best-kept secrets a covert technology that borders on science fiction these mysterious aircraft make futuristic movies and video games seem odd to me mystery here superior missions while keeping their technology shrouded in secrecy but now rare footage reveals new information about the stabber as a disguise it’s the ultimate virtual-reality ride aboard the invisible airplanes up today and tomorrow stealth and beyond next it’s a revolution warfare high-tech and otherworldly nearly invisible and soaring at supersonic speeds in a multi-threaded global environment these possum airplanes to scare the pants off any adversary and the enemy won’t even see them coming she to their sure strike capabilities stealth these winged warriors primarily were designed to sneak past enemy radar but they also have other stealthy technologies that surpassed most conventional war planes today.
History of Stealth Aircraft (Video)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzQPIlXe2H0
two stealth aircraft are fully operational three more are slated to thunder across the not so friendly skies in the near future in these are only the ones we know about I don’t think this anybody in a moment to catch the Americans in terms of stuff technologies it provides us the capability to dominate the airspace anywhere in the world well out into the future in order to penetrate the spooky world a stealth one must look Edwin this daring technology got started the F one seventeen A Nighthawk was the first operational stealth aircraft the F one seventeen days bizarre designed looks like something out of Star Wars the plane resembles an oversized I’m in because if it’s faceted shape wanted the secrets to expel the mass this black chick has proven its stealthy straight did combat missions including operation desert storm Operation Allied Force in Kosovo and cooperation conceded anyone who sees what happened on day one 1991 up Gulf War we’ll see what is achievable by self when you had a small force F one seventeen stealth fighters head into Iraq totally unobserved takeout’s all the major leadership targets in Baghdad and still no Iraqi really have a clue West direct that surface to air missile or anti-aircraft fire the F one seventeen.
success story but how did the project ever get off the ground the idea of nearly invisible aircraft has been around since the dawn of light in 1917 Germany covered ago the bomber with cellophane skins to try to make it less visible although this primitive concept didn’t work the technology eventually took flight in the late nineteen fifties during the cold war in Iraq seventy percent of the Soviet Union’s defense systems had been using a technology called radar the system sends out electromagnetic signals which reflect of a target such as an airplane radar antennas on the ground can pick up the reflected energy and determine the distance and direction of the plains in May 1960 Russian radar identified a CIA u-2 spy plane and subsequently shot it down using surface to air missiles the pilot Francis Gary Powers was taken prisoner the events sent shock waves across the US the air force quickly realized it needed airplanes capable of getting past enemy radar to destroy their ground weapons the stealth race was on American aeronautical engineers began looking into an aircraft shape as a way to deflect radar in the nineteen sixties the Lockheed Corporation built the sr-71 Blackbird reconnaissance plane with simple stealth features on the sr-71 was one of the first airplane did I know of that was specifically designed to try to have loose stealth characteristics both from the phone interview materials and also from shaping the United States first real push to spoof enemy radar came in 1975 the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency known as darpa ask several aeronautics companies including Northrop unlucky to design a stealth the plane under the project called Harvey named after the invisible rabbit in the popular
Hollywood film starring Jimmy Stewart but in the end proved they had the right stuff they came up with the winning model called I have blue low have blue was designed to be an airplane with the world’s lowest radar cross-section it was like designing a car to break the speed record after achieving this will result I have been prototyped issues to building F one seventeen A Nighthawk which was conceived in Lockheed’s highly secretive skunk works division the company’s president enrich hired the best engineers in the business to work on the highly clandestine project high was the first program manager and chief engineer for the F one seventeen stealth was at that time in 1977 78 was tremendously exciting to Lockheed skunk works well we all thought was the this company in the country may be in the world are doing innovative technological things engineers first came up with the new stealthy shape the you some clever math to remove any square panels and 45 degree angles which dramatically reflect radar as a result they designed a multi-faceted diamond-shaped airplane with radical zigzag edges around doors and windows to reduce the RCS for radar cross-section radar cross section is really are the Mariner Energy that’s reflected back from the aircraft to a radar on the ground is looking forward other way to reduce an aircraft’s radar cross-section is by applying radar absorbing material or RAM it’s a secret recipe on electromagnetic materials which absorb or redirect radar energy coming from ground-based Asians or other planes a computer sprays on the coating which absorbs the high frequencies directed at the plane’s on the radar absorbing structure absorbs lower frequencies shaping encoding reduced the F one seventeen’s radar cross-section by eighty-five percent but who said stealth was only skin deep.
