Fighter Wing: A Guided Tour of an Air Force Combat Wing

We've all seen TV cartoons that show some clever character fashioning a set of wings and then trying to fly like a bird (with thanks to Warner Bros., Chuck Jones, and Wile E. Coyote). Usually, the sequence ends with the character in a bruised and battered jumble at the bottom of some horrendous precipice, pleading for help. Fitting wings to your arms and flapping them like a bird and leaping off cliffs looks silly, and so we laugh; yet that's just how humans tried for several hundred years to achieve flight. Needless to say, it didn't work. It can't. The approach has to fail because it does not take into account the basic forces that affect flight.

Essentially, two forces help you get into the air and stay there. These forces are called thrust and lift. Working against them are another pair of forces that try to keep you grounded. These forces are called weight (mass and gravity) and drag; and their practical application to fly an aircraft safely from point A to point B constitutes the engineering discipline of aerodynamics.

For an engineer designing a combat aircraft, ignoring those forces seems as absurd as traveling backward in time. At the same time, he or she must press the limits imposed by those forces as far as possible. You want a combat aircraft to fly as close to the "edge" as you can make it. By definition. Putting this another way: To really understand the edge, you have to understand the basic forces. And so, before we look at how well various combat aircraft succeed in approaching the edge, let's spend a little time going over the four forces — thrust, lift, weight, and drag.

THRUST

This is the force that causes an aircraft to move through the air. It is provided by an aircraft's engines, and has the same effect on the aircraft whether it is pulled through the air with a propeller or pushed with a jet engine. Thrust is conventionally measured in pounds or newtons. The more thrust an aircraft's engines can generate, the faster the aircraft will travel, and the more lift the wings will provide. Similarly, when you step on your car's accelerator, the engine produces more power, the wheels spin faster, and the car moves along the road at a higher speed. This action also causes the air to move past the car at a higher speed.

In the world of combat aircraft design, the engine's raw propulsion power is expressed as its thrust-to-weight ratio. This ratio compares the amount of thrust that the engines can produce to the weight of the aircraft. The higher the ratio, the more powerful the aircraft. For most combat aircraft, this ratio is around 0.7 to 0.9. However, really high-performance models, like the F-15 and -16, have thrust-to-weight ratios greater than 1.0 and can accelerate while going straight up!

LIFT

Lift is the force that pushes an object up due to the unbalanced movement of air past it. In an aircraft, the unbalance comes from the different curvature of the upper and lower surfaces of the wings (the upper surface has more curve than the lower), and the movement of air is provided as a consequence of the engine's thrust. When the moving air comes in contact with the leading edge of the wing, the air separates. Part of the flow passes over the top of the wing, and the remainder below. Given the shape of an aircraft's wing, the air stream on top has to travel a greater distance than the stream below. If both air streams are to arrive at the trailing edge at the same time, then the air stream above the wing must have a higher speed.

In aerodynamics, there is a simple, but neat, relationship between the speed of a gas and its pressure: The faster a gas travels, the lower its pressure and vice versa. This principle is called Bernoulli's Law, in honor of the 18th-century Italian scientist who first investigated it experimentally. So if the air stream above the wing is moving faster than the air stream below the wing, air pressure above the wing will be lower than below the wing. This difference causes the air below to push upward and "lift" the wing up. As the speed of an aircraft increases, the pressure difference grows and produces more lift. This wing's angle, called the angle of attack (AOA) of the aircraft, can have a significant effect on lift.

Initially, lift increases as AOA increases, but only up to a certain point. Beyond this point, the AOA is too large and the air flow over the wing stops. Without the air flow, there is no pressure difference and the wing no longer produces lift. When this situation occurs, the wing (and the aircraft) is said to have stalled. Now, a high AOA isn't the only thing that will cause an aircraft to stall. If an aircraft's speed gets too low, the air no longer moves fast enough over the wings to generate adequate lift, and again the aircraft will stall — and any pilot will tell you that stalls can be really bad for your health.

DRAG

Drag is the force that wants to slow the aircraft down. In essence, drag is friction; it resists the movement of the aircraft. This is a tough concept to grasp, because we can't see air. But while air may be invisible, it still has weight and inertia. We've all taken a walk on a windy day and felt the air pushing against us. That is drag. As an aircraft moves through the air, it pushes the air out of its way, and the air pushes back. At supersonic speeds, this air resistance can be very significant, as a huge amount of air is rapidly pushed out of the way and the friction generated can rapidly heat the aircraft's body to temperatures over 500deg F/260deg C.

There are two types of drag, parasitic and induced. Parasitic drag is wind resistance associated with the various bumps, lumps, and other structures on an aircraft. Anything that makes the aircraft's surface rough or uneven, like bombs, rivet heads, drop tanks, radio antennae, paint, and control surfaces (rudder, canards), increases the aircraft's wind resistance. Induced drag is more difficult to understand because it is directly linked to lift. In other words, if lift is being generated by the wings, so too is induced drag. Since drag is unavoidable, the best that can be done is to minimize it and understand the limits it places on the aircraft's performance. And the limits are significant. Drag degrades the aircraft's ability to accelerate and maneuver and increases fuel consumption, which affects combat range/radius. Therefore, a good understanding of drag is needed not only by aircraft designers, but by aviators as well.

WEIGHT

Weight is the result of gravitational attraction of the Earth, which pulls the mass of the aircraft toward the Earth's center. As such it is in direct opposition to lift. Of all the forces involved with flying, gravity is the most persistent. To some extent, we can control the other three. But gravity is beyond our control. In the end, it always wins (unless you're riding a spacecraft fast enough to escape the Earth's gravity entirely — about 25,000mph [40,000 kph]!). Thrust, lift, and drag are all accounted for in the design process of the aircraft. But when thrust or lift become insufficient to maintain the aircraft aloft, gravity will bring the plane down.

ENGINES

Once you understand the physics of flight, and you can build a sufficiently lightweight power plant, getting an aircraft into the air is a relatively simple matter. But operating high-performance aircraft in the hostile environment faced by today's military aircraft is quite another thing. These machines are anything but simple.

With complexity comes problems. The heart of a good aircraft is a good engine — the thing that makes it go! More fighter programs have been plagued by engine troubles than by any other source of grief. So, what's the big deal in making a good jet engine, you might ask? Well, try and imagine building a 3,000-to-4,000 lb./1,363.6-to-1,818 kg. machine that produces over seven times its own weight in thrust and is made with tolerances tighter than the finest Swiss watch. It has to operate reliably for years, even when pilots under the stress of combat or the spur of competition push it beyond its design limits.

To give you a better picture of how exact these engines are made, look at a human hair. While it may look pretty thin to you, it would barely fit between many of the moving parts in a jet engine. That's what I mean by tight tolerances! Now, let's spin some of those parts at thousands of revolutions per minute and expose a few of them to temperatures so high that most metal alloys would melt instantly. One can now begin to appreciate the mechanical and thermal stresses that a jet engine must be designed to handle every time it runs. Should even one of the rapidly rotating compressor or turbine wheels fail under these stresses and come into contact with the stationary casing, the resulting fragments would shred the aircraft just as effectively as missile or cannon fire.

Since a combat aircraft's performance is so closely tied to its propulsion plant, the limits of engine technology are constantly being pushed by designers and manufacturers. Their goal is to design an engine that is lighter than its predecessors and competitors, but produces more thrust. To accomplish this, an engine designer almost always has to bet that a new emerging technology or two will work out as anticipated. Occasionally, this means taking some pretty big risks. Risks that usually turn into problems that get widely reported in the media. For example, engine-development problems in the mid-1950s almost wrecked major aircraft companies, when airframes like the McDonnell F-3H Demon and Vought F-5U Cutlass had to wait months — or even years — for their engines to be developed. So, just how far has jet engine performance come along in the past forty years? Let's take a quick look.

In the mid-1950s, the U.S. Air Force began operating the North American F-100 Super Sabre, nicknamed the "Hun." Powered by a single Pratt & Whitney J57-P-7 engine, an axial-flow turbojet generating up to 16,000 lb./ 7,272.7 kg. of thrust, and aided by the newly developed afterburner, it was the first supersonic fighter, achieving a top speed of Mach 1.25. With confidence growing in the axial-flow turbojet engine, new fighter designs quickly showed up, and in 1958 the first McDonnell F-4 Phantom II flew. In the world of combat aircraft, the F-4 is legendary. During the Vietnam War it proved to be a formidable fighter bomber, and it still serves in some air forces. Powered by two giant General Electric J79-GE-15 turbojet engines, each generating up to 17,900lb./8,136kg. of thrust, the Phantom, or the "Rhino" as it was affectionately called, could reach speeds up to Mach 2.2 at high altitudes.

