Nighthawks finally go Grey

[KingNor]

firing missles at "best guess" trajectorys to hit planes sounds highly suspect to me.

i'm thinking something happend to compromise its stealth. i realy dont' think anyone was blindly lobbing missles where they "thought" it was going to be simply because they saw it a few other days in the same area.

weirder stuf has happend i guess. nothings perfect you know, it IS warfare, stuff gets shot down.

did you read my post? The F-117 isn't some absolutely invisible vehicle. Never did I say they were shooting blindly, however the Fighter probably gave off intermittent signals, while flying past which they used to give a best guess to fire. It has been also said that they probably staggerd the radar sites to give the best signal possible.

are they radar guided missles? if they don't have a target they don't fire them.

if the missles use some other form of traking then ok, i admittadly don't know much about serbian (or what ever) missles. but i DO know that if a missle requires a lock of somekind (radar or heat sig) and the 117 wasn't damaged, or compromised in anyway, then they woudlnt' have fired, becasue even if they could see the thing, they couldln't lock it.

missles like that don't fire under "best guess" situations, and the 117 while not perfect, doesn't offer a target if its working properly. it has the radar return of something like a small bird or bug or something like that, even from the sides. no missle will lock onto a bird. and i beleive the heat from the plane is FAR below missle targeting capability.

The Airforce Ruled out ANYTHING that may have compromised stealth... the fighter was  perfectly operational.

i guess that makes it true

i've heard the military cover up things, sometimes in cases when their "highly trained" people do something really really dumb like leave their landing gear down, or take off with bomb-bay doors open.

i'm thinking it was probably something more like that, pilot error. i know they put special reflector plates ont he stealths when flying non-combat.. perhaps one was on the plane some how.

anyway. new grey for the 117 ? neat. i'd like to see one in standard grey. the camo one looked pretty cool.

Edited April 12, 2004 by KingNor

[Noyhauser]

Again, the F-117 isn't some invisible fighter. According to Former pilots and industry experts, the F-117 almost increased its RCS by a factor of 100 in a bank. Moreover, it has been discovered that Low frequency radars are far more able to defeat stealth than high frequency radars. However their image resolution is low, making them less than ideal as a guidance radar. It is quite possilbe that the Serbians used either a newer model of Russian/Czech radar, or slaved their lower frequency search radar as a guidance radar, and detonated the missile in the proximity of the F-117.

Moreover, these missiles DO NOT need a lock on to fire. The SA-3 does not need a lock on to fire because it is a command guided missile, it is directed by the command vehicle towards targets. Thats serbians probably learned some dirty tricks to use with SA-3 that allowed it to take out the F-117. the SA-6 (which the Russians Claimed to have shot down the F-117) does not need a lock on at first, but does need mid course guidance from radar. This was done to ensure that the Radar site cannot be targeted when firing its missile.

This isn't some conspiracy to cover up the truth. I got my information from a book published by the Rand Corporation, ""NATO's Air War for Kososvo, A Strategic and operational Assessment" by Benjamin Lambeth. The US airforce did not hesitate in laying blame on other factors like the EA-6B, the mission route, and inadequate SEAD procedures.

[KingNor]

i stand corrected about the missles, though i still think that if what ever was going after them relyed on either radar or heat, then it woudln't have worked. maybe it hit the plane on luck, yet never managed to track it.

i just find it hard to belive that it was shot down by some easyly duplicatable tactic like pinging it from the side or something like that.

[David Hingtgen]

There's a few more photos of the Have Blue(s) in WAPJ issue #19. I reference it often for it is both the main F-117 issue, and the "F-14A/B/D comparison" issue.

Best pic is an up-close detailed one of Have Blue #2 in flight, from below, with its elevons deflected. You can really see how different its flight controls are from an F-117's.