Of course the best thing about articles like this is the foreign reaction. People assume since only the US has revealed this problem, only the US has this problem…

I realize this is a bit of old news since the work has already begun, but for some reason the story came out yesterday:

France modernizing Rafale F-1s

PARIS, April 23 (UPI) — The French government has announced it is upgrading F-1 Rafale fighters for operational capability equivalent to that of F-3 models.

The 10 Rafale Marine aircraft were in the early 2000s qualified only for air-to-air operations and for in-flight refueling. The upgrade will allow them to perform ground-attack and reconnaissance missions.

No – a channelised receiver is one that divides the bandwidth to be covered over a series of receivers each allocated to a specific range of frequencies. And a crystal video detector is about the simplest form of receiver that can be used for the radar-warning task, and pre-dates the use of superheterodyne receivers in this role. That’s why it was used in a relatively old system such as Serval.

Yep. It seems that “People interested” should read a basic primer on EW and RWRs like this one.

[INDENT]”The RWR is the simplest and most essential component of any EW suite. The simplest and most commonly used RWR is the crystal video receiver which offers respectable performance in spite of its basic conceptual simplicity. In a crystal video receiver, the impinging microwave transmission from a hostile radar falls upon a wide band receiving antenna from which it is fed into a bank of simple filter/detector/amplifier receivers each of which is much like the receivers used by motorists to detect police radars. The receivers are each tuned to consecutive slices of the covered band which allows simultaneous reception and discrimination of radars operating in various parts of the band.”[/INDENT]

But once again you’re talking to someone who has no understanding of the technology and bases their knowledge entirely on marketing brochures, and believes that steerable ECM and analog-to-digital processing of radar signals is space technology available only to France.

I wonder though, DAS is said to have 360 degrees coverage, so what happens if the pilot looks straight down? Does the camera point straight down?

Yes. There isn’t just one “camera”, it is, as the name implies, a distributed array of apertures:

Earlier the question came up about why bother having sensors with a FOV where the pilot physically won’t look, e.g. directly behind the aircraft. The answer is that the EO-DAS is also used for the MAWS, so it is useful whether or not the pilot is actually looking through it.

You meen the F-117s never had something as basic as a RWR ? I find that very hard to believe, especially in an aircraft that is suposed to evade radar …

Whether and what type of RWR the F-117 has is not public information, so that is speculative at best. So is the notion of tracking it with radar at 20km. The Bosnian SAMs had been upgraded with optical guidance and that is most likely what was used to hit the F-117. A difficult proposition, but made much easier by the advance warning and predictable flight paths NATO aircraft were using.

Could you provide a direct source for this notion that YF-14s were sent to Israeli airports to protect the Nickel Grass flights from Russian MiG-25s? There are many aspects to that claim which make no sense. And how did these jets operate from airports in Israel for 32 days without anyone ever reporting it?

There were 14 F-14 prototypes (“YF-14”), of which 12 were instrumented. Of those 12, 2 had been lost in crashes by October 1973 and not all of them were mission capable. One had been re-engined with F401 engines. Further, we know that flight testing continued to take place throughout 1973 including the October-November time period.

Meanwhile VF-124, the Fleet Replacement Squadron, began receiving production F-14As in October of 1972, and the first two operational squadrons VF-1 and VF-2 began receiving their F-14As in July of 1973. By October of 1973 there were a total of 12 F-14As between those 3 squadrons.

No, Stealth is a really bad movie. All the aircraft are CGI, the only thing worth looking at in the film is Jessica Biel in her G suit. It is worth a look for a laugh, but as an aviation film or thriller it is awful.

Just for grins here is the trailer.

I believe that is the same aircraft as in these pics, and that is a PDLCT (mockup).

ETA: this was at ILA 1998.