Mysterious radar echo over Easter lake Ontario

[cpxxx]

I seem to remember the Serbs shot down the F117 for a more basic reason than that. They had spotters out and there were only a limited number of routes that could be used. Basically they salvoed hundreds of missiles in the path of known sightings and only got lucky once. If they really had some form of special electronics they would have brought down non stealthy aircraft in droves.

[smoe]

On a serious note, several years ago some Brit cell phone engineers had a bright idea to track the B-2. Some how they are able to track signals between transmitters. While radar works on the target sending the radio signal back to the radar set, they realized that the shape of stealth planes reflected the radio waves anywhere but the radar set. They figured they could track the B-2 by simply following the disruption in signals from one cell phone tower to another.

It worked. The Pentagon went nuts, story was printed then pulled though not before my firm printed it. Discovered in the UK but printed in an Australian paper, go figure. In any case, it was this concept that helped the Serbs shoot down a F-117 over kosovo a year or so later.

Boo

So basically every enemy knew how to track stealth fighters. I wonder if the stealth fighter pilots were given information or was it on a need-to-know basis only?

[superpug1]

The pilot went back and met the missile battery commander not too long ago. They take vacations to eachother's homes with their families. The commander of the battery actually did some pretty smart stuff to find the F-117s and get his missiles on the right track to where the IR heads could pick up on them.

[Stellaris]

Stealth is like camouflage.  It doesn't make the plane invisible to radar, it makes the plane hard to see on radar.  It is far from perfect, and bistatic and low frequency techniques see it better.  That doesn't make it useless, if only because most radars are monostatic and high frequency. 

[guncrasher]

So basically every enemy knew how to track stealth fighters. I wonder if the stealth fighter pilots were given information or was it on a need-to-know basis only?

think about it.  how did they know that the stealth fighter was flying over it and not something else causing interference.  the only way to prove it was to know in advance of the path of stealth fighters.  I kinda doubt that information would be released to the public from the AF.  also kinda doubt that engineers would risk their jobs to prove such a thing, after all tracking airplanes is not really something they're supposed to do on company time.


midway

[fbEagle]

Ambient sonar is also in widespread use.  Lots of ambient sources in the ocean - or even out of it.  Anything supersonic in the sky dumps a lot of energy into the water over a big area.

Problem is that the B2 is subsonic.

[crazyivan]

Vanscrew, trys to sneak this in every year. Tetris thunderstorm

[Stellaris]

Problem is that the B2 is subsonic.

LOL!  OK, I wasn't clear enough here - I was talking of ambient radiation tracking systems in general.  Sonar is (obviously) mostly used to track submarines.  The problem with ambient fields is that to get good localization you want a nice sharp pulse (like a traditional sonar ping), or even better a chirp, and while whales and dolphins provide these in abundance, they're very low power.  However Concorde used to cross the Atlantic at Mach 2.  With several departures scheduled daily, no less.

Get what I'm saying?

This technique could theoretically serve to track aircraft as well, as the speed of sound in water is greater than the speed of sound in air, so you'd get advance warning of the aircraft inbound.  However the localization and delay involved wouldn't allow you to target weapons directly.   I have no idea if this was ever done.  Tu-95 are loud but subsonic, so the energy transfer across the water-air interface would be very low.

[icepac]

In high school, I worked drilling and populating circuit boards for a what later became the air launched "sonobuoy".

They ended up being able to hear/sense the Tu95s when they flew over.