Ight I have essentially no knowledge in planes. What makes a big triangle more stealthy than say a Pringles can with wings?
In: Technology
Angles. Say you throw a bouncy ball straight at a wall, it comes back to you right?
Now stand 45degrees facing the wall, it’d bye bye ball.
Radar needs signals to return in order know something is there.
It’s all about radar and other sensors. Odds are you can’t see most planes flying above you because of cloud cover or distance, especially at night. So, people use radar and other sensors. I don’t know the specifics, but suffice it to say that the shape and materials used significantly reduce the plane’s radar profile so enemy sensors either don’t “see” it, or it “looks” different enough to not warrant a response that would normally accompany an enemy bomber/stealth plane.
When it comes to planes, visual inspection if the least important part of “stealth”. If you’re relying on someone seeing the plane to let you know that there’s a bomber incoming, you’re already fucked.
Stealth planes use a wide variety of plane shapes, materials, and technologies to make the plane hard to detect via the various methods we use to detect planes at long range. For example, if you scatter or absorb so much of the incoming radar waves that the returning signal is sufficiently small, you’re functionally invisible to radar.
The full list of how this is accomplished is well outside the range of an ELI5, but basically, you just have to convince enemy detection systems that you’re not as big or as fast as you actually are.
The shape of the plane and materials it’s made of are specifically designed to have the lowest radar signal possible. Basically if a radar on the ground is pointed in its direction it won’t reflect the signal back
Using my super simplified knowledge, certain shapes and colors/paint (like the B2, the lack of vertical stabilizers, etc) allows a radar’s radio waves to bounce off the plane, making it “invisible.” Certain planes such as the YF23 also have methods to be stealthy with tiles to hide the heat from the exhaust, ECM pods to jam the radar, etc.
[This Redditor](https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/s/pFqLgZc8jS) answered this question beautifully
Look towards a wall mounted mirror. You can see yourself right?
Imagine a pringles can shaped mirror. Youd still be able to see yourself, just a bit distorted
Now look at a mirror angled away from you. You wont see yourself at all if the angle is correct
The angles of a stealth plane help reflect the radar waves so that almost none of them return to the radar. To be as effective as possible though the pilots need to have a good idea of where the radars are so they can plan their flight path to orient their angles correctly to defeat the radar
Essentially two things make it stealth.
Radar works by transmitting a radar signal, then listening for the signal to come back after it bounces off of an object. The shape is of the fuselage is designed to prevent the radar signal from going back to the radar antenna.
The second part is the skin of the plane is made of materials designed to absorb radar signals.
These two things to combine to make it harder to detect a stealthy aircraft with a radar.
There’s a few different things going on.
First, the way it is shaped gives very few edges. There is no tails, canards or other shapes. The engines and their intakes are hidden on top of the aircraft and can’t be seen from most directions and the aircraft is generally a single blended shape with no features sticking out. Radar waves that strike it bounce off, but generally don’t bounce back to the transmitter.
Second is it’s coated in material that absorbs radar waves.
Last, it’s a dark color. This makes it harder to see at night.
Imagine you are in a completely dark room. You know there’s a wasp in there with you somewhere, but you don’t know where. You have a flashlight, and swing it around the room, looking for the wasp. You know you’ve found it when you see a bright yellow dot when the light from your flashlight reflects back off the wasp and into your eyes.
Radar is the same. The light they use is radio waves (fun fact: the microwave oven was developed based on the same technology that makes radar work), and the wasp is an airplane.
Stealth planes are shaped in such a way that the Radar is reflected away, instead of back at the tower- imagine if the wasp in our scenario above had mirrors all over that reflected all the light that hit it away from your eyes.
The materials the planes are made of also absorb radar waves- imagine the wasp were also painted flat black.
So in summary- radar is how we “see” airplanes from many miles away. The stealth plane absorbs much of the radar that hits it and reflects that which isn’t absorbed away, so the radar can’t “see” the plane.
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