Didn’t a ranking US General state some time back that the UAE AIr Force with its Blk 60 Vipers could overpower its Iranian counterpart all by its lonesome? Aside from the UAE, there’s the Saudi Fleet of British and US jets and now Oman building up its air force. Not to forget Israel of course. And the US would figure to get involved in any future conflict in all likelihood.

The IAF would have a very dramatic few days of existence in any major conflict but there’s no doubting the outcome. That’s why they’re so keen to develop their nuke capability.. its their trump card offsetting (in their mind) any weakness they have in conventional forces.

I have no doubt that the hardware of the AN/AAR-56 (F-22’s MLD) can handle the job. Here are two video’s showing what the MLD can pick up. It’s only a matter of writing the software to interpret the information and integrate it into the F-22 battle computer.

However, just as EODAS in only WVR, so is the MLD. There is still a need of a real IRST for long range detection and ID of targets.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUj3JTe1nVI

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVrdQhYQI1M

Has there been actual cofirmation that EODAS is limited to the WVR arena? Surely the sensor tech used in EODAS can exceed WVR distances?

Surely this can’t be the first time such tactics were employed against US fighters? The first instance when the F-16 detected the radar only to have it disappear a short time later should have been a red flag to the pilots. Rather than assume that their detection equipment was not functioning correctly, shouldn’t the pilots have erred on the side of caution and initiated a sharp change in direction & altitude to throw off any firing solution.:confused:

If the PAK-FA utilized a MAW, then it should have done away with traditional control surfaces on the wings but they’re still there as far as I can see.

Even the simplest uncooled thermal sensors have temperature resolution of 0.1-0.5K. It’s not realistic to expect that you can adapt aircraft’s surface to exactly match the environment within this temperature range. That means your aircraft will ALWAYS be detectable. Of course you can do something about the detection distance..

One question for all, if we got a high altitude subsonic aircraft, does its skin need to be cooled or heated in order to adapt to the environment?

I think the air friction would ensure its temperature would exceed that of the ambient air temp.

What I believe is this.

1. The USAF with its wide variety of assets takes a lot of workload off the Pilot and hence a single seater may be preferable in most scenarios than a twin seater.

2. The IAF on the other hand does not have that much net centric assetts and rely more on the aircrafts on board sensors, so two crew members instead of one would take care of things better in that respect.

That’s a fair observation. From what i’ve read abd seen on video of the F-35, it probably has the edge in terms of its on-board sensors.

My understanding is that the IAF prefers a 2-seater because it will be more capable in the A2G environment. The US, on the other hand, went with a single seat F-35 to do the same job. Can we infer anything as to the relative sophistication of the 2 aircrafts sensor fusion capabilities from this?