But now we have experimental proof, as Typhoon German pilots (Luftwaffe) had what one of them called “Raptor Salad for lunch“, in exercises in Alaska. So the fact a lowly Mirage III had shot down a F22 Raptor in mock combat in Dubai was no accident.

Passive stealth has enormous cost in aerodynamics (the plane is made of facets, and various sharp planes), so they get quickly demolish by aero loads, in speed (resins don’t hold above a temperature that has got to be pretty low, thus limiting excursions to Mach 2), and then low carrying capacity, etc…

The way active stealth works in the Rafale is apparently by focusing countermeasures to very narrow beams, so when the French attacked Qaddafi entire armor dashing to benghazi with full missile air cover, the Rafales were able to neutralize the missiles while hitting armor, and allowing the Mirages to bomb.

Passive stealth is a huge mistake: it can be detected in all sorts of ways, for example with Infrared, as the Typhoons do. Some day passive stealth will work, using metamaterials (but those are still in the lab, although Intellectual Ventures, a patent farm based in Seattle, intents to commercialize them before the end of 2013)
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2) Because of thrust vectoring, partisans of the F22 have always sung the praises of the F22 maneuvrability. Pictures taken from Rafales show the F22 desperately thrusting and vectoring, while in Rafale’s gunsights (there is a famous such picture).

Oh, also, whereas the Rafale is very compact, its maximum take-off mass is equal to that of the F22: it can carry much more weapons and fuel.

Although the USA was willing to let Rafale and F22 engage in combat, the Americans absolutely refused to engage Rafales in long range electronic combat. And the reasons are plain:

a) they did not want the Rafale to exhibit its superiority.

b) at long range (above, say, 50 kilometers, and, certainly above 100 kilometers), the F22, or, actually, the USA, has simply NO missile to engage a Rafale with. Existing MICAs (used in Libya, where they shot down at least one Libyan plane), and the soon deployed Meteor can do this.

The USA’s theory was that stealth would allow the F22 and F35 to come, stealthily, within 50 kilometers, so they did not need long range missiles!

That is particularly ridiculous, especially in light of the fact that the F35 does not have supersonic supercruise (which the Rafale has used a lot, fully armed).

In other words, it’s not clear the F35 could be used even against a distant subsonic civil airline (and it could never have caught Concorde!). In such a situation, the ability to fire a very long range, hypersonic missle such as the Meteor is crucial.

Moreover, the Rafale can use its ASEA to guide the Meteor up to 50 kilometers (and can do this with 8 targets!), before the Mach 5 Meteor takes over.

3) In practice, war does not work on USA schedule. In Libya, Qaddafi rushed its entire armor, with all its mobile missiles SA5 and SA8 batteries for supplementary cover towards Benghazi. it was a question of ONE hour, maximum, to save Benghazi when Sarkozy gave the order of attack. The rafale themselves, using Spectra for defense and attack, wiped out the missiles while the Mirages disintegrated the entire column.

The war was concluded when a column of two hundred (200)vehicules rushing out of Qaddafi’s stronghold and birthplace was observed by, and then attacked, Rafales flying CAP. ONE, a single tiny USA drone joined in.

The convoy was smashed by the Rafales, entirely destroyed. The Toyota SUV in which Qaddafi was, got hit by shrapnel and rendered inoperable, airbags deployed. A wounded Qaddafi escaped on foot. His main bodyguard, unconscious, would wake up in the hospital.
Partisans later found Qaddafi had joined those rats he despised so much, in a tunnel.

When F22 and F35 carry exterior weapons, they have zero stealth. Those weapons are made of metal. When a Rafale carries exteriro weapons, its Spectra is still fully operational, and it can apply radar suppression with a precision of one degree, against multiple sources.

The USA has obviously been terrified to admit that the F22 emperor had no clothes, and no weapons. That’s why it was never engaged in a hostile environment. Not once.

That’s also why a cheaper version of the F22 was evolved, the F35. The reasoning apparently has been that, since the F22 did not work, having more of them will allow some to get through.

As a USA military planner said, sometimes he wakes up at night in a terror, thinking that he would send F35 pilots into combat with just two tiny missiles…

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Fellow bloggers have also noted sudden changes of classifications. An impopular site becomes suddenly popular, just because it is freshened up daily, or so Google decides. This encourages superficial thinking.