To illustrate the axial-flow turbojet, consider the J79 engine and its five major sections:

At the front of the J79 is the compressor section. Here, air is sucked into the engine and compacted in a series of seventeen axial compressor stages. Each stage is like a pinwheel with dozens of small turbine blades (they look like small curved fins) that push air through the engine, compressing it. The compressed air then passes into the combustor section, where it mixes with fuel and ignites. Combustion produces a mass of hot high-pressure gas that is packed with energy. The hot gas escapes through a nozzle onto the three turbine stages of the engine's hot section (so-called because this is where you find the highest temperatures). The stubby fan-like turbine blades are pushed by the hot gas as it strikes them. This causes the turbine wheel to spin at very high speed and with great power. The turbine wheel is connected by a shaft which spins the compressor stages which compact the air flow even further. The hot gas then escapes out the back of the turbojet and this flow pushes the aircraft through the air. When the afterburner (or augmentor) is used, additional fuel is sprayed directly into the exhaust gases in a final combustion chamber, or "burner can" as it is known. This provides a 50 % increase in the final thrust of the engine. An afterburner is required for a turbojet to reach supersonic speeds. Unfortunately, using an afterburner gobbles fuel at roughly three to four times the rate of non-afterburning "dry"-thrust settings. For example, using full afterburner in the F-4 Phantom II would drain its tanks dry in just under eight minutes. This thirst for fuel was the next problem the engine designers had to overcome.

The axial flow turbojet became the dominant aircraft propulsion plant in the late 1950s because it could sustain supersonic flight for as long as the aircraft's fuel supply held up. The term "axial" means along a straight line, which is how the air flows in these engines. Up until that time, centrifugal (circular) flow engines were the military engines of choice — they were actually more powerful than early axial flow turbojets. But centrifugal flow engines could not support supersonic speeds.

Instead of a multiple stage compressor, centrifugal flow engines used a single stage, pump-like impeller to compress the incoming air flow. This drastically limited the pressure (or compression) ratio of the early jet engines, and therefore the maximum amount of thrust they could produce. The comparison between the air pressure leaving the last compressor stage of a jet engine and the air pressure at the inlet of the compressor section is how the pressure ratio is defined. Because the pressure ratio is the key performance characteristic of any jet engine, the axial flow designs had more growth potential than other designs of the period. Therefore, the major reasons why axial flow engines replaced centrifugal flow designs was that they could achieve higher pressure ratios and could also accommodate an afterburner. Centrifugal flow simply could not move enough air through the engine to keep an afterburner lit. By the mid-1960s, it became apparent that turbojet engines had reached their practical limitations, especially at subsonic speeds. If combat aircraft were going to carry heavier payloads with greater range, then a new engine with greater takeoff thrust and better fuel economy would have to be designed. The engine that finally emerged from the design labs in the 1960s was called a high-bypass turbofan.

At first glance, a turbofan doesn't look all that much different from a turbojet. There are, in fact, many differences, the most obvious being the presence of the fan section and the bypass duct. The fan section is a large, low-pressure compressor which pushes part of the air flow into the main compressor. The rest of the air goes down a separate channel called the bypass duct. The ratio between the amount of air pushed down the bypass duct and the amount that goes into the compressor is called the bypass ratio. For high bypass turbofans, about 40 % to 60 % of the air is diverted down the bypass duct. But in some designs, the bypass ratio can go as high as 97 %.

I know this doesn't appear to make a whole lot of sense. Don't you need more air, not less, to make a jet engine more powerful? In the case of turbofans, not so. More air is definitely not better. To repeat, pressure ratio is the key performance characteristic of a jet engine. Therefore the designers of the first turbofans put a lot of effort into increasing this pressure ratio. The result was the bypass concept.

If an engine has to compress a lot of air, then the pressure increase is distributed, or spread out, over a large volume. By reducing the amount of air flowing into the compressor, more work can be done on a smaller volume, which means a greater pressure increase. This is good. Then the designers increased the rotational speed of the compressor. With the compressor stages spinning around faster, more work is done on the air, and this again means a greater pressure increase. This is better. The bypass duct was relatively easy to incorporate into an engine design, but unfortunately, a faster spinning compressor proved to be far more difficult.

There were three major problems: 1. Getting more work out of the turbine so that it could drive the compressor at higher speeds. 2. Preventing the compressor blades from stalling when rotated at the higher speeds. 3. Reducing the weight of the compressor so that the centrifugal stresses would not exceed the mechanical strength of the alloys used in the compressor blades.

Each problem is a formidable technological challenge, but mastering all three took some serious engineering ingenuity.

Getting more work out of a turbine is basically a metallurgy problem: To produce the hotter gases needed to spin the turbine wheels faster, the engine must run hotter. Next, if the turbine's weight can be reduced, more useful work can be extracted from the hot gases. Both require a stronger, more heat-resistant metal alloy. But developing such an alloy is a difficult quest. In working with metals, you don't find high strength and high heat resistance in the same material. The solution was found not only in the particular alloy chosen for the turbine blades, but also in the manufacturing technique.

Traditionally, turbine blades have been constructed from nickel-based alloys. These are very resistant to high temperatures and have great mechanical strength. Unfortunately, even the best nickel-based alloys melt around 2,100deg to 2,200degF/1,148deg to 1,204degC. For turbojets like the J79, in which the combustion section exit temperature is only about 1,800degF/982degC, this is good enough; the temperature of the first stage turbine blades can be kept well below their melting point. But high bypass turbofans have combustion exit temperatures in the neighborhood of 2,500degF/1,371degC. Such heat turns the best nickel-based turbine blade into slag in a few seconds. Even before the blades reached their melting point, they would become pliable, like Silly Putty. Stretched by centrifugal forces, they would quickly come into contact with the stationary turbine case. Bad news.

Nickel-based alloys still remain the best material for turbine blades. So improvements in strength and heat resistance depend on the blade manufacturing process. The manufacturing technology that had the greatest effect on turbine blade performance was single-crystal casting.

Single-crystal casting is a process in which a molten turbine blade is carefully cooled so that the metallic structure of the blade forms a single crystal. Most metallic objects have a crystalline structure. For example, you can sometimes see the crystal boundaries on the zinc coating of new galvanized steel cans, or on old brass doorknobs etched by years of wear. When metal objects are cast, the crystals in the metal form randomly due to uneven cooling. Metal objects usually break or fracture along the boundaries of crystal structures. To melt a crystalline object, the heat energy must break down the bonds that hold the crystals together. The bigger the crystals the more energy it takes. If these crystalline boundaries can be eliminated entirely, a cast metal object can have very high strength and heat resistance, qualities highly desirable in a turbine blade.

The first step in forming a single crystal structure is to precisely control the cooling process. In turbine blade manufacturing, this is done by very slowly withdrawing the mold from an induction furnace. This works like your microwave oven at home, only a lot hotter. Controlled cooling by itself, however, will not produce a single crystalline structure. For that you also need a "structural filter."

So the molten nickel alloy is poured into the turbine blade mold, which is mounted on a cold plate in an induction furnace. When the mold is filled, the mold/cold plate package is slowly retracted from the furnace. Immediately, multiple crystal structures begin to form in a crystal "starter block" at the bottom of the mold. But because the cold plate is withdrawn vertically, the crystals can only grow toward the top of the starter block. At the top of the block is a very narrow passage that is shaped like a pig's curly tail. This pigtail coil is the structural filter, and it is only wide enough for one crystal structure to travel through. When the single crystal structure reaches the root of the turbine blade, it spreads out and solidifies as the blade mold is slowly withdrawn from the furnace. Once it is completely cooled, the turbine blade will be a single crystal of metal with no structural boundaries to weaken it. It now only requires final machining and polishing to make it ready for use.

While single-crystal turbine blades are very strong and heat resistant, they would still melt if directly exposed to the hot gases from the combustion of a turbofan engine. To keep molten turbine wheels from dribbling out the back end of the engine, a blanket of cool air from the compressor is spread over the turbine blades. This is possible because complex air passages and air bleed holes can be cast directly into the turbine blades. These bleed holes form a protective film of air, which keeps the turbine blades from coming into direct contact with the exhaust gases, while simultaneously allowing the turbine blades to extract work from those gases. Earlier non-single-crystal turbine blade designs had very simple cooling passages and bleed holes that were machined out by lasers or electron beams, and didn't provide as much thermal protection.

Thanks to single-crystal casting technologies, the turbine sections of turbofans not only operate at higher pressures and temperatures than turbojets, but are smaller, lighter, and more reliable. For example, a quick comparison between the J79 and the F100 shows that the turbine section that drives the compressor has shrunk from three large stages to two smaller ones.

The remaining problems resulting from a turbofan's higher pressure ratio include preventing the compressor blades from stalling at higher rotational speeds, and reducing the compressor section's weight. Weight is particularly critical, since every extra pound/kilogram has to be compensated for by the aircraft's designers. Fortunately, the solution to compressor stalling also reduces the compressor's overall weight.

