Reply to post: Re: 2.5MW

Hell hath no fury like a radar engineer scorned

phuzz Silver badge

Re: 2.5MW

There's a bunch of qualifiers to that though.

Firstly, the USAF had got sloppy, and were flying missions using the same routes night after night, so the Yugoslav's had a good idea of where and when the aircraft might show up. Spies outside the airbase helped.

Secondly, 'stealth doesn't mean invisible, it just means hard to see. Typically a stealthy aircraft will be designed to be most difficult to detect from certain directions, and by certain frequencies of radar. Outside of this, if the aircraft is at the wrong angle to the radar, or the radar is using a much more powerful beam, or at an unusual frequency or for some other reason (eg if the aircraft has it's bomb bay open as with the F117 shoot-down), then it might well be detectable enough to shoot at.

Don't forget that most ground to air missiles are designed with a proximity fuse, and rely on just being close enough that part of the explosion will damage the target (think more shotgun than rifle).

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