Plenty of dirty tricks are in usage around many blogs. There are pseudo left sites (some set-up…by CIA (“ex”-)employees!). They of course all block me as a dangerous whatever (although the epithet “trolls” and “racist” were used).

A site set-up by (French) bankers blocked me because I demonstrated that American plutocrats had financed Hitler (no kidding, it’s called the “European Tribune“). That was apparently a terrible no-no. I am still seething… But it was most instructive: second knives protect their masters well…

A “philosophy” site managed by some of my (pseudo) philosophical enemies (Searl, etc.) barred me for “theft of intellectual property“. By this they meant that I had used on their site something suspiciously similar to what was on my site, an obvious case of I stealing from me. Sinking or thinking, that is not the question.
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Of course it can be happenstance, or a very stimulating subject… But having seen it happen again and again, I rather suspect extended use of internet watch techniques by committed groups or interests..

1. The loss of one F-117 in combat does not disprove the value of stealth. The F-117 has performed many successful missions before being retired with only one loss. That is an excellent record for any aircraft, and this was a new type.

2. The war game to which you refer was a gun training exercise. The F-22 is not optimized for dogfighting, so such training exercises are not predictors of its chances for success in an actual combat situation. Also, one incident cannot establish a trend.

In actual combat, the F-22 is designed to control the airspace without coming into visual range of the enemy, and with minimum risk of detection by radar. That is how it must be judged.

3. Internal-only weapons are required for maximum stealth, when the object is
to clear the airspace and destroy air defenses. When the airspace is
sufficiently safe, both the F22 and F-35 can carry external weapons and fuel for greater capability although with reduced stealth.

In the USSR, I mean Putinland, aka “Russia”, if people make an anti Putin prayer, or have an anti Purtin website, they risk many years in jail, and are put on trial. Most Russians (aka “Putinists”) perceive this as just. Most Germans, 70 years ago perceived the Jews as war mongers.

As I pointed out explicitly, the political system in the USA is abominably corrupt (look at “citizens united“). By French standards, the Supreme Court of the U.S. would be arrested, for corruption. (Something like that happened in France already, BTW, several years ago: the Constitutional Court president had to resign, and was “examined”).

You do not understand how SPECTRA works: it actively cancels with a precision of one degree.

I recommend my site(s) for further understanding of WWII. Repeating slogans and comfortable notions is not repeating the truth. The USA, Congress and president took measures against France and Britain in 1939.

And the lead tetra ethyl support by the USA to Hitler was no small potatoes. A the time 45 French divisions were engaged in combat, and Poland was fighting for its life.

If Hitler Air Force had been grounded in September 1939 when fighting France and Poland, thanks to lack of lead tetraethyl, as it was in front of Moscow in December 1941, because of the extreme cold, things would have turned out quite differently (Moscow was the first severe defeat of the Werhmacht, after several Pyrrhus like victories… Such as the battle of France, where Hitler’s war machine, after all, even after underevaluating its losses, suffered no less than 200,000 CASUALTIES! Or the conquest of crete, where the victorious Nazi paratroops were basically annihilated!).

The purchasing of USA planes by France happened in 1940, under “Cash and Carry”. They were obsolete planes, relative to the latest French, German or British fighters, and had no impact on the war. The real problem was that 50% of the French Air Force was outside of France. Many of the purchased USA planes were captured by the Nazis, and sent to Finland, or used by the Vichy putchists (which had been recognized by Roosevelt as the French gov.)
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So what can a Rafale do? Turn on its AESA, fire its Meteor. It can do that in two ways: either fire and forget, and turn tail at Mach2, or then it can guide the Meteor for 50 kilometers (that is, 35 seconds!). After that, the Meteor will take charge, and keep charging on its own…

The F35 system has nothing of the sort, no very long range missile such as the Meteor (the Meteor has been fired, and is an existing missile). Engineers are now scrambling to make the Meteor smaller so that it would fit inside the F35… It remains to be seen if it can still fly, after making its wings smaller… And how the F35 could be adapted to fire it. Meanwhile Israel has cut down its order from 75 F35s down to 19, and calls the F35 style plane a “niche”…
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