Can China's Military Really Track F-22 Stealth Fighters?

[rangerrebew]

February 21, 2020

Can China's Military Really Track F-22 Stealth Fighters?

Real or a lie?
by TNI Staff

Key point: Beijing likes to boast and claims it can follow around the F-22. That remains to be seen and is probably unlikely.
 

State-run Chinese media claimed back in 2016 that the People’s Liberation Army is able to track the U.S. Air Force’s Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor stealth fighters over the East China Sea. While the Chinese report might be easily dismissed as propaganda—it is not beyond the realm of possibility. In fact—it’s very possible that China can track the Raptor. Stealth is not a cloak of invisibility, after all. Stealth technology simply delays detection and tracking.

First off, if a Raptor is carrying external fuel tanks—as it often does during “ferry missions”—it is not in a stealth configuration. Moreover, the aircraft is often fitted with a Luneburg lens device on its ventral side during peacetime operations that enhances its cross section on radar.

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/can-chinas-military-really-track-f-22-stealth-fighters-125986

[PeteS in CA]

AFAIK, no "stealth" aircraft is utterly invisible to radar, just extremely difficult to discern from ordinary natural background objects, and even more difficult to track without knowing what to track, and even more difficult to do so in time to respond defensively.

[Smokin Joe]

AFAIK, no "stealth" aircraft is utterly invisible to radar, just extremely difficult to discern from ordinary natural background objects, and even more difficult to track without knowing what to track, and even more difficult to do so in time to respond defensively.

Yeah, but any seagull doing mach 1 is suspect...

[PeteS in CA]

Yeah, but any seagull doing mach 1 is suspect...

While true, the radar operator(s) would have to know to focus on the blip in order to know it wasn't a seagull. Otherwise the F-22 would just be blips that showed once or twice or thrice in different places and then disappeared without the operator(s) knowing the several blips were the same object.