Being Canadian I might be forgiven for showing a lil irrational nationalistic pride and say blindly that the Snowbirds are one of the best without reason. They are power limited, no fly by wire and take more skill to do what those pilots put them through. I would not put them better than others like the Blue Angels or the Thunderbirds, merely different as the demands flight wise are more pilot oriented, rather than managerial oriented, push the stick, computer flies an F-18 or -16, but every little twitch in a Tutor and you’ve gotta catch it to look clean. It’s easy to be impressed by the brute force of a tactical combat jet, the Snowbirds…..they dance, that’s harder.

No, ‘fraid not, read the site information and those are similar range and radius numbers that i’ve seen elsewhere by solid researchers. 470 statute mile radius with mixed sub/supersonic speeds and 700 give or take purely subsonic on internal fuel.

Seems low to you but this jet has engines which are not very efficient at subsonic speeds, read back issues of Aviation Week magazine from 1995 and it was an acknowledged compromise to the F119 engine. The specific fuel consumption of these low bypass engines is higher per pound of thrust at subsonic speed than the F-15 engines, its advantage in fuel consumption is in supersonic speeds, the old F100 engine’s SFC in afterburner was 2.5 lbs fuel/lbs thust per hour, that’s a lot, the F119 fuel consumption using afterburning is approx 1.7 using afterburner, the figures for non afterburning SFC are approx .7 and .82 for the F100 and F119 engines respectively.

The Raptor does not need to use afterburners to reach supersonic speed so its supersonic persistence is much better than the Eagle, it’s internal fuel capacity is only about 18348 lbs, the F-15’s is 13455 lbs, the difference isn’t all that big fuel wise, there’s a LOT of internal space dedicated to weapons bays, the fuel capacity is lower than people estimated it would be years ago, so its range is not what people think. At least not supersonic.

Hope this helps

The combat radius is nowhere near what you’re saying, they can’t supercruise out 800 miles on internal fuel, they’d run out of fuel, see my post above. It would be subsonic only. Only if they used external fuel would they be able to do such a mission, use external fuel until the high threat area, punch the ET’s and run on internal fuel for the supercruise portion in and out and go subsonic again for the low threat portion on the way out. the F-22 wont’ do 75000, they’d need a full pressure suit and the aircraft will only do 60 thousand anyway which is quite good enough. The combat edge suit acts like a partial pressure suit equivelent if there’s a cockpit pressure problem until it can get to low enough altitude.

Tanker use relative to the active combat arena is another matter though, in combination with ET, inflight refueling will of course increase range like other tactical aircraft.

There was the Project Rainbow U-2 and the A-12 series of aircraft, an attempt to reduce RCS, but until the Hopeless Diamond came along, there wasn’t a useful reduction of RCS to actually qualify as a stealth aircraft, its not a linear thing, to halve your detection range you have to shrink the RCS by a factor of 1000 or something. And not even the D-21 drone came close to the Lockheed Have Blue prototype.

As for my claim the Typhoon is a better raw dogfighter than the F-22 if each didn’t use TV, i think that’s accurate, although that’s opinion of course. The Typhoon will get TV in time and it will be very interesting to see how they each perform.

I think it is time for a not so brief history of stealth. Ever since radar wqs invented it was envisaged that a bomber aircraft would be best designed to have a lower RCS to improve its mission sucess percentile. That was the 1930’s.

WW2 the Germans did indeed have RAM on their snorkels to try to reduce airborne radar detection while they ran under the surface, even had a prototype stealth aircraft called the Horten Model 9, it was a flying wing, it was plywood sandwiched with sawdust and charcoal, very primative radar absorbing structure.

In the jet age to my knowledge there were small attempts to reduce the RCS of conventional aircraft, a Lockheed Shooting Star or T-Bird, forget which, was covered in a rubber based RAM and flown by none other than Gus Grissom, he was the first stealth pilot. The RAM coating reduced the aircraft performance to the point it wallowed horribly, and the signature reduction was nowhere near enough to be useful.

There were many studies on stealth design, the last open study being Project Harvey of the 1970s. But around that time all stealth research went deep black. All because Lockheed had found a paper written by a russian mathematician called Pyotr Ufimstev. Using a computer program they developed based on those equations, they could reliably calculate the radar cross section of any shape they fed into it. Computer technology of that time wasn’t as good as it is now so they could only calculate surfaces that were in flat planes. Ergo the HAVE Blue and F-117A.

General rules for stealth as previously mentioned in this thread, planform alignment, integration of design of airframe and application of RAM that suits likely targeted frequencies. Some radars will be less affected than others, some parts of the aircraft will naturally have a slight resonance based on size. NO right angles anywhere, a 90 degree angle will bounce a radar wave back to its transmitter, that’s why on stealth aircraft if there’s a tail at all its around 30 degrees off vertical. The F-22 design is in some ways very similar to the F-117, just turned upside down and smoothed out, the increase in computing power has made curved surfaces easier to calculate. Stealth is absorb what you can and reflect the rest in non useful directions, that’s why the planform alignment, wing leading edges are the same as tail leading edges and engine inlet edges for instance, the access doors for fixing it are surrounded in saw tooth edges in the same angles, everything is done in that order, absorb, reflect in controlled ways.

Canards as seen in the new European fighters like the Rafale and the Typhoon aren’t good for stealth, and not good for the area rule for supersonic drag reasons either. They do shed favorable vorticies over the wings for maneuver, that’s their strength. If Eurofighter met Raptor and the Raptor didn’t have T.V. i’d say the Typhoon would likely win in close combat maneuvers.

As for the silly claim that covering an Eagle would make it as good in stealth as a Raptor, try looking down the intakes of an Eagle, modern radars certainly can and they really like to see those whirling fan blades in there, that’s a huge percentage of the Eagles RCS right there along with its external weapon carriage.

In finishing, stealth is an integrated design philosophy, its not any single thing, it is many things at once, materials, design, precision manufacture, a single screw not bedded in right can screw you. That was clear during the original test flights of HAVE Blue back in 1978. One or 2 screws that had not been cinched down literally had more radar cross section than the rest of the whole plane put together and made it visible to radar.