the plane also featured a wide variety of other stealthy technologies including visual acoustic and infrared which is he produced by engine exhaust debt with an infrared seeking missile will go after may not be able see one radar but if you can see a heat signature he’ll go after that he signature engineers solve this problem by creating see in RAM coded slots at the end of the plane’s two engines to dissipate the exhaust can reduce its infrared signature the F one seventeen a was designed to be sub Sunday to further reduce the amount of heat generated at higher speeds another concession was the plane’s highly swept view detail which lowered the radar signature but created an aerodynamically unstable planes simply put a diamond-shaped aircraft is tough to fly traditional air vehicles have curved surfaces that permit air to flow smoothly over them the F one seventeen’s shape is not care Damocles stables a few if you just locked all the control surfaces immense this let it fly it would he would pretty quickly disco outta control and the solution engineers installed a fly by wire system a computer connected to the pilots controls which maintain stability in flight yet one of the most remarkable aspects of stealth is it’s highly classified technology the F one seventeen a was a deep black project no one in government knew it existed except for the pentagon black program is one that the funding has the funding use concealed in various part 4 leave soon the Pentagon’s budget in this done usually at a remote location and the research is done clandestine great programs over in the budget is known in a little bit more comes off clean people know what’s going on because talk a lot about it the security at was of course very tight we worked in the building which have no windows and everything that was in there stayed there in the do not talk about what you doing anywhere else I was suspected probably being a mole in the skunk works her head an advanced degree wish I got in Europe hi denigrated in my mid-twenties my head work my way into a very high technical position and all that you know fits the mold exactly with secrecy being paramount.
the F one seventeen A’s test flights were conducted at area 51 a place the pentagon claims doesn’t exist a remote area in the Nevada desert 100 miles from Las Vegas this mysterious sight is a top security facility were stealth technology has been tested under the cover of darkness the cloak of secrecy has attracted still sleeps who are obsessed with seeking out clues about the cutting edge airplanes I’ve been on the job the desert over 80 times I will not break the law of push it to the very edge what are the ways I was able to find out information on would turn out to be the F one seventeen I have a lot of friends there now retired that work to the skunk works and they were just feed me little bits of information things that were not classified so you’re looking Syria little piece there filling all blanks by the late 1980s had produced so many F one seventeen A’s that they could no longer hide them as a result the actual aircraft was unveiled to the public on April 21st 1990 12 DC’s holes American-style strategy was that they kept it secret for the best past 15 years that gave them a 15-year lease on other people to keep self totally under wraps in the back world the F one seventeen a was far from the final word on stealth coming up lakh each competitor was about to build the most capable warplane in the world talk about extreme stealth this is considered the most survivable aircraft ever built the large black flying wing resembles a prehistoric looking man terrain the b-2 spirit stealth bomber is a low observable strategic long-range heavy plane capable of penetrating sophisticated air defense Shields a monster bomber was designed for the cold war-era but demonstrated its vitality during a 24-hour mission to Iraq in 2003 the B-two certainly proved itself in combat in Iraq in fact that they flew them from the United States with multiple air refueling along the way when we got there the Iraqis no work the beach used journey to superstardom began in the mid-1970s Northrop had lost the first else competition to Lockheed’s have blue what are called wanted Northrop involved in the second program this one incorporated stealth technology and precision-guided weapons to stop soviet surface to air in the air to air missiles this required tackling the problem including airborne radar to track tanks and at the same time the invisible to ground radar I had come to Northrop in 1970 for the government through darker tortoise in to start looking at a different problem and that was how do you put a Raider earners tells the airplane how are you getting your plane that can fly at altitudes .