Consider the problem: As the rotational speed of the compressor increases, so too does the speed of the airflow. At some point the airspeed becomes so high that a shock wave forms and the compressor "stalls." This is very similar to what happened to many early straight wing jet and rocket-powered aircraft when they went supersonic. As the aircraft exceeded the speed of sound, a shock wave (a virtual "wall" of air) formed which caused the wing to undergo "shock stall" and lose all lift. In an engine, excessive shock-induced drag stalls the airflow and the compressor is unable to push the air any further. In aircraft design, the remedy for shock stall was to sweep the wings back. The same solution works for turbofan engine compressor blades. Sweeping back the compressor blades not only avoids shock stalling, but allows the blades to do more work on the air because they are moving faster. This raises the pressure ratio. Since these higher-speed, swept-back compressor blades are much more efficient in compacting air, a smaller number of compressor stages are required to achieve a desired pressure ratio. A smaller number of stages means a reduction in the overall weight of the compressor and the engine itself. Again, comparing the J79 and the F100, we can see an overall reduction in the number of compressor stages from seventeen in the J79 to thirteen for the F100 (or really only ten if we exclude the fan section). Compressor weight has also been reduced through the use of titanium alloys in about half of the stages towards the front of the engine. Although titanium is lighter than nickel alloys, it cannot be used further aft than the midsection of the compressor (due to heat-resistance limits of titanium alloys), so heavier steel alloys are used in the remaining stages. Still, there is a significant weight saving from the use of titanium where it is applicable, and the current generation of fighting turbofan engines has greatly benefited as a result.

Once the problems with higher rotation speed compressors were solved, turbofan engines generally replaced the turbojet as the propulsion plant of choice for high-performance military aircraft. Their superior thrust made them a natural choice for the new generation of high-performance aircraft like the F-15 and F-16 that came on-line in the mid-1970s.

The latest version of the Pratt & Whitney F100 family, the F100-PW-229, is generally considered to be the best fighter engine in the world today. It is capable of delivering over 29,000 lb./13,181.8 kg. of thrust in afterburner, as well as providing improved fuel economy in dry-thrust ranges. Although it's not the first turbofan engine used in a fighter design (the F-111A was fitted with the Pratt & Whitney TF30), the F100 engine was the first true "fighting" turbofan, and is the propulsion plant for all of the F-15-series aircraft and the majority of the F-16 fleet as well. The F100 engine first flew in July 1972 in the first prototype F-15; and by February 1975, the Eagle had established eight world records for rapid climbing, streaking past the records held by the turbojet-powered F-4 Phantom and the Soviet MiG-25 Foxbat.

The improvement in fuel economy at subsonic speeds came about because the smaller quantity of higher-pressure air entering the combustion chamber mixed better with the fuel and burned more completely. Since the fuel burns more efficiently, turbofans have about 20 % lower specific fuel consumption at subsonic speeds; and as an added bonus they do not produce as much smoke as a turbojet. This was a major tactical improvement. In Vietnam, the F-4 Phantom II usually announced its presence by the plumes of smoke belching from its twin J79 turbojets.

Another significant improvement in fuel economy and overall engine performance came with the development of an advanced electronic-control system called Full-Authority Digital Engine Control or FADEC. FADEC replaced the old hydromechanical control system found on turbojets, responding faster and more precisely to changes that the engine experiences in flight. Factors that FADEC monitors include aircraft angle of attack, air pressure, air temperature, and airspeed. Since FADEC can monitor considerably more parameters than a hydromechanical system, it is constantly fine-tuning the engine to maximize its performance.

Not everything about a fighting turbofan engine is an improvement over a turbojet. For instance, the afterburner of a turbofan actually consumes far more fuel (about 25 % more) than its counterpart on a turbojet. Because so much of the air entering a turbofan goes through the bypass duct, the afterburner is supplied with a larger supply of oxygen-rich air. With the greater amount of oxygen available for combustion, more fuel can be sprayed into the afterburner to produce even more thrust. For turbofan engines, the afterburner provides about a 65 % increase in thrust (compared with 50 % for a turbojet). The good news is that aircraft equipped with fighting turbofans don't need to use afterburners as often. The latest version of the F100 produces as much thrust without afterburner as the J79 does with it. Now, an F-15C still needs the afterburner to sustain supersonic flight, but it can cruise at high subsonic speeds, loaded with external fuel tanks and missiles, without using this fuel-guzzling feature.

Presently, all high-performance fighters are subsonic aircraft, with the ability to make short supersonic dashes through the use of afterburners. But the USAF's next-generation Advanced Tactical Fighter (ATF) will be required to sustain cruise speeds above Mach 1.5 (at altitude) without the use of its afterburners. The only way this can be done is to have the core (the compressor, combust, and turbine section) of a turbofan produce more thrust than even the current-generation fighting turbofans. With the help of advanced computer-modeling techniques, called computational fluid dynamics, the compressor and turbine blades of the new engine are shorter, thicker, and more twisted than those in the F100. Thus, the F119-PW-100, the engine chosen for the new F-22 fighter (winner of the ATF competition), has fewer stages in the compressor and the turbine (three stages in the fan, six in the compressor, and two stages in the turbine). Even with these changes, supersonic cruise could not be achieved. To get the needed thrust, the bypass ratio had to be further reduced, and more air sent through the core of the engine.

The F119 engine on the F-22 is technically a low-bypass turbofan, with only about 15 % to 20 % of the air going down the bypass duct. Now, this low-bypass ratio seems to conflict with all I've said about the advantages of high-bypass turbofans. However, a high-bypass-ratio turbofan is designed to give good performance at subsonic speeds! For supersonic cruising, the best engine must be more like a turbojet. With its low bypass ratio, the F119 engine is almost a pure turbojet, with only enough air sent down the bypass duct to provide for the cooling and combustion (oxygen) requirements of the afterburner. During test runs in 1990 and 1991, the F-22 was able to sustain Mach 1.58 at altitude, without using its afterburner. The tremendous advantage of maintaining supersonic speeds without the afterburner, coupled with thrust-vectored exhaust nozzles, will provide the F-22 with significantly enhanced maneuvering characteristics over even the nimble F-16 Block 50/52, equipped with the -229 version of the F100. Thrust vectoring is the use of steerable nozzles or vanes to deflect part of the engine exhaust in a desired direction. This allows the aircraft to change its direction, or flight attitude, with less use of its control surfaces (ailerons, rudder), which induce a lot of drag. The Rolls-Royce Pegasus engine, which enables the AV-8 Harrier to land and take off from a tennis court, is the best-known example of thrust vectoring.

Where engine technology will go from here is anyone's guess. One of the major challenges that has faced designers for decades is to produce power-plants that can make Short Takeoff/Vertical Landing (STOVL) tactical aircraft a practical reality. The AV-8B Harrier II is a wonderful tool for the U.S. Marines, but the weight of its Pegasus powerplant limits it to short-range, subsonic flights. Perhaps the next-generation engine that is being developed under the Joint Advanced Strike Technology (JAST) program will provide the answer for this quest. Whatever happens, though, engine designers will always hold the key to those who "feel the need for speed…"

STEALTH

Stealth is a good Anglo-Saxon word, derived from the same root as the verb "steal," in the sense of "stealing" up on your foe to surprise him. When a good set of eyes and ears were the only sensors, camouflage and careful, muffled steps (don't break any twigs, and I'll flog the first legionary whose armor clanks!) were the way to sneak up on the enemy. The ninja warriors of medieval Japan were masters of stealth, using the cover of night, black suits, and silent methods of infiltrating castles and killing sentries to earn a legendary reputation for mystical invisibility. Submarines use the ocean to conceal their movements, and no high-technology sensor has yet managed to render the ocean transparent.

For aircraft, radar and infrared are the sensors that represent the greatest threat. Let's consider radar first. The acronym RADAR first came into the military vocabulary during World War II. The term stands for Radio Detection and Ranging, and this significantly enhanced the ability of a land-based warning outpost, ship, or aircraft to detect enemy units. A transmitter generates a pulse of electromagnetic energy, which is fed to an antenna via a switching circuit. The antenna forms the pulse into a concentrated beam which can be steered by the antenna. If a target lies within the beam, some is absorbed, and a very small amount is reflected back to the radar antenna. The switching circuit then takes the returning pulse from the antenna and sends it to a receiver which amplifies the signal and extracts the important tactical information (target bearing and range). This information is displayed on a screen, where a human can see the target's position, guess where it is going, and try to make tactical decisions. A big object that reflects lots of energy back toward the antenna shows up as a big, bright blip on the screen. A very small object that reflects very little energy may not show up at all.

