Royal Australian Air Force [RAAF] News, Discussions and Updates

[Todjaeger]

There’s something wrong with those articles. From 20,000 feet the horizon is about 280 km away. If the F-22 was also at 20,000 feet the maximum line of sight would be IVO 600 km. And, how did a Chinese observer get within 1000 km of an F-22, which are almost exclusively CONUS based, with the kit needed to make the observation? That’s not to mention the chaotic nature of the atmosphere when it comes to heat distribution.

The one article which mentioned an altitude, was an altitude of 20,000 metres IIRC so the radar and visual horizon issue should not be so much of an issue. The claims about the ability to actually detect non-Chinese LO aircraft in testing very much remain though.

TBH the articles tend to strike me as some of the articles which came out about 15 to 20 years ago where different nations made claims to have essentially 'defeated stealth' through various methods, but when a number of them were raised and discussed here on DT there was quite a gap, or perhaps more of a chasm, between claims and what was actually deliverable. It generally turned out that the ideas presented then, as now, seemed to be more that such developments might be able to detect LO objects, under certain circumstances. That is quite different from any claims about a method being able to reliably able detect LO objects, never mind doing so across a broad range of circumstances, and even further from then being able to reliably track a LO object once it has been detected.

Also, I would still urge people to re-read the LO sticky thread, because people still seem to think that 'stealth' is some sort of specific or discreet set of technologies which it is not.