Everyone’s talking about how the F-35 Lightning II has a RCS the size of a Golfball but I don’t know what it means or how significant it is.
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The other comments here are absolutely correct. Big things reflect a lot of the radar signal while small things reflect very little of the radar signal. And the F-35 reflects about as much of the radar signal as a golf ball, or more common for the radars, a sparrow. But radars do not just measure the power of the reflected signal but also measures the speed through the dopplar shift in frequency. A radar might have issues finding the weak return signal from an F-35 in all the random radio noise it picks up, but if it detects even a very faint signal it will be able to tell that it is going supersonic and is therefore very unlikely to be a golf ball or a small bird. So a fighter jet is not going to be completely invisible on radar even with such a small radar cross section.
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