular vehicle while it is impossible to make an aircraft completely invisible to radar modern stealth techniques can reduce the radar cross-section of an aircraft the size of the Northrop Grumman B2 Spirit a bomber with a 52 meter wingspan down to the size of a tennis ball Another World War II aircraft commonly believed to have stealth capabilities was the experimental German Horton ho 229 Flying Wing Jet Fighter a futuristic design the Horton lack diffuselage or vertical tail surfaces parts of regular aircraft that are excellent radar reflectors like the mosquito it was also built largely of wood and was even coated in paint containing carbon particles intended to absorb or radar waves theoretically all of this should have made the Horton the world's first true stealth aircraft but the war ended before it could see service in 2008 however the Northrop Grumman Corporation and the National Geographic Society teamed up to evaluate the advanced German Jets anti-radar capabilities the team constructed a full-size non-flying mock-up took it to Northrop grumman's radar test range at teon California and exposed it to radar waves of various frequencies these tests revealed that the model had a radar cross-section around 40 that of standard German World War II fighter the messerschmidt bf-109 however this experiment failed to account for two important factors first the real aircraft was not built entirely of wood and featured an internal steel structure and second its twin jet engines especially their spinning compressor blades would have been very strong radar reflectors these two factors combined would have made the Horton's stealth capabilities marginal at best even the Innovative carbon-laced paint was found to be largely ineffective against World War II era Radars indeed the first deliberate application of radar style technology took place not in the air but at Sea the development of a centimetric Airborne radar gave the Allies a huge advantage in the battle of the Atlantic allowing Patrol aircraft to detect objects as small as a submarine Periscope on the ocean's surface from several kilometers away in response the Germans developed Innovative radar-absorbing materials code name Sean steinfagger and symph which was applied to U-Boat periscopes and the snorkels that they used to run their diesel engines while submerged these materials were effectively versions of the Salisbury screen developed by American engineer Winfield Salisbury in the early 1940s this consisted of a sheet of insulating material of a particular thickness sandwiched between a metal screen and a solid metal sheet when a radar wave hit the screen it split into two components one half of the wave reflected off the screen while the second traveled through it and bounced off the solid metal layer the two waves then canceled each other out through the destructive interference causing the object to which they were applied to return a much weaker signal the Germans also pioneered a form of acoustic stealth technology to protect U-boats against plastic the Allied code name for active sonar codenamed arboric after the invisible dwarf from Germanic mythology this took the form of special rubber tires applied to the hull of the U-Boat the tiles were covered in specially shaped holes which would absorb any Aztec sound waves that struck them albrech was applied experimentally to a handful of U-boats including the u-480 the coating proved highly effective with the 480s commander managing to Sig four ships in five days in August 1944 without ever being detected by the Allies unfortunately the war ended before the technology could be implemented on a wider scale today however anechoic tiles like alboric are a common feature on many military submarines the development of true stealth technology would have to wait until the post-war period but only after some hard lessons were learned in combat in the early years of the Cold War the main Western strategy for defeating Soviet air defenses was simply to fly too high and too fast to be intercepted in 1956 Lockheed aircraft introduced the U2 a spy plane designed to penetrate deep into Soviet airspace and photograph strategic military installations essentially year jet-powered glider with enormous 31 meter Wings the U2 was hardly stealthy but it could cruise at it out due to 24 000 meters far higher than any Soviet fighter on Missile could reach so while Soviet radar easily tracked the U2 over flights for four years the aircraft enjoyed relative immunity from Attack then on May the 1 1960 YouTube pilot Francis Gary Powers was shot down by a Soviet s-75 Davina missile while on a mission over svertlovsk in addition to sparking a mage diplomatic incident the shoot down revealed that Soviet missile technology had caught up with the U2 and that some method was now needed to conceal future overflights thankfully blockade had already initiated a project codenamed rainbow with the goal of making the U2 less visible to radar ultimately three solutions were developed codenamed trapeze wires and wallpaper trapezium-wise consisted of fine steel wires mounted on short fiberglass pylons strung along the leading and trailing edges of the Wings and along the sides of the fuselage which broke up in scouted radar waves while wallpaper was a Salisbury screen-based Raider are absorbing material applied to the aircraft's fuselage unfortunately testing revealed that these modifications were only marginally effective against Soviet radar they also produced significant drag and seriously impacted performance costing the YouTube 1500 meters in altitude and 2 200 kilometers in range even worse the wallpaper material acted as a thermal insulator and caused the engine to overheat with fatal consequences during an April the 2nd 1957 test flight heat buildup caused the aircraft engine to fail this in turn caused the cabin to depressurize and test pilot Robert cyker's pressure suit to pop open psycho immediately lost Consciousness and the aircraft entered a flat spin and spiraled towards the ground though cycle eventually regained Consciousness and bailed out he was too close to the ground and was killed nonetheless operational flights of the modified U2's code named dirty birds of covered wagons began in July 1957 the total of nine missions were flown before the system was deemed ineffective and the project was abandoned with the U2 quickly becoming obsolete Lockheed decided to take a different approach to defeating Soviet air defenses rather than out climbing Soviet Fighters and missiles they would instead outrun them the result was the a12 ox cart a futuristic titanium spy plane capable of flying at more than three times the speed of sound while the a12 and the later SR-71 blackbird's main defense was their sheer speed great effort was also taken to minimize their radar cross-section the first aircraft to be so designed from the ground up stealth features included angled vertical tail surfaces and a sharp Chine around the fuselage to deflect radar waves away from the aircraft to the use of radar absorbing Composite Materials in many components and fuel additives to make