How do stealth aircraft become invisible?

In 1903, the Wright brothers built the world's first true airplane and completed its first test flight. From then on, mankind's dream of soaring into the sky was finally realized.

However, humans were not satisfied with simply flying in the sky. They soon began to develop new uses for airplanes. It was not until 1911, the eighth year after the invention of the airplane, that humans finally discovered that airplanes could be used for combat. At that time, during the Mexican Revolution, the government army used its air superiority to frequently use reconnaissance planes to conduct reconnaissance on the revolutionary army. We all know that for a war, the acquisition of intelligence and information plays a decisive role in the outcome of the war. In this case, the revolutionary army hired an American civilian pilot named "Irving Rambo". One day, Rambo was driving his Curtiss plane in the air and met the government's reconnaissance plane.

Rambo's plane met a government reconnaissance plane in the sky, and the pilots of the two planes shot at each other in the air with pistols. This was the first air battle in human history.

Although the scale of this air battle was small, it made humans realize that aircraft still had great potential for development in the military field. So four years later, in 1915, the world's first fighter plane came out, which was the French Morane-Solnier L fighter. After the birth of military aircraft such as fighters and bombers, humans soon realized the power of flying objects, so in 1935, the British government decided to develop a weapon to deal with aircraft. At that time, it was before the outbreak of World War II, and the situation in Europe was relatively tense. As the saying goes, it is better to prepare for a rainy day, and Britain decided to make early preparations for the German air threat.

At that time, the British government believed that radio waves had the potential to destroy aircraft, so it commissioned physicist Watt to conduct research. Watt soon concluded that it was impossible to turn radio waves into weapons.

But Watt's research was not without results. He found that the radio waves emitted would be delayed after rebounding, and by collecting the delayed data, the flight direction and distance of the aircraft could be determined. Thus, radar was born. The working principle of radar is relatively simple. It is to emit radar waves in a specific direction. When the radar waves encounter an aircraft, they will rebound. By collecting the rebound information, the position of the aircraft can be known. Of course, radar cannot predict which direction the aircraft will come from, so it must keep circling and sweeping in all directions.

Since the invention of radar, airplanes have had opponents, so aircraft manufacturers began to figure out how to avoid being detected by radar, and thus stealth aircraft were born.

The "invisibility" of stealth aircraft is aimed at radar, and it is not really transparent. So how can we make it invisible to radar? It's very simple. Since radar relies on receiving rebounded radar waves to detect aircraft, we just need to prevent the radar waves from bouncing back. How can we prevent radar waves from bouncing back? First of all, we need to work hard on the appearance. Stealth aircraft and ordinary aircraft are very different in appearance. Stealth aircraft are usually angular and sharp-edged. This shape can easily cause radar waves to deflect, that is, the radar waves that hit the aircraft will no longer return along the original path. In this way, the radar cannot receive information and naturally cannot detect the aircraft.

However, simply changing the appearance is not enough, because no matter how good the appearance is, it cannot deflect all radar waves, so invisible coatings were invented.

Apply a layer of invisible coating on the surface of the aircraft, which can absorb radar waves and make them "go out like a meat bun hitting a dog, and there is no return." So what exactly is the invisible coating? Why can it absorb radar waves? This question has never been announced by any stealth aircraft manufacturer, so no one knows, so anything you say is just a guess, but from a physical point of view, it may be some material similar to carbon fiber material. In short, the appearance combined with the coating can make the aircraft invisible under radar surveillance.

Is it true that radar is powerless against stealth aircraft? Not really.

Radar can make the target clear by narrowing the viewing angle. After all, the thickness of the stealth coating is limited and it is impossible to absorb all radar waves. But in order to narrow the viewing angle, the antenna area must be increased. It is easy to increase the antenna area, but it is difficult to rotate after it is increased. What should I do? A new type of radar was born, the phased array radar. The phased array radar does not need to rotate. It is composed of countless independent transmitting units. When a large number of transmitting units transmit radar waves at the same time, interference will occur. The propagation direction of the radar wave after interference will change. By controlling the phase difference of each independent transmitting unit, the transmission direction of the radar wave can be changed. In this way, the radar does not need to rotate to scan in all directions, and the clarity is greatly improved. In short, stealth aircraft and radar are like you advance a foot, I advance a foot, and neither of them gives in.

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