it looked at from all directions and still be still T North request back in black they began developing an advanced technology bomber which would be called the B-two one of the major challenges was it shaped the company opted for a flying wing designed aviation giant Jack Northrop had always been a fan of flying wing aircraft in 1948 his company had built the Y be 49 they discovered the aircraft smooth curve surface didn’t reflect radar waves back to the base until it was almost directly flying overhead also flying wings could carry large payloads one-way glass and using less fuel because the dragon the tail surfaces are absent so when Northrop begin building the beach you they introduce curvature into the services to make it more aerodynamically efficient and at the same time maintain its del Venus if you lay their curved surface over for new the energy will skip often not reflect back and you get here dynamic efficiency I’m Northrop finally hatched a stealthy bird that resembles a black boomerang the slim looking plane possesses an extremely small side view radar cross-section but a wingspan of 172 feet the leading edges of the wings of eagles at 35 degrees and the trailing edge has a double W shape the aircraft is controlled by a quandary done did fly by wire flight control system which monitors all elements of the weekend to be too is a bomber aircraft so engineers also face the daunting task of putting stealthy radar on a stealth plane who come in any details on that but we figured out how to put on stealthy into the news how to produce tells the radar in and how to get an airplane ball aspect little radar cross-section the Northrop also concocted their own special batch radar absorbing material along with perfecting other stealthy features the beach you he’s very hard to see an ACO altitude level because it lacks tales and the B-two’s long flat shaped doesn’t stand out very well 0 visuals very hard to handle B-two’s a very large urban didn’t keep lying low it’s good to have a certain visual signature so the B-two has a black bottom because it’s going to be viewed as a blank space from the past jet noise was the sound asleep brings a major problem when you want to be stealthy you only way to really be acquired his to be a glider at low speed to you want to go fast you can reduce your noises and way to minimize and is grew up in altitude and another stealthy concern was infrared or heat produced by the engine infrared primary source Houston engineers or you going to do things to cooler and we’re going to go into who that would be diff Northrop has kept a tight lipped bonnet stealthy bomber at the time to be too was kept under a veil upgrade from its inception president carter had mentioned to be too in the early seventies so it was a great program I think everybody knew was a flying wing we did dimensions we deal with the capabilities were well Northrop was developing a pricey stealth bomber Rockwell a competitive aeronautics company was commissioned to revive their B one bomber project to be too had to be described as a risky program it was had elements in its design it had never been done before to be one be they felt was something new in the early 1980s scientists tried to make the B-one a stealthy by adding RAM newly designed ducted inlets and they removed the spine faring to revamp their plane was called the B one B but the air force soon discovered if you want a real stealthy aircraft you need to start from scratch as a result the pentagon put all their eggs in the cockpit up the beach you on November 22nd 1988 the bomber was greeted with patriotic fanfare as it rolled out of the hangars at an Air Force plant in Palmdale Caliph.
if you can watch the B-two flying you see there’s anger black sheep taking of course in or make just sick leave when you follow a darker side and then all the sudden you see a black line appear in the sky and the metal balloon and the angular shape is it turns magnificent you two day to beat you can fly anywhere in the world within hours have the airplane is capable of all altitude attacks up to angels 5 that Air Force talk for fifty thousand feet the two crew cockpit as a navigation emissions system that sounds is easy is driving a car there’s a simple three-way switch takeoff go to work and landing the stealth bomber can carry up to 40,000 pounds have weapons including nuclear-tipped missiles and bombs p the B-two appears to be the stealth for all seasons even with a small fleet of 20 bombers it is proven its worth in March 2003 the tunes ran multiple forty-hour missions in Iraq without a hitch being as their only twenty B-twos in the force it is inevitably still a silver bullet aircraft’s so you could have it an instance where single B-two invisible to radar could fly over targets with up to 72 individual things to be struck on the ground and release 72 precision-guided satellite guided bombs and take all those targets house with precision the nothing can match to be jus power and perseverance yet the Air Force kept pushing the outside of the envelope they were probing the outer limits for a highly maneuverable plane that is still free yet looks like a real fighter they got their wish now rarely seen footage will expose a new stealthy warplane ready to break all records including the sound barrier of stealth a new sleek state-of-the-art tactical fighter stealthy and super cruise say 22 doctor is the world’s fastest else playing and promises to rule the skies in any conflict cue it will be the first aircraft to combine stealth technology with air superiority capabilities the FA 22 has the ability to detect target destroy the enemy well discovered the 22 really brings an evolution from the previous stealth aircraft F one seventeen was developed from the first prototype the b-2 spirit was the next major weapon system that that embodied stealth and it force brought capability to carry attack long range mb22 takes the further step beyond that adding the true fighters maneuverability and speed in combination with the stealth an integrated media X.
