Ight I have essentially no knowledge in planes. What makes a big triangle more stealthy than say a Pringles can with wings?
In: Technology
So you have a laser pointer in your hand. Imagine the bomber is as reflective as a mirror.
The laser pointer in your hand is the radar. You can only “see” the plane when the laser reflects back at you and your eyes.
That is almost quite literally how radar works. The laser pointer is just a shorter wavelength on the electromagnetic spectrum that we call “visible light.”
Now the name of the game for stealth is to design the shape of the bomber in such a way that as few angles as possible will ever reflect anything back the way it came from.
In theory a spherical object is the best shape to reflect minimally in all directions. However if you know the direction you want to avoid reflections, you’d end up making something that looks like the flying wing. From the front sides and back it’s as flat as can be.
It needs to carry lots of fuel and payloads while having the smallest “radar cross section” when viewed from a distance. That’s why you end up with the flying flat triangle (the entire plane is a wing so you don’t need a bulky fuselage that reflects radar).
Metal is shiny, not just to visible light, but also to the microwave lights that radars use. A radar is kind of like a big flashlight that looks around for anything that shows up in the light. The radar’s computer determines how big something probably is based on how much it lights up when the microwave flashlight is pointed at it (and some other stuff).
So the trick to stealth is to make the plane not show up in the different types of microwave light very much, so the radar computers think that they see a cloud or a bird, instead of a plane. So like others have said, the type of paint and the angles of the plane and even the flight path are all designed to make the plane look like something the radar operator wouldn’t be interested in, until it’s close enough to have launched it’s missiles and turned around (or whatever).
Great book called Skunkworks by Ben Rich on stuff like this if anyone is interested and wants to learn more on the topic.
It’s stealthy in relation to radar, not visuals.
Radar is just a big signal emitter, that sends out energy, which bounces off something, then the radar receives the energy back. The change in energy lets the radar and its operators try to interpret the change and determine what the radar energy bounced off.
If you have a tennis ball, and you’re blindfolded, and throw it at a flat brick wall, it’s pretty easy to figure out what the ball hit. If you throw it at a slanted wall, only some of the energy comes back, as the ball comes back at an angle. Since you’re blindfolded, you might not even catch the ball. If you throw it at a very slanted wall, the ball might not even come back, so you wouldn’t know anything about what the ball hit – you might assume there’s nothing there to hit, since the ball didn’t come back.
But there is something there, it’s just stealthy.
In addition to what others said, stealth itself is not *invisible* to radar. It’s better to think of stealth as camouflage.
The more lower the radar cross section (the more stealth it is), the more difficult it is to identify and lock with missiles.
Long wave radar can detect the presence of a stealth plane, but shorter wave, more precise radar needed to guide missiles had a harder time doing to. Stealth can greatly reduce the range at which radar guided missiles can target and track the plane. It can decrease those missiles accuracy.
It is not about planes. It is about electromagnetics. If you have a student email address you can download CST Microwave Studio and simulate radar cross section of whatever you want. The 3D modeling interface is similar to SolidWorks.
Long story short, your design objective is to make a shape that reflects Electromagnetic waves in a direction away from the incoming wave. The math underlying it is identical to e.g. simulating an antenna.
There’s a book titled ‘Skunkworks’ that is written by the guy who headed the division around the time this plane was developed. Great read IMO.
Aircraft do not need to be undetectable to human senses. You can still see/hear stealth aircraft.
They need to reduce their signature on radar. Without radar, you won’t have early warning to incoming aircraft. You also need radar to track aircraft and guide anti-aircraft missiles towards their targets.
Stealth aircraft work by either reflecting or adsorbing radar waves. This reduces (but can never completely eliminate) their radar signature.
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It’s not trying to hide from eyes, it’s trying to hide from radar. The triangle and the Pringles can would be equally easy to find with your eyes, but there are certain properties of radar that means the triangle is harder to find with radar.
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