| No. Not a F-22 or F-35 are unlikely to actually be invisible. A B-2 bomber has a better chance. The talking heads from the military may talk about 'invisibility', but they are full of shit. Just propaganda for the tax payer. The problem is the physical size of the jet. In order to absorb the radar the material needs to be the proper size in relation to the wavelength. A B-2 bomber is large enough to absorb useful radar frequencies, but F-35 or F-22 isn't. What the F-35/F-22 stealth does get, however, is invisibility in the XHF and higher frequency ranges, which is what is used for radar guided missiles. So they will have a major advantage against ground and air launched long range missiles. The F-22 also has good infrared suppression, which protects it against infrared guided missiles. F-35s have a large IR signature, so they are probably not much better then other US jets. Traditionally speaking it's IR weapons that have caused losses for USA airplanes in modern times. At VHF and lower frequencies the F-22 and F-35 can be detected, but those radars don't offer enough resolution to make them particularly useful for missiles. People suspect that with multiple angles and computer algorithms it may be possible to target a jet that way, but who knows. So if you were Russia and you detected something with VHF long range radar and then you pointed a shorter range XHF radard at it... and nothing shows up then you can be reasonably certain that it's a American stealth fighter jet. That doesn't mean they can do much about it, though. To combat this it is suspected that Americans use a technique that involves 'ghosting' commercial airliner traffic to mask the signatures of their jets against the lower frequency, longer range, radar. |
You mean flying under commercial traffic? That's what was likely the cause of French jets downing a civilian plane over Italy in 1980 - while trying to hit a Lybian MIG "hidden" under it. Reportedly, Lybian planes routinely did that in order to reach their servicing bases in Yugoslavia.