if you look at what the other stuff aircraft are out here for sale Tory the F one seventeen and db2 if you compare the FA 22 to those aircraft the FA twenty-two’s the only one that’s really a fighter a true fighter the idea of building an ATF work Advanced Tactical Fighter began in the 1980s when the Air Force wanted a new stealthy fighter to replace its holder conventional war planes aircraft like the F-fifteen the F-sixteen the F-eighteen to been around for a while at the new legacies you take all the attributes have those fighters that we’ve had before and now you add stealth this the F one seventeen a sacrifice speed and handling which is unusual design the by the 21st century engineers figured out that you didn’t need to have a not faceted shape or a flying wing to deflect radar the with the aid of an intricate computer systems the FA 22 can have the look in her a dynamic design have the F-fifteen and at the same time the stealthy the FA 22 possesses the ultimate radar signature which is the size of a bird for be the F-fifteen and F-sixteen on the other hand at the radar signature the size of a standard door am you have a twenty-two is an awesome looking planes so long-standing saying in aviation and plane it looks good it’s going to fly good and the rapture is certainly prefer that it looks good on the ground looks fantastic in the year flies fantastic 1x way the cockpit contains a revolutionary integrated avionics system houses six color screens which provide easy to read flight and target information without distracting the pilot’s attention that aircraft avionics system takes radar information from all the other sensors infuses it together and then presents mean wind between display that shows me the overall battle picture what that allows the pilot to do is concentrate on tactics and not spanned a lot I’ve time trying to put pieces at the picture together on your closing it 20 miles a minute on another aircraft it’s that on killing you every second counts that’s what FA 22 Prince if a twenty-two has both the capability to go find other aircraft fight its way into enemy territory and then take out the ground exit the commanders need to be taken down this the FA 22 cockpit demonstrator what you’ll see is the basic cockpit layout here the control stick is on the side very much like a F-sixteen where the throttles on the opposite side and you’ll notice a large number of switches and controls on these two devices the concept is called hands-on sticking throttle and it what it does allows the pilot to manipulate the weapon system in the sensors into engage the aircraft in combat without having to move his hands around the cockpit the FA 22 fighter contains advanced medium-range air-to-air missiles and offers first look for shot and first kill capabilities what that means is that weekend see the enemy first weekend she weapon and then kill the enemy for Danny actually ever sees the FE 22 the FA 22 is a supersonic speed demand cruising at Mach 2 and without afterburners most fighters can only fly supersonic leave for a few minutes before exhausting their fuel the FA 22 can fly an entire mission so and this rare footage proves the FA 22 is also an all-weather vehicle in special climate control hangers the fighter has demonstrated it can withstand sub-zero blizzards torrential rains and hurricane winds they say it only takes two things to fly airspeed and money the FA 22 certainly proves that the smart looking stealth fighter promises to possess air superiority when it becomes operational in 2005 but its production costs are about one hundred million dollars per plane consequently the Pentagon has been shopping for a cheaper stealth fighter which can also service three branches of the military after a fierce to your competition one of the largest aerospace companies is gearing up to produce the most versatile stealth fighter planes on the planet so how can you get a cool stealthy for later without bankrupting the government after a nail-biting competition with Boeing Lockheed Martin won a contract to design such a plane’s the f35 Joint Strike Fighter or JSF is the next generation of stealth fighters he promises to be stealthy affordable and accommodating to the Air Force Navy and Marines and much of its technology is also blanketed in secrecy the Joint Strike Fighter program came about simply because airplanes are more expensive now so rather than go to the cost love develop into new fighter for the Air Force a new attack bomber.
