Point is nothing has been demonstrated. We don’t know how the F-22 and PAK-FA final variant will fair in air to air combat. Same for the F-35 and PAK-FA or J-20.

And we won’t ever find out, most likely, as nations wielding comparable weapons aren’t going to fight wars – most odds considered.

We may get an inkling if the aircraft ever face each other at Red Flag, etc…..

You would be a fool to believe that the ones joining the party could not have possibly found a different, better method given that they had more advanced tools to do it (hence 1990s vs 2000s tech).

Anything’s possible, but I’d be a fool to assume that this was in fact the case, until it had been demonstrated. Also, when you use the word tech, you have to remember that it’s not an apples to apples comparison. It’s 2011, and no one has deployed an aircraft as stealthy as the US had flying in the late 70s, so why would I assume that some short cut had been discovered to leap frog US designs?

Shaping is the foremost concern, followed by materials and RAM, if you’re wanting to be VLO.

Maybe I’m reading that wrong, but it sounds like the back seaters will still be trained as WSOs. They just won’t be called Navigators.

That seems like an awful lot of trouble to go to. It would seem that were there a story, there would be multiple corroborating sources. I find it inplausible that all media sources would be involved in a conspiracy to cover up a plane landing in Greece, damaged or otherwise.

Your opinion is seriously flawed by the fact that USAF decided to retire its F-117 fleet after the Kosovo war.

You may want to consider the fact that at the time the F-117s were retired, the USAF was trying to find a way to afford 381 F-22s(or that the F-22s could perform almost any task, that the F-117s could).

The F-117 was intended to operate in dense SAM enviornements and to bomb value targets, on the notion that it’s stealth would evade SAM threats, and it flew like that in Serbia until one was shot down, and another damaged. After that it was reported to reduce it’s flights and flying always escorted, wich was not compatible for the operations it was designed for.

And the incident showed it’s design flaws: a sacrifice design for minimum RCS visible to 60s L-band radars wich resulted in a slow, poor flight and very unstable bomber, vulnerable to 1st gen SAM missiles

Which is why hundreds of F-117s were lost in Iraq and Serbia. Oh wait, that’s not the case.
You’re suffering from a case of “don’t confuse me with the facts.” The fact of the matter is that F-117s flew thousands of missions unscathed, but this is conveniently ignored by those that inform themselves by youtube, and .ru sites. If you do some research, you’ll see that the SAM site was ~8nm from the F-117, when it engaged(hardly demonstrating that stealth is ineffective). Another thing to ponder is that F-117s had no MAWS, ECM, etc.., resulting in poor situational awareness, or self defense measures. Had that not been the case, the outcome may very well have been different.

It certainly seems to beat it in terms of detection range. Shouldn’t be that much of a surprise too, given newer technology, much larger size and space available for the radar and associated systems. Oh, and the glorious fact of both mechanical and electronic scanning angles.

Now we just need new missiles to keep up with this monstrous radar performance.

The 400km range is only in very narrow beams/small search volume. That’s not the typical range, when searching large volumes of airspace. The F-22 is also capable of doing narrow beam searches, at longer than typical ranges. It should also be noted that the range quotes for the max ranges are VS a 3m^2 target, whereas the unclassified range quotes for the APG-77 are VS a 1m^2 target.