There are two stealth techniques to defeat radar: shaping, to reduce an object's "radar cross section" (RCS), and coating the object with radar-absorbing materials (RAM). When radar was in its infancy in World War II, both sides experimented with these techniques. The Germans were particularly successful. By 1943, the Germans were applying two different types of RAM coatings, called Jaumann and Wesch absorbers, to their U-boat snorkel masts to reduce detectability to aircraft radar. Although the RAM reduced the radar-detection range of a snorkel mast from about 8 miles/14.6 km. to 1 mile/1.8 km., the coatings didn't adhere well to the snorkel masts after prolonged immersion in seawater. Meanwhile, the Luftwaffe was investigating radar-defeating airframe shapes. In 1943, two German brothers named Horten designed a jet-propelled flying wing, quite similar in appearance to the USAF B-2 bomber. Tail surfaces and sharp breaks between wing and fuselage increase a plane's radar cross section, so an all-wing airplane is an ideal stealth shape, as well as an efficient design. A prototype aircraft, designated the Ho IX V-2, first flew in 1944, but crashed in the spring of 1945 after a test flight. Due to Allied advances on both fronts, the program was stopped. The remarkable work on reducing various aircraft signatures that was done by German engineers in the early-to-mid-1940s would not be reproduced in an operational aircraft until 1958, when Lockheed's Skunk Works started working on the A-12, the forerunner to the SR-71 Blackbird.

As with any other active sensor, a radar's performance is highly dependent on how much of the transmitted energy is reflected by the target back towards the receiving antenna. A lot of energy, and the operator sees a big blip. Less energy, and the operator sees a small blip. The amount of the reflected energy, the radar cross section (RCS) of the target, is expressed as an area, usually in square meters (about 10.8 square feet). This measurement is, however, somewhat misleading: RCS can't be determined by simply calculating the target area facing the radar. RCS is a complex characteristic that depends on the cross-sectional area of that target (geometric cross section), how well the target reflects radar energy (material reflectivity), and how much of the reflected energy travels back toward the radar antenna (directivity). To lower an aircraft's RCS, designers must reduce these factors as much as they can without degrading the aircraft's ability to carry out its mission. It should be said that such design features are not easily slapped onto an existing design, but in fact are fundamental to the plane's design. Thus the need for designed-to-purpose stealth structures.

Of the three factors that determine RCS, geometric cross section is the least worrisome to designers. Compare the RCS of the B-2 bomber with your average duck. A duck is physically much, much smaller than a stealth bomber. However, to a long-range search radar, a duck is actually five times larger than the B-2A! The common sparrow or finch would be a closer match from a search radar's perspective. Since physical size isn't critical for RCS reduction, designers are mainly concerned with the reflectivity and directivity, and as we will see, a lot can be done with these.

And of the two, directivity is by far the part of the RCS equation that has the greatest effect. Reducing the directivity component is why the F-117A and the B-2 have shapes that make them look so odd. Shaping can lower the directivity component by orienting target surfaces and edges so that the incoming radar energy is deflected away from the radar antenna, like the many mirrored faces of a dance club "disco ball." The F-117A is "faceted" into a series of flat plates, while the smoothly contoured B-2 uses a technique called planform shaping. Both techniques present surfaces that are angled about 30deg away from the incoming radar signals. Smaller angles, however, can also have a significant effect on RCS. Consider three metal plates with different angles with respect to the radar beam. If the first plate is perpendicular (90deg) to the radar beam, most of the energy is reflected back towards the radar antenna, maximizing the plate's RCS with respect to the radar. Now, imagine a second plate that is tilted back by 10deg. About 97 % of the energy is deflected away from the direction of the radar. This is better. Now, think about a third plate, tilted back by 30deg. Almost 99.9 % of the incoming radar energy is deflected away from the radar!

Even though shaping is the best way to reduce RCS, it is virtually impossible to eliminate all the surfaces or edges which reflect radar energy. Examples of such reflectors are engine inlets, leading edges of wings, canopy rails, or even access-panel join lines on the aircraft's fuselage. These trouble spots are taken care of by reducing their reflectivity through the use of RAM coatings and radar-absorbing structures (RAS). RAM materials absorb radar energy and convert it into heat or small magnetic fields. The physical mechanism that accomplishes this is very complex: The material resonates with the incoming radar energy and then changes it by vibration into heat or by electrical induction into weak magnetic fields. RAM can absorb about 90 % to 95 % of the incident radar energy, depending on composition and thickness. For existing non-stealth aircraft designs, like the F-15 or F-16, RAM coatings (the U.S. Air Force reportedly has a radar-absorbing paint called "Iron Ball") can cut their RCS by as much as 70 % to 80 %.

Radar-absorbing structures, on the other hand, are only used by aircraft designed specifically to be stealthy, as they must be carefully built into the aircraft's framework. Modern RAS designs use strong, radar-transparent composites to build a rigid hollow structure which is then filled with RAM. Because the RAM can be quite thick under the composite shell, most of the radar beam's energy is absorbed before it hits one of the metallic components of the aircraft's structure. Older RAS structure designs, like those on the SR-71, are made of radar-reflective metals in a triangular shape, with a RAM filling in the triangle cavity. When a radar beam hits such a structure, it is reflected back and forth between the reflector plates. With each bounce, the radar beam passes through the RAM, and more of the energy is absorbed. Eventually, the radar signal becomes too weak to show up on a radar screen, and that is that! On stealth aircraft like the B-2 and F-22, radar-absorbing structures are used extensively on hard-to-shape spots like the leading and trailing edges of the wings, control surfaces, and the inlets to the engines. A well-designed RAS can absorb up to 99.9 % of an incoming radar beam's energy.

Consider a hypothetical air-search radar with a detection range of 200 nm./365.7 km. against a B-52, which looks like the broad side of a barn to a radar. With extensive use of stealth technologies, the B-2A's RCS is 1/10,000 that of the B-52, and the detection range drops to less than 20 nm./36.6 km.! This reduction in a radar's range leaves massive gaps in a hostile nation's early warning net, which an aircraft like the B-2 can easily fly through.

In sum, the B-2A, or for that matter the F-117A or the F-22A, isn't invisible to a radar; but the effective range against these aircraft is so short that they can fly around radar warning sites with relative impunity. And this is exactly what the F-117s of the 37th Tactical Fighter Wing (Provisional) did to Iraq during Desert Storm.

While radar is the primary sensor used to detect aircraft, infrared (IR) sensors are becoming increasingly sensitive. The frequency of the IR portion of the electromagnetic spectrum is just below that of visible light and well above that of radar. Since most infrared energy is absorbed by water vapor and carbon dioxide gas in the atmosphere, there are only two "windows" in the infrared band where detection of an aircraft is likely. One window ("mid-IR") occurs at a wavelength of 2 to 5 microns. Mid-IR is used by current IR-HOMING air-to-air missiles like the AIM-9 Sidewinder series. Infrared radiation from the heat of an aircraft's engine parts and exhaust falls in this mid-IR region. The other window is in the long IR band, at a wavelength of 8 to 15 microns. The long IR signature of an aircraft is caused by solar heating or by air friction on the fuselage of the aircraft. Modern Infrared Search and Track (IRST) and Forward-Looking Infrared (FLIR) systems (which have become more significant as air-to-air sensors since radar-stealthy aircraft became operational) can look for targets in both windows.

To decrease an aircraft's IR signature, the designer must find ways to cool the engine exhaust, where most of the IR radiation is generated. A good start is eliminating the afterburner, which creates a large IR bright spot or "bloom." Though this reduces the aircraft's flight performance, if high speed is not a requirement (as in the design of the F-117A and the B-2A), then the afterburner can be discarded. Both the F-117A and the B-2A have non-afterburning versions of turbofan engines used on other aircraft. The next step in IR suppression is to design the engine inlet so that cool ambient air goes around the engine and mixes with the hot exhaust gases before they are expelled from the aircraft. Cooling the exhaust by even 100deg or 200degF significantly reduces the aircraft's IR signature.

Since it is impossible to completely cool the engine exhaust to ambient air temperature, the aircraft designer must reduce the detectability of the hot exhaust. Wide, thin nozzles can flatten out the exhaust plume so it mixes more rapidly with the ambient air. This rapid mixing quickly dissipates the exhaust plume, reducing its detectability by IR sensors. Both the F-117A and B-2 have exotic nozzles that not only rapidly dissipate the exhaust plume, but also block the line of sight to the hotter parts of the engine itself. In the case of the F-117A, the nozzles were coated with a ceramic material, similar to that used on the Space Shuttle, to help deal with the heat erosion of the hot exhaust.

Although a lot can be done to reduce the medium IR band signature from the engines, little can be done about solar or friction heating of the aircraft's outer skin. At best, one could make greater use of carbon-carbon composite materials, which have good IR-dissipation qualities, in the aircraft's fuselage and wing surfaces. Some special paints have modest effects on the long IR signature, but this is a limited modification at best. Short of an expensive and complex active cooling system, this exhausts the limited list of useful options. Fortunately, current IRSTs do not provide greater detection ranges than radar, even against a stealth aircraft, though this could change in the future.