for the navy need close support playing for the marines to conserve key move can we may 21 airframe which will combine these things the f35 was created in essence to replace the f-16 get sixteen was an aircraft designed seventies and I had 35 years’ worth of life on it and there was an impossible retrofit it back into the F-sixteen’s a really f35 represents the evolution of that yeah that requirement into this next generation the f35 will come in three versions: each plane will have the same internal avionics each were also contain unique features the DVD version will have bigger we control services so we can make sure takeoffs and on carriers the air force model will be similar to the Navy version but will have smaller wings and more fuel capacity for improved range the Marine Corps version will incorporate a brand new technology shaft driven lift and propulsion system to make stealthy vertical take offs and landings just like every year it includes a vector in rear nozzle that looks like a mechanical caterpillar it also has a counter-rotating lift fan the complex system involves taking gas out of the engine redirecting it inside the airplane to come out at different places on the body with the plan hundreds of children Strike Fighters will be ready for takeoff into the wild blue yonder by 2010 view this stealth technology has a first strike option but to really comprehend the have 35 stealthy versatility one needs to hop into the pilot’s seat this is the f35 or joint strike fighter cockpit demonstrator if you look at the cockpit of the Joint Strike Fighter instead of the separate screens that we had on the FA 22 we now have one large display and instead of using cursors and buttons to move its it’s a touchscreen display for we do use our finger to decide how we want to change our screens and have multiple displays at our fingertips literally along with advanced shaping ramp and in turn weapons the new fighters newest stealth technology is its 21st century mission systems which prioritizes information for quick response on multi-spectral sensor sweeps give a complete picture Apostol surroundings with enough time for the f35 to you attack for a foodie enemy on so an onboard now planner confine safe passage to high threat areas when destroying a target the fighters electro optical system instantly picks up and assesses damaged a doubt the f-35’s mission system provides a lower risk environment the Wada the military never had to worry about using a pilot though we may have lost the Joint Strike Fighter competition but they made stealthy breakthroughs which is helping them win the war on the digital battlefield the company is making quantum leaps into the future twenty-year she’s our unmanned stealth vehicles the air force and navy are joining forces to create robot warplanes has sponsored a competition called the joy unmanned combat air system program bowling and the Air Force have completed Phase one of the project by designing the X 45 the first unmanned combat air vehicle were you get out the X 45 appears to be the most secretive stealth program around trying to procure information is like trying to count all the stars in the sky but experts believe the unmanned plane including 10 innovative radar-evading design can specifically comment on it still features but you can see from its basic design that those kinds of things were thought about I can’t talk specifically about the radar cross-section but with regards to a cockpit.
there is a cockpit and that is a ground station which we call the mission control system here unmanned air vehicles are removing the pilots from the loop but rather moving them from the cockpit to the ground K portion hereof fair pronounce it have one pilot per one airplane we will attempt to demonstrate you know that a single operator can manage up to four vehicles and a very tense situation being in combat just the operation of unmanned airplanes doesn’t really require a diploma from the Air Force Academy instead the demands useful dexterity and thousands of hours mastering high adrenaline computer and video games what it is a video game some contacts in fact most of the up the operators that will use a system like this in the future are growing up today playing distributed interactive video games over the Internet and a lot of what we do is much like that will computer nerds become our future four-star generals unmanned planes certainly provide some appealing advantages there are two primary drivers for unmanned combat air vehicle technology one of course is that it lowers the cost if you take all the support infrastructure out an aircraft traditionally associated with the pilots ejection seats environmental controls the other essential reason to taking a pilot house for combat aircraft is that of course your knots nearly so concerned about losing their craft in an over hostile territory it so much better politically to be able the send a vehicle in to forget the proper happened without the potential lawsuit pilot our country and reach support really don’t want to lose people war their vehicles also create opportunities for some futuristic stealth technologies which sound like things only digital animators in Hollywood would envision one actually involves transforming the planes in flight that technology is emerging so you could literally morph the vehicle to a different configuration flight you could fly them sideways you could job them extreme you can make them very soon and in fact that’s what are the advantages the X 45 as it is a very thin airplane me three feet thick regardless of their shape these lethal weapons will carry approximately forty five hundred pounds of payload can be anywhere in the room hours they can execute a mission without the risk of prisoners of war on the six o’clock news still not everyone approves man list missions unmanned aircraft definitely have a future and Air Force I don’t think unmanned aircraft will ever replace manned aircraft simply because when comes time for combat you rarely they’ve ever fight the fight that you thought you were going to text with them and their craft you have that ability to think and me and reason for as you have a UAV an issue a target and they want to kill it problem is you can proceed out into what you’re seeing because how many times to be identified incorrectly fund so you might she tell somebody didn’t want to shoot down you wow but the Air Force doesn’t have any plans to retire his top guns just yet America’s Flyboys still have a long future fighting the bad guy ass it’s a brave new world in the US isn’t the only one jumping on the stealth bandwagon foreign allies and former enemies are also entering the black coming up the future of stealth aircraft is as far out as the existence of UFO’s of stealth is a high-stakes game it was March 27th 1999 Operation Allied Force Kosovo Yugoslavia US forces were deployed to suppress the Serbian ethnic cleansing campaign against the Albanians the stealthy F one seventeen eighties establish the regular flight track over the mountainous region of Bosnia for several days but this made them extremely vulnerable we were very constrained in the way we could fly the airplane there is a policy in effect on the go for that we would never fly the same track twice because even if you weren’t were detected if people feel that you’re flying along the same track night after night they can just fire all their weapons into that area and that’s just what happened the air force ordered an F one seventeen me to drop bombs on a target in Belgrade on aware of their flight track Serbian forces shot it the pilot was rescued but Appling became a field W Serbians collected stealthy remains and presumably performed reverse engineering studying the material to figure out its secret technology when the F one seventeen went down in Yugoslavia obviously that gave other people a chance to take that material and study it and see knows me that wouldn’t have been production methods but it would give them with the basic material word I don’t think there’s any doubt at all that if the Serbs have sold well given that that so there that’s the wreckage.
the Russian’s the former soviet Union has already known a little bit about stealth the cold war was the catalyst for the technology now there’ve been sketchy reports that the Russian’s are researching the stealthy benefits of plasma sure they discovered that when a spaceship flies for long periods its heat shield produces plasma Russian scientists claim day created an artificial plasma that can be wrapped around a conventional war plane to absorb electromagnetic waves emitted by enemy tracking systems the Russians say that they can’t I that’s plasma generation technique to any aircraft they can retrofitted to make a mig-21 a stealthy is next 22 this widespread skepticism about this has to be said but the Russians around they can do it allies that the US are also racing to develop stealthy technology in addition to their conventional war planes Great Britain is rumored to be developing a secret stealth fighter code-named halo year high altitude low observable from my witness descriptions the plane seems to resemble the half blue lakh each verse tells prototype first the European defense companies are still lagging behind the US when it comes to stealth if you want to join the stealth club you going to be part of a pretty exclusive club there are not many nations that can afford to get into that game it appears as though America stealth club is finally opening its doors to new members 17 countries are joining forces with the US to build the have 35 Joint Strike Fighter overseas allies will benefit from America stealthy expertise however there’s a reluctance to share his sophisticated technology the US is vested many billions of dollars in developing could become the preeminent instead of Technology and I don’t think it points to give that away willy-nilly to people who need seller to get competition with the US on the other hand there’s usually a desire for some cooperation with our allies other countries continue research development and production I love superior machines and we want to stay a step ahead we don’t want fair fight we want our people to go into the area of conflict with Supreme advantage so they can dominate in the theater the US military still put its faith in future in stealth so how many deep black programs currently exist the air force actually contacted me the person to contact me is a very clearance has been involved in black programs as well life visitors 16 programs are evaluating for declassification which former mayor so if there are more black projects buried in the pentagon budget what are some of the latest and greatest else gadgetry some say scientists are developing a technology that were outperform any Las Vegas magic act 24 or daytime stealth would make an airplane blend into any environment just like a chameleon airplanes would be covered with reactive skins which would since you color greatness surrounding and the information will be collected and the image would be projected onto the aircraft here’s the change the color for change the contrast intensity pain flight by chemical or electric means were being worked on in the early eighties and no doubt would be would continue hairstyles technology has provided the US with a fantastic insurance package global their dominance for at least the next 20 to 30 years but what about the next 100 years what does the future hold for stealth airplanes you could see some very wild designs in the future the capabilities that you gain with digital fly by wire systems where we’re not relying so much on aerodynamic shape at the airplane on my very last conversations would enrich who was the retired president talked about what’s happening in the future said Jim we have things in the Nevada desert better fifty years no I would you can comprehend if you sing StarCraft uses Star Wars you with the science fiction book we’ve already been there done that people running around saying they were seeing UFO’s in the middle the Fatah desert that they were seeing what was course the stealth fighter so many people say that the perfects still shape is a source then that would be your optimum still fear
