Wednesday, September 4, 2013

Do stealth fighters need active radar jammers?

Some say no.  The idea of stealth is to become invisible on radar.  If the stealth aircraft starts radiating, it can be a give away, similar to violating radio silence at sea.  Jamming can give your position away.  On the other hand,  stealth or no stealth, there comes a point when enemy radar sees you, and is guiding missiles your way.  In this case a range gate stealer, an angle track deflector, a sidelobe jammer, or what ever else has been dreamed up since Viet Nam, can save your bacon.  If you have the equipment on board that is.  If you don't, best to check your ejection seat. 
   The Aviation Week article goes on to criticize the F16 for lacking internal jammers,  and the F15 for having old internal jammers.   Back when I was on the flight line, you put your jammers in pods under the wing.  That way you could upgrade your jammer to meet new threats by just loading a new pod, rather than rewiring the entire aircraft to install new internal jammers. The jammers are most effective against missiles.  A good radar man can often sort the target out from the jamming.  Missiles are dumber than radar men.
  What set off this Aviation Week commentary?  The Malaysian Air Force showed up with new model Russian jamming pods on their Russian built fighters.  The accompanying photo shows a Sukhoi 30 fighter so old that the twin rudders are mounted straight up and down.  The simplest stealth design would have canted the rudders off the vertical, so radar reflections would go down toward the ground, rather than straight back to the enemy radar set.  This bit of stealth has been well known, even to Russians, for at least 10 years, maybe longer. 

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