Detection technologies are moving forward rapidly, and today's stealth jet could be tomorrow's sitting duck if designers remain complacent. My friend Steve Coonts used a concept of "active" stealth in his novel The Minotaur a few years ago. Computer-controlled "cloaking" systems are just science fiction right now, but with the continuing improvements in computer and signal-processing technology, we may be only a generation away from an aircraft with the ability to hide behind an electronic cloak of its own making. Millions of years ago, natural selection taught a little reptile called the chameleon that the way to become invisible to a predator is to look exactly like your background.

AVIONICS

In Submarine and Armored Cav, we saw how advances in computer hardware and software revolutionized a fighting machine's ability to find and kill targets. Because the crew is often made up of only one person, modern high-performance aircraft place heavier than ever requirements on fast, high-data-rate computers. You can think of sensors as the eyes and ears of an aircraft, computers as its brain, and displays as its voice — the way it communicates with the human in the cockpit. Sensors, computers, and displays are all components of the aircraft's electronic nervous system or "avionics."

In older aircraft, such as the F-15A Eagle, the only search sensor available was a radar, and almost all of the system indicators were analog gauges. In combat, the pilot of an early-model Eagle had a first-generation Heads-Up Display (HUD) which showed him what he needed to fly and fight the aircraft. When you are through counting everything, the F-15A pilot still had over a hundred dials, switches, and screens to worry about. As computer technology improved, and as more capable sensors were added, the amount of data that became available to the pilot increased dramatically. To avoid overloading the pilot, multi-function displays (which look like small computer monitors surrounded by buttons) started replacing many of the single-purpose displays and gauges. In some aircraft, such as the F-15E Strike Eagle, there was now so much data available that to employ the aircraft to its full potential, both a pilot and a weapon systems officer (WSO) had to man it. The Air Force's new F-22 fighter will incorporate even greater advances in sensor and computer capabilities. In comparison to the F-15E Strike Eagle, which has, at best, the equivalent of two or three IBM PC-AT computers (based on Intel 80286 microprocessors), the F-22 will take to the skies with the equivalent of two Cray mainframe supercomputers in her belly, and there is room for a third! To keep up with this vast increase in processing power, data rates on the network or "bus" connecting various aircraft subsystems have increased from one million characters per second (1 Mb/sec.) to over 50 Mb/sec. There has been a similar increase in computer memory and data-storage capacity.

A pilot simply cannot fly the F-22 without the assistance of a computer. In fact, all U.S. combat aircraft produced since the F-16 have been designed with inherently unstable flight characteristics. The only way for such a machine to stay in the air is for a computer-controlled flight control system, with reaction time and agility measured in milliseconds, to control things (human reaction times are typically measured in tenths of seconds, a hundred times longer). Usually the automated systems process and filter the pilot's "stick and rudder" control inputs, preventing any "pilot-induced oscillations" that might cause the aircraft to "depart controlled flight." A nightmarish phrase sometimes occurs in accident reports: "controlled flight into terrain." The English translation is that some poor bastard drilled a crater right into the ground and never knew it. The dream of every flight-control avionics designer and programmer is to make that impossible.

To help the pilot make practical use of all this greatly expanded tactical information, the F-22 will incorporate decision-aid and management software which will help him or her to drive and fight the aircraft to its limits. In essence, the functions of the human WSO of the F-15E have been delegated to electronic systems rather than flesh and blood. But whether the extra help is human or machine, there is no doubt future pilots will need plenty of it to handle all of the information collected by integrated sensor suites and multiple off-board assets while still flying the plane. Automation is an absolute necessity if future combat aircraft are going to be manned by just one person. It costs over a million dollars to train a pilot or WSO, and personnel costs are the biggest single factor in the defense budget, so it is easy to understand the desire to minimize the aircrew required. The trick is to figure out just what the machines are capable of doing on their own, and what requires the pilot's human judgment. The key to this relationship is a cockpit design that lets the pilot glance at no more than four or five display panels to know exactly what's going on inside and outside the cockpit ("situational awareness").

An overview of recent advances in computer technology is beyond the scope of this book, but two areas are critical to our understanding of how an aircraft finds its target, destroys it, and leaves before the enemy can do anything about it. These areas are sensors and "man-machine interfaces" or displays. In sensors, we'll look at the advances in the performance of radar, IR, and electronic-support-measures (ESM) systems made possible by the massive number-crunching power of today's computers. In displays, we'll look at how information is conveyed to the pilot so that he or she can use it to make better tactical decisions under the stress of combat.

SENSORS

Radar has been the most important sensor for fighter and ground-attack aircraft since the Korean War. And the operating principles of airborne systems haven't changed fundamentally since World War II. Until the 1970s, airborne radar systems, were mostly single-purpose air-intercept or ground-mapping /navigation systems. In 1975 the F-15A Eagle, equipped with the powerful Hughes APG-63, introduced a new era of multi-mode radars.

The APG-63 radar was the first all-weather, programmable, multi-mode, Pulse-Doppler radar designed to be used by a single pilot. Pulse-Doppler radars rely on the principle that the frequency of waves reflected from a moving object will be slightly shifted upward or downward, depending on whether the object is moving toward or away from the observer. Precise measurement of this Doppler shift allows the radar's signal-processing computer to determine the target's relative speed and direction with great precision. With a detection range of greater than 100 nm./182.8 km. against a large RCS target (like a Tu-95 BEAR bomber), the APG-63 combined long range with features such as automatic detection and lock-on. By allowing a digital computer to control most radar operations, the pilot was left free to concentrate on getting into position to make an effective attack. This computer, by the way, was just slightly more powerful than your standard first generation IBM PC (equipped with an Intel 8-Bit 8086/8088 processor; today many home appliances like refrigerators use a more powerful computer chip!). The most impressive aspect of the APG-63 radar system was the first-generation programmable signal processor (PSP), which effectively filtered out ground clutter, giving the radar "look-down, shoot-down" capability. This meant that in broken terrain the pilot could successfully track and engage targets flying at low altitude, which previously were able to "hide" amid the clutter of returns from trees, hills, rocks, and buildings. With some modifications to the PSP's hardware and software, the APG-63 could also provide real-time, high-resolution ground maps, allowing navigation in poor weather or at night. The radar ground maps were good enough for an experienced pilot to pick out vehicles, bunkers, and other targets. This ability would be further enhanced in the F-15E Strike Eagle fighter-bomber variant. Finally, the APG-63 can track one target while searching for others (track-while-scan or TWS).

The hardware of the APG-63 was as revolutionary as its software. The antenna is a flat, circular planar array, gimbaled in two axes so that it can maintain target lock-on during high-G maneuvers. This means that the F-15 can launch an air-to-air missile, turn up to 60deg away from the target (called off-boresight), and still maintain the track, even while the target pulls evasive maneuvers. The APG-63's subsystems, such as the power supply, transmitter, and signal processor, are packaged as individual line-replaceable units (LRUs), which reduces maintenance and repair time. An LRU is a box of system electronics (usually small enough to be handled, removed, and rapidly replaced by a single mechanic) that contains a major electronic or mechanical subsystem of an aircraft. When something inside an LRU fails, the entire box is sent back to the factory or a base/depot-level maintenance facility for repair.

The radar's horizontal or azimuth scan has three selectable arcs, 30deg, 60deg, or 120deg, centered directly in front of the aircraft. The vertical or elevation scan has three selectable "bars" (a bar is a slice of airspace with a vertical depth of 1 1/2deg per bar)—2 bar (3deg), 4 bar (6deg), or 6 bar (90deg) — for varying vertical coverage. To cover a specific search pattern, the gimbaled antenna scans from left to right over the selected arc. At the end of the arc, the radar beam drops down one bar and scans back right to left. This continues until the entire bar scan is completed. With an antenna sweep speed of around 70deg/sec./bar, the largest search pattern (a 120deg, 6-bar scan) can take up to fourteen seconds to complete. Early Eagle drivers were very happy with their new aircraft's radar because, after years of peering into fuzzy, cluttered radar screens as if they were crystal balls, struggling to glean target data, the APG- 63 was a revelation. But the ultimate proof of a system only comes in combat. The USAF F-15Cs in Desert Storm, as well as those in Saudi and Israeli service, have proved the value of the APG-63 radar system. The F-15 has at least 96.5 "kills" of enemy aircraft to its credit, with no losses.

