I remember, the days and nights were so bright for the most of the time that I could clearly see the type of the plane flying above my head, or you could see exhaust plume at night. I think that they also had no problems seeing things on the ground, if they could locate them. We had, for example, bunch of 2K12 Kub`s standing alongside the public road near the trees for few days without any camouflage and F-16 flying above us regularly, yet they were unable to detect SAM`s. And it was nice and sunny 😉

they probably saw them:

– hey, SAMs @ 2 o’clock!

– naah, too visible, they are obviously decoys, forget about them… 😀

f-117 actually often fly at altitude just over 500 meters and do like 3000-4000 routes so people know there is something fly over their place , as they didnot detect it on radar , they know that a stealth aircraft and prepare for ambush

er… 500m?

should they try to go from italy to serbia at such low level and back, they’d probably run out of fuel long before returning home (not to speak about the mountains it would crash into on its way in or out)

besides, what would be the point in f-117 shaping if it flew at such low level?

talking about baghdad, I remember a report for the US congress stating that jamming over baghdad was so intense from the very begginning that a 747 could probably have overflown it without being seen… probably somewhat caricatural, but it illustrated the point that stealth doesn’t mean invisible…

as a sidenote, if an aircraft can’t be tracked, it can go the same route every night as the enemy won’t be able to see it…

so the argument “they could position themselves” also shows that it could be tracked by those old, outdated and not so much supported systems (after some 10 years of embargo), as for the serbs to know where to position themselves, they had to be able to find that route first…

2 GBU’s for long range mission perhaps (save weight)?

I’m not sure if there’s a lot of viable targets in Mali especially for more strategic long range missions.

their targets are pretty much small and spread on large distances… there are good chances they’d load their fighters with as many and as small bombs as possible (no need for big ones, usually)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCK9E0qkx2A

“any ressemblance with an existing aircraft (or that may exist in the future) is totally fortuitous…”

😀

one thing that may play a role in that price difference may be the fact that the naval operators have to carry all their spares with them (you can’t easily order parts when you’re on cruise on the other side of the globe), meaning, they have what they need to maintain properly their aircraft for the duration of the cruise. So, for a good part of their time (except maybe at the very end of the cruise) they have enough parts to do their job efficiently. In the air force, they’re supposed to “order only what they need right at the moment” (to reduce wasting resources by storing unnecessary parts for unneeded periods of time…. ahem :rolleyes: ), which means that they have little spares available at any time. If they need a spare for something that isn’t in store, they have to take it from another aircraft that’s waiting already for another repair, for example, which means maintenance hours to remove from the previous aircraft, then installing the spare on the one that will use it (for the potential that remains before it has to be changed again) while the ordered part that arrives later will go on the cannibalized aircraft…. in the end, you have double installation work that should be needed, for a given part, added with the work to remove it from its first aircraft…

if canada doesn’t take the F-35, the Sh is the natural candidate… but a rafale proposed at a low price to force a very low bid from boeing may be a way to hurt a competitor (who already is loosing cash with the KC-30 deal that gets delayed and obviously more complicated than “expected”… )

and still, they were fine in the RCS department as TR1 said… besides, making an efficient radar blocker is all but easy, or else everybody would do it