Why don’t fighter planes have 360 degree radar?
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So a fighter plane needs to be aerodynamic. This means a sleek shape.
Radar is given off by some sort of antennae. These are not sleek. To keep the sleek shape of a plane like a fighter plane the radar is inside the nose of the aircraft and so it just points forwards.
Another type of plane is an AWACS plane. You may have seen these. They have a massive radar dish on top of them to see everywhere. These planes can be large and cumbersome because they’re not supposed to get into dogfights and such. If you have one of these in the air its radar image can be transmitted to you either by just reporting contacts or actually some sort of data link that you can see.
Anyway, back to fighter planes. Fighter aircraft though do have smaller receivers on them. These are to detect radar waves hitting the aircraft so while the fighter plane may only be able to see what is in front of it from its own radar system it can detect if radar is hitting it from other directions and what type. So this will tell it if another fighter aircraft’s radar is looking in its direction (even further than that aircraft can detect it). It can tell the difference between a search radar and a lock on radar.
Now here’s the kicker. Fighter aircraft don’t always fly with their radar on. The reason, as mentioned above, is that your radar will be detectable at distances further than you can get a good enough return to see. It means that you’ll be telling everyone where you are before you can see them. So quite often fighter aircraft will just turn on their radar, see if anything is ahead of them and then turn it off and change their direction of flight. If they have their own AWACS up transmitting its radar to them then they might only turn on their own radar when it’s time to get a radar lock on a target. The side without an AWACS may have to be flying around with their own radars on more often and thus are actually at a huge disadvantage.
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