As good as the APG-63 was, the follow-on radar system for the dual-role F-15E Strike Eagle had to be even better. Hughes engineers used the APG-63 as the basis for the new APG-70 radar. When it was tested in 1983 on a modified two-seat F-15B, it was obvious that the Eagle's eyes had gotten even sharper. To keep costs and airframe modifications to a minimum, the APG- 70 used the same antenna, power supply, and transmitter as its predecessor. But the brains of the system were all new. A new radar data processor, PSP, and other modules replaced older APG-63 LRUs. The software package was completely new, with greater flexibility, making future modifications even easier. The APG-70 can simultaneously track and engage multiple airborne targets with the new AIM-120 AMRAAM air-to-air missile. To support the F-15E's ground-attack mission, there is a high-resolution ground-mapping mode (crews tell us it can routinely pick up high-tension power lines), and an even finer synthetic-aperture-radar (SAR) mode, which produces in just seconds a black-and-white photographic-quality picture of the ground for use by the WSO. SARs use a processing technique that uses the aircraft's horizontal motion to "fool" the radar system into "believing" the antenna is actually much larger than it really is. By overlapping multiple return echoes from several scans, and matching them up with the Doppler shift from the various objects in each individual scan, a very high resolution image can be created. Objects as small as 8.5 feet/2.6 meters can be clearly seen in the SAR mode at a range of around 15 nm./27.4 km. The ability to clearly pick out buildings or even vehicles from the radar image at long ranges and in almost any weather greatly simplifies the targeting problem for an aircrew.

Another remarkable feature of the APG-70 is called Non-Cooperative Target Recognition (NCTR). "Cooperative" target recognition depends on the transponders carried by friendly aircraft, which return the proper coded reply when they are "interrogated" by an IFF system. The relatively low reliability of this method has led to very restrictive rules of engagement (ROE) that require several independent means of verifying that a target is really, truly an enemy before a pilot is allowed to shoot it. All air commanders live in fear of "fratricide" or "blue-on-blue" accidents, and the tragic shootdown of two Army helicopters in Northern Iraq in 1994 by F-15Cs suggests that this fear is well founded. NCTR, which is quickly becoming standard on many U.S.-designed radars, is the ability to classify a target by type while it is still beyond visual range. How this is done is highly classified; and even mentioning NCTR around an Air Force or contractor site is likely to raise eyebrows and tighten lips. Nevertheless, NCTR was used in Desert Storm. One possible means discussed in open sources is to focus a high-resolution radar beam on a head-on target and count the number of blades in the opposing aircraft's engine fan or compressor. Knowing the blade count tells you the type of engine and can give you a good idea as to whether the target is hostile.

The APG-70 also has a Low Probability of Intercept (LPI) mode, designed to defeat the Radar Warning Receivers (RWRs) and Electronic Support Measure (ESM) detectors on enemy aircraft, by using techniques like frequency-hopping and power regulation.

The key to the APG-70's capabilities is raw computer power. Compared to earlier F-15s, the Strike Eagle has a five-fold increase in computer processing capability, a ten-fold increase in system memory and storage, and software which is easier to reprogram and use. Troubleshooting is simplified by Built-In Test (BIT) software that routinely checks on the health and well-being of major systems and can isolate a fault to a particular LRU. These capabilities make the F-15E Strike Eagle the most dangerous bird of prey in the air today. Yet even as the "Mud Hen" (as the early crews called the F-15E) was finishing up its testing in 1990, the U.S. Department of Defense was already looking into ways to shorten the time it took to get advanced computer technology into military systems.

In 1980, the Pave Pillar program was initiated by the USAF, with the goal of developing an advanced avionics architecture that could be built out of standard modules containing next-generation digital integrated circuits. With this approach, all of the sensors, communications, navigation, and weapon systems management subsystems will talk to each other over a local area network (LAN), and processed information will be presented to the crew as needed or requested. This significantly reduces pilot workload, allowing him or her to concentrate on flying the plane — a must if future aircraft are to have only one human on board. The new F-22 is the first aircraft to benefit from the Pave Pillar program, and the increase in computer power will make the avionics system of the F-15E Strike Eagle look like a pocket calculator by comparison.

The F-22 carries two Hughes Common Integrated Processors (CIPs). They give the new fighter a hundred-fold increase in computer-processing power over the Strike Eagle. When new sensors or other systems become available, there is room for a third CIP, if required. To accommodate this increase in processing capability, the F-22 data bus bandwidth has been increased to 50 Mb/sec. By comparison the F-15E's data bus carries only 1 Mb/ sec. Since the F-22's APG-77 radar is no longer a stand-alone system, the radar antenna will be just one of a number of sensor arrays, including the electronic-warfare and the threat-warning systems. Data from all of these sensors will be fused together, processed by the CIPs, and displayed to the pilot on one or more color flat-panel multi-function displays (MFDs). Now let's take a look at what the F-22's new APG-77 radar will do.

The APG-77 is nothing like older radar systems. The antenna is a fixed, elliptical, active array which contains about 1,500 radar Transmit/Receive (T/ R) modules. Each T/R module is about the size of an adult's finger and is a complete radar system in its own right. The AN/APG-77 T/R module is the result of a massive technology development program by Texas Instruments and the DoD. As planned, each module will cost about $500 per unit (depending on the quantity ordered), a price that was set when the program was first begun almost a decade ago. The APG-77 has no motors or mechanical linkages to aim the antenna. Even though the antenna doesn't move, the APG-77 is still able to sweep a 120deg multiple-bar search pattern. However, instead of taking fourteen seconds to sweep a 120deg, six-bar search pattern like the APG-70, the APG-77 will search the equivalent volume almost instantaneously. This is because the active array can form multiple radar beams to rapidly scan an area.

The most impressive capability of the APG-77 radar is LPI (low probability of intercept) search. LPI radar pulses are very difficult to detect with conventional RWR and ESM systems. This means the F-22 can conduct an active search with its APG-77 radar, and RWR/ESM-equipped aircraft will probably be none the wiser. Conventional radars emit high-energy pulses in a narrow frequency band, then listen for relatively high-energy returns. A good warning set, however, can pick up these high-energy pulses at over two times the radar's effective range. LPI radars, on the other hand, transmit low-energy pulses over a wide band of frequencies (this is called "spread spectrum" transmission). When the multiple echoes are received from the target, the radar's signal processor integrates all the individual pulses back together, and the amount of reflected EM energy is about the same as a normal radar's high-energy pulse. But because each individual LPI pulse has significantly less energy, and since they do not necessarily fit the normal frequency pattern used by air-search radars, an enemy's warning system will be hard-pressed to detect the pulses long before the LPI radar has detected the target. This will give the F-22 a tremendous advantage in any long-range engagement, as the pilot doesn't have to establish a lock-on when firing AMRAAM missiles. Thus, the first indication that a hostile aircraft will have of an attack by an F-22 will be the screams from his radar-warning receiver telling him that the AMRAAM's radar has lit off, locked on, and is in the final stages of intercept. By that time it's probably too late for him to do anything except eject.

Finally, the APG-77 has an improved capability to conduct NCTR. Since it can form incredibly fine beams, the signal processor can generate a high-resolution radar image of an aircraft through Inverse Synthetic Aperture Radar (ISAR) mode processing. An ISAR-capable radar uses the Doppler shifts caused by rotational changes in the target's position with respect to the radar antenna to create a 3-D map of its target. Thus, where ISAR processing is used, it is the target that provides the Doppler shift, and not the aircraft that the radar is mounted on, which is the case in SAR processing. With a good 3-D radar image, an integrated aircraft-combat system could conceivably identify the target by comparing the image to a stored database. The computer would then pass its best guess to the pilot, who could, if desired, check for himself by calling up the radar image on one of the multi-function displays. If this sounds like a scene from a Star Trek movie, remember that it's all done by software in the F-22s CIPs, and additional capabilities are only a software upgrade away.

Although radar will continue to be the main sensor of combat aircraft for decades to come, infrared sensors are increasingly important for both air superiority and ground-attack missions. In Desert Storm, FLIR-equipped aircraft (such as F-117A, F-111F, F-15E, and F-16C) made precision bombing attacks around the clock. For the air-superiority mission, an aircraft needs an IRST system, while a specialized ground-attack aircraft needs a FLIR system. The differences between these two IR sensors stem from different mission requirements.

IRSTs are wide field-of-view sensors that look for targets in both the middle and long IR bands. IRSTs use automated detection and track routines, designed to find targets in highly cluttered backgrounds. Modern IRSTs are stabilized, gimbaled staring arrays that can scan large areas and detect aircraft at ranges out to 10 to 15 nm./18.2 to 27.4 km. — although 5 to 8 nm./9.1 to 14.6 km. is a more reasonable range against a non-afterburning, non-IR stealthy aircraft. Stabilized means that the sensor automatically compensates for the motion of the aircraft. Gimbals are the supporting bearings that make this possible by allowing the sensor head to rotate on multiple axes. A staring array is like an insect's eye — it consists of many independent detector elements arranged more or less hemispherically rather than a single element that must be mechanically driven to sweep the whole field of view.