the jet exhaust less detectable to infrared sensors the result was an aircraft with a radar cross-section of a Piper Cub a civilian recreational aircraft about half its size however the first stealth aircraft as we understand the term today would not appear until the 1980s with the technology that made it possible coming ironically from the Soviet Union in 1962 Soviet physicist Piata or fimsev published a groundbreaking paper titled method of edge waves in the physical theory of diffraction in which he has described how to accurately calculate radar cross-section of any shape and how to design a shape that would reflect the majority of radar waves away from its source though it attracted little interest in Russia the paper was secretly translated into English and in 1975 came to the attention of Lockheed radar specialist Denny's overholzer overhauls her realized that ifimsev's theories could be used to render an aircraft nearly invisible to radar based on his recommendations Lockheed and the U.S government approved a development program under the code name have blue the design of the specially shaped stale fairframe was undertaken by engineer Bill Schroeder as 1970s computers were not powerful enough to analyze complex curved shapes shoda designed the aircraft entirely out of flat angled planes to make the analysis easier a technique now known as passating this however resulted in a shape that was completely unstable in Flight thankfully recent developments in computerized stability augmentation systems also known as flyby wire allowed the radical new aircraft to be made flyable the result of have blue was a pair of sub-scale Technology demonstrator draft that looked unlike anything the world had ever seen wedge-shaped and covered in sharp angled facets the aircraft looked so unaer Dynamic that its Builders jokingly nicknamed it the Hopeless diamond in addition to its trademark faceting have blue integrated a number of other RCS reducing features including sharply angled vertical tail surfaces like the a12 and SR-71 on regular aircraft the most radar reflective features tend to be cavities like the cockpit engine intakes and wheel wells as well as moving Parts like spinning jet engine compressor blades thus on have blue great care was taken to hide or fare over these features the steeply angled canopy was coated in a thin layer of gold which reflected radar waves away from the cockpit while not affecting the Pilot's Vision the engines were buried deep in the fuselage with protective screens covering the intakes while heat absorbing tiles lining the exhaust ducts reduced the exhaust's temperature and the aircraft's infrared signature finally the whole aircraft was covered in special paint impregnated with tiny iron spheres which would absorb radar waves and dissipate their energy in the form of heat have blue made its Maiden flight on December 1st 1977 above Groom Lake in Nevada better known as area 51. the test program revealed that the aircraft worked exactly as intended the stability augmentation system allowed for smooth controllable flight while the stealth features reduced the aircraft's RCs to that of a marble while both prototypes were destroyed by mechanical problems unrelated to their stealth features the program was considered successful enough for Lockheed to proceed to the next phase codenamed senior Trend the result was the F-117 Nighthawk which made its Maiden flight on June the 18th 1981. though popularly known as the stealth fighter the F-117 was designed from the outset as a bomber capable of penetrating deep into enemy territory and carrying out Precision strikes using laser guide ammunitions in addition to the stealth features developed by have blue the F-117 lacked radar or any other transmitters that could portray its presence and carried its weapons in an internal Bombay 64 f-117s were produced the type first scene combat during the U.S invasion of Panama in 1989. the Nighthawk remained in service for 25 years finally being retired in 2008. in that time only one Nighthawk was ever lost in combat an aircraft flown by Lieutenant Colonel Daryl zalco shot down by a missile over Yugoslavia on March 27 1999. the success of the F-117 paved the way for further advances in stealth technology in 1989 the same year the F-117 was first deployed the Northrop Corporation now Northrop Grumman introduced the B-2 Spirit stealth bomber echoing the design of the wartime German Horton 229 the B2 is a pure flying wing with no vertical tail servicers and a crew compartment engines and internal Bombay smoothly blended into its chevron-shaped wing as previously mentioned these features along with its buried engine intakes and radar absorbing paint help give the B2 an RCS equivalent to a tennis ball though originally designed to penetrate Soviet airspace and Destroy strategic targets using nuclear warheads the end of the Cold War relegated the B2 to the controversial bombing role the type being used for air support in Kosovo Afghanistan Iraq and Libya however the aircraft's unique capabilities come at a tremendous cost with the 21 strong B2 Fleet being valued at nearly 2 billion dollars a piece in recent years stealth technology has been incorporated into an increasing number of military vehicles aircraft like the American Lockheed F-22 Rapture and F-35 lightning II the Russian Sukhoi su-57 and the Chinese Chengdu j-20 all incorporate stealth features pioneered by the F-117 including faceting internal weapons bays and metal coated canopies though modern computer software has allowed Engineers to design more curved aerodynamic airframe shapes that do not require as much computer correction to render stable many of these aircraft also incorporate what are known as radar-absorbing structures with special cavities that absorb and dissipate incoming radar waves the effect is what one engineer Likens do an electromagnetic roach motel radar waves check in but they never check out many modern Naval vessels also feature a stealthy faceted design including the French Lafayette class Dutch de Zeb and provincian class and the Swedish whispy class but whilst Earth has been Game Changer in the fields of aerial and Naval Warfare if history has taught us anything it's that on the technological Battlefield no tactical or strategic Advantage is maintained for very long new weapons lead to new countermeasures and so on and it is only a matter of time before new technologies render stealth as obsolete as the introduction of radar made visual camouflage during the second world war indeed developments in multi-beam and low frequency radar and enhanced infrared Imaging are already beginning to chip away at modern stealth Effectiveness and nobody knows what the future is going to hold

Channel: Today I Found Out

Views: 108,690

Keywords: today i found out, tifovidz12, tifo, awesome, facts, didn't know, stealth, nanotube, signature, cross-section, nighthawk, radar, raptor, bomber, fighter, military, air force, lightning, usaf, spirit, attacker, triangles

Id: lKfozw5kDyQ

Length: 26min 11sec (1571 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 10 2023