FLIRs can be either wide or narrow field-of-view sensors. However, image quality is not particularly good with a wide field-of-view FLIR, and such systems are usually for navigation purposes only. Because FLIRs are designed to provide a higher-resolution picture than an IRST, they have a higher data rate and do not undergo as much signal processing. Essentially, FLIRs are IR television cameras, which must provide a clear image so that an operator can identify the picture with the world's smartest sensor, a Mark 1 human eyeball. Most ground-attack FLIR systems are mounted in external pods or turrets. The Low-Altitude Navigation and Targeting Infrared Night (LANTIRN) system used on the F-15E and F-16C consists of two such pods. The AAQ-13 navigation pod is equipped with a wide field-of-view FLIR for navigation and a terrain-following radar for all-weather navigation. The AAQ-14 targeting pod has a narrow field-of-view FLIR for precise target recognition, along with a bore-sighted laser designator. The FLIR systems used by F-15Es and F-111s in Desert Storm were the cameras that brought you some of the amazing nighttime footage of laser-guided bombs going down Iraqi command post ventilation shafts.

Only a few years ago, radar-warning receivers were widely regarded as noisy and unreliable nuisances in the cockpit. Today, however, no sane combat pilot wants to fly in harm's way without a good RWR/ESM suite. Most combat aircraft have RWRs which are tuned to provide a warning only when an enemy fire control radar has established a lock-on. That means they work about as effectively as smoke alarms do when you are in the same room with the fire. With the greatly increased computer power available to the F-22A, a fully integrated ESM and electronic-warfare (EW) system is now finally possible. ESM is basically a wide frequency band passive radar receiver. It is designed to find radar signals, analyze them, and classify the type of radar that is producing the emissions. This has already been done on specialized EW aircraft such as the EF- 111A Raven, which are packed with so many electronic black boxes and festooned with so many antennas that they have little direct combat capability.

In addition to the standard ESM package, dedicated missile-warning systems are being investigated for installation on the F-22. Historically, 80 % of all aircraft shot down never saw the opponent that killed them. With a missile-warning receiver providing 360deg spherical coverage, a pilot will know when an enemy missile has been fired at him. Based on data from the missile-warning receiver, other aircraft systems could automatically deploy expendable countermeasures (chaff and flares) and sound an aural warning to the pilot. This will improve the pilot's reaction time to an incoming missile, reducing aircraft losses in high-threat environments.

DISPLAYS

Human senses set a limit to how much data pilots can handle before they become overloaded. The key to managing this flood of data is to give the pilot only processed information relevant to the current situation. In other words, we need "pilot friendly" cockpits: If you don't get the message, it doesn't matter if the computer had the right answer or not. Earlier, we noted the sheer number of gauges, switches, and screens that an early F-15 pilot had to be aware of in order to fly the plane. However, once he went into combat, all he needed to do was put the wide-angle HUD onto the enemy aircraft, which allowed him to keep his eyes out of the cockpit.

The HUD displays all relevant tactical and aircraft-systems information in a clear and concise manner — once you understand what all the numbers and symbols mean. The HUD is tied to and controlled by a series of switches mounted on the engine throttle and control stick. Called Hands On Throttle and Stick (HOTAS), this system allows a pilot to avoid having to go "head down" into the cockpit while in a combat situation. On the Vietnam-era F-4E Phantom, the pilot had to reach below his seat to find the selector switch for the 20mm cannon! Today, the pilot of an F-15 or F-16 has only to flip a selector switch to control everything from radar modes to weapons selection.

A lot of important data is crammed onto the HUD. For example, a pilot can tell that he is on a course of 191deg at an airspeed of 510 knots, that the aircraft is in a 10deg climb, and that the target is up and to the left of the plane's present course. A short range IR-homing missile can be selected to engage the target, once the pilot is in a proper position to shoot. Unfortunately, when pilots take their eyes off the HUD to look around (and a good pilot will do that often to check his "six" — the sky behind him), all that data is lost to them until they look forward again. The HUD is just an image projected onto a glass screen mounted above the instrument panel. Since it is a fixed display, it can't follow the pilot's eyes when they look around.

Or can it? Right now, helmet-mounted HUDs are under development in the U.S. and Great Britain (and Israel and Russia both have operational systems). The helmet-mounted HUD supplements the standard HUD, providing enhanced situational awareness. If the aircraft carries air-to-air missiles with slewable seekers (called high off-boresight seekers), like the Russian AA-11 Archer or the Israeli Python-4, the pilot can attack targets that are offset from the aircraft's nose. You can attack a crossing target without wasting time or energy maneuvering for position, which gives you a tremendous advantage in a high-speed, multi-aircraft dogfight or "furball."

Future possibilities include virtual-reality (VR) displays, voice-command recognition (remember the book and movie Firefox?), VR control gloves, VR bodysuits, or eye motion command controls. In skies filled with stealthy, silent attacks, there is no time to waste.

THE "EDGE": COMING USAF AIRCRAFT

Northrop Grumman B-2A Spirit

Two B-2s, without escorts or tankers, could have performed the same mission as a package of thirty-two strike aircraft, sixteen fighters, twelve air-defense suppression aircraft, and fifteen tankers.

— GENERAL CHUCK HORNER, USAF (RET.)

The most expensive airplane ever built is a hard sell to taxpayers and legislators who are increasingly cynical about defense contractors and increasingly skeptical about military procurement. But to understand the B-2, you have to understand the threat that it was designed to overcome and the almost unimaginable mission it was created to perform. One of the things that helped to bankrupt the Soviet Union was an obsessive, forty-year attempt to build an impenetrable air-defense system. The National Air Defense Force (known by its Russian initials, PVO) was a separate service, co-equal with the Soviet Army, Navy, Air Force, and Strategic Rocket Forces. It was designed to keep the U.S. Air Force and the few strategic bombers of the other Western allies from penetrating the Russian heartland and decapitating the highly centralized Soviet command and control system, as well as their top military and political leadership. Ultimately, the only Western plan for defeating the system was the Doomsday scenario, using nuclear missiles to "roll back" the successive layers of air defense so the bombers could get through to their targets.

In the 1970s, the Russians began to develop mobile ICBM systems that could shuttle around the vast spaces of the Soviet Union on special railroad trains or giant wheeled vehicles. The Soviets knew that every fixed missile silo could be pinpointed by satellite imagery and targeted for destruction; every Soviet ballistic missile submarine could be tracked by sonar arrays and trailed by a U.S./NATO attack boat; but what could you do to kill a mobile missile complex? The proposed U.S. solution was to hunt down the mobile missiles with an aircraft so revolutionary that nothing in the Soviet arsenal could touch it.

^{The first pre-production B-2A Spirit stealth bomber in front of its hangar at the Northrop Grumman factory at Palmdale, California.}

^{Craig E. Kaston}

An invisible airplane that traveled at the speed of light, armed with precision "death ray" weapons, would have been ideal. But a subsonic airplane which was almost invisible to radar and IR sensors, carrying a few nuclear-tipped missiles, was sufficient if (and it was a big if) its development could be kept so secret that the other side would have no time, and no data, to develop effective countermeasures. Thus was born the B-2A Spirit. The origins of the B-2 design date back to experimental aircraft of the 1920s, when the visionary Horten brothers of Germany designed their first "flying wing" aircraft, without conventional tail surfaces and with a cockpit smoothly blended into the thickened wing section. Their goal was low drag (they were unaware as yet of the advantages of a low radar cross section). The problem with all-wing aircraft is that they are inherently less stable than the more normal kind with fuselages and tail sections; and crashes of various prototypes led to the shelving of the Hortens' project (although a very ambitious twin-jet-powered version was under development at the end of the Second World War). In the 1940s, the brilliant and eccentric American engineer Jack Northrop designed the XB-35 heavy bomber, a propeller-driven flying wing, and later the YB-49, a promising eight-engined turbojet bomber (which compromised the purity of the design by adding four small vertical fins). Unfortunately, the manual flight controls of the time were inadequate to solve the inherent stability problems of pure flying wing designs, and the Air Force canceled the project. Despite the problems inherent in the flying wing design, it does have one undeniable characteristic: It is tough to see on radar. Thus, the stage was set for the development of the B-2.

Originally called the Advanced Technology Bomber (ATB), the B-2 began development in 1978 as a black program, which means that it was not published in the Air Force budget and its existence was revealed only to a limited circle of legislators. In 1981 the Northrop/Boeing team's proposal was selected, and full-scale development of the new bomber followed. It took seven years, including a major redesign in the mid-1980s, when the USAF changed the original B-2 specification to include a low-level penetration capability. (Shortly before his death, under a special security dispensation, Jack Northrop was allowed to see a model of the B-2—the vindication of the idea he had championed four decades earlier.)

The first B-2 pre-production aircraft (known as Air Vehicle #1) was rolled out at Palmdale, California, on November 22nd, 1988, and the first flight was on July 17th, 1989. The first B-2A squadron (of eight aircraft) of the 509th Bombardment Wing at Whiteman AFB, Missouri, are scheduled to reach IOC (initial operation capability) in 1996. Given the official Air Force designation of Spirit, each aircraft will be named for a state; the first five are "Spirit of California," "Spirit of Missouri," "Spirit of Texas," "Spirit of Washington," and "Spirit of South Carolina." General Mike Loh, the ACC commander, likes the designation because, like a ghost, the B-2 will be able to come and go without being seen.

A combination of several advanced technologies made the B-2 possible. Foremost among these was computer-aided design/computer-aided manufacturing, known as CAD/CAM in the aircraft industry. The F-117A had to employ awkwardly faceted flat surfaces, because this was the only solution available in the mid-1970s to the earlier-generation computer hardware and software on which it was designed (millions of radar cross section calculations were necessary to validate the design). The B-2, designed on vastly more powerful computer systems, could have smoothly contoured aerodynamic surfaces because, by that time, the billions of necessary calculations could be performed relatively quickly.

Moreover, the B-2 was the first modern aircraft to go into production without requiring a prototype, or even a development fixture. Designed with advanced three-dimensional CAD/CAM systems, which are used to fix parts, the B-2's virtual development fixture allowed every component to be fit-checked before it was manufactured. As a result, when the first B-2s were assembled, something happened that was unprecedented in aviation history, possibly in the entire history of engineering development and manufacturing. Every part fit perfectly the first time, and the finished aircraft precisely matched its designed dimensions within a few millimeters over a span of 172 feet/52.4 meters.

^{The first pre-production B-2A Spirit bomber flies over Edwards AFB, California. Note the control surfaces (elevons and flaperons) along the trailing edge of the wing.}

^{Craig E. Kaston}

The B-2's flight-control surfaces are unique. The outboard trailing edge of each wing tip consists of a pair of hinged "drag rudders," moved by hydraulic actuators, with another set called "elevons" inboard of those. These surfaces take the place of the rudder, elevators, and ailerons on a conventional aircraft.

The B-2's crew consists of a mission commander and pilot, who sit side by side on conventional ejection seats beneath blow-out panels overhead. The commander is in the right-hand (starboard) position, with the pilot on the left (port). Each crew station has four color multi-function displays and fighter-type control sticks, rather than the control yokes commonly used on large multi-engined aircraft. These controls feed into the quad-redundant fly-by-wire flight control system, which makes the Spirit very stable, but highly agile. (According to the test pilots, the B-2 flies "like a fighter" thanks to the agility of the fly-by-wire system.) The communications systems consist of a full array of HF/UHF/VHF radios, as well as a satellite communications terminal, all of which are controlled from a single data entry panel. Eventually, this will be fully compatible with the new MILSTAR communications satellites that are now coming online. The wraparound windows are very large, but there is no visibility aft, so the crew must rely on sophisticated tail-warning sensors to "check six." The crew enters through a floor hatch with a retractable ladder that is just aft of the nose landing gear well. The traditional "alert" button is on the nose gear, though most experts agree that it will probably never be used by a B-2 crew.

The four General Electric F118-100 turbofan engines buried inside the wing are non-afterburning versions of the F101 used in the B-1B. Each engine is rated at 19,000 lb./8,600 kg. of thrust. To dissipate heat and hide the hot section from hostile IR tracking systems, the complex air intakes receive incoming air through an S-shaped turn, which shields the fan sections from the view of any hostile radar; then the unique V-shaped exhaust slots pass the exhaust gases across a long, wide, trough-shaped section of the upper wing.

While many details of the structure and materials of the B-2 will remain closely guarded secrets for years to come, published sources suggest that graphite-epoxy composites are used extensively. Even the paint requires unique new technology. Antennas are mounted flush with the skin; even the air-data sensors which stick out prominently on most fly-by-wire aircraft are flush-mounted on the leading edge of the B-2. The most conventional equipment is the main landing gear, derived from the Boeing 767 airliner, and the nose gear, from the Boeing 757.

With only one air-to-air refueling, a range of more than 10,000 nm./ 18,280 km. is possible. Endurance is thus limited only by crew fatigue, which is exceptionally low due to the high degree of onboard automation. In effect, with a minimum of tanker support, the B-2 can strike any target in the world and return to a base in the continental United States. The in-flight refueling receptacle on top of the crew compartment is concealed behind a retractable door of radar-absorbing material, and according to pilot reports, the B-2 is quite stable and has very pleasant flying qualities around tankers.

All weapons will be carried internally — an absolute requirement for any stealthy aircraft, since ordnance dangling on pylons increases the radar cross section dramatically. The two bomb bays, aft of the crew compartment, are designed to each accommodate an eight-round rotary launcher, or a conventional munitions module similar to those on the B-1B.

The Air Force plans to buy twenty B-2s by 1998 for $44 billion from Northrop Grumman Corp. of Los Angeles. Originally the service wanted 132 B-2s, but because of the plane's high purchase price and the end of the Cold War, Congress limited the program. Though Northrop Grumman has proposed constructing an additional twenty aircraft by 2008 at a guaranteed fixed price of about $570 million each, the future of the program is highly uncertain. Nevertheless, the B-2A Spirit is the state of the art in strike aircraft, and probably will be well into the middle of the next century.

Lockheed Martin-Boeing F-22

It has been over twenty years since the current USAF air superiority fighter, the F-15 Eagle, first took wing in 1972. Those two decades have seen massive changes, both in the political makeup of the world and the nature of aviation technology. Thus, it is in that context that the Air Force is betting billions of dollars and the future of manned fighter aircraft on the Lockheed Martin-Boeing F-22 and its new Pratt & Whitney F119 engines. In 1984, the ATF specification called for a 50,000 lb./22,700 kg., $35 million aircraft (that's in 1985 U.S. dollars) incorporating the latest advances in low-observable technologies and able to cruise at supersonic speed (the YF-22A demonstrated the ability to cruise at Mach 1.58 during the competitive fly-off, and to do so at altitudes in excess of 50,000 feet) to a combat radius of more than 800 nm./ 1,200 km. By 1986 the competition narrowed down to two teams, each of which would build and fly a pair of prototypes: the Lockheed-Boeing-General Dynamics YF-22 and the Northrop-McDonnell Douglas YF-23. Although the YF-23 had excellent performance, the Air Force decided in April 1991 to go with the superior agility of the YF-22. Under current plans, the Air Force will now buy 442 aircraft, with a first production aircraft flight scheduled early in 1997 and initial operational capability by 2004. Planned production will continue through 2011, with follow-on versions such as strike, SEAD (Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses), and reconnaissance coming afterwards as required.

^{One of the two YF-22 prototype aircraft flying over Edwards AFB during the advanced tactical fighter "fly-off."}

^{Lockheed Martin}

The Air Force views the mission of air superiority as instrumental for the success of other types of missions (deep strike, battlefield, interdiction, close air support, etc.). With the wide variety of current-generation fighters in the air forces of potential adversaries, as well as the potential sales of new-generation aircraft, the USAF will require a fighter able to engage and destroy any potential opponent at times and places of their choosing. The F-22 is designed to take the basic weapons/sensor load of the F-15C and repackage it into a stealthy platform capable of supersonic cruise. This combination of stealth and high cruise speed is designed to allow the F-22 to rapidly enter an area, establish air superiority, avoid enemy detection/engagement, and basically act like Ridley Scott's Alien, so that the bad guys are too scared to even come up.

Lockheed Martin indicates that the F-22A/B will be a true stealth design, in the same class as the F-117A and the B-2A. Although the F-22 is essentially the same size as the F-15, over the frontal aspect its radar cross section is reportedly over one hundred times smaller! The structure of the F-22 will be composed of the following: 28 % composites (carbon-carbon, thermoplastics, etc.), 37 % titanium, 20 % metal (aluminum and steel), and 15 % "other" materials (kryptonite?). To reduce the weight of the aircraft and still provide strength, the structural members of the F-22 are of a mixed metal/composite design that minimizes the total RCS of the package. For example, two of every three wing spars are of composite construction, while every third one is titanium. Also, watch for a new paint which may have RAM properties as well. By the way, the "notch" in the leading edge of the wing is supposed to be a radar "trap" to catch and dissipate radar waves around the wing roots.

Even the engines are stealthy. Since the twin F119 power plants deliver enough dry thrust (i.e., without use of the afterburner) to allow the F-22 to cruise at supersonic speeds, its IR signature is significantly reduced over a conventional fighter aircraft traveling at the same speed. The Pratt & Whitney F119 (35,000 lb./15,909.1 kg. of thrust each) provides the F-22 with the performance of the F-15C (with the F100-PW-220 engine in full afterburner) while in military (dry) power. All this is done without a variable inlet ramp (to reduce the aircraft's RCS) and with an engine that is stealthy by itself, unlike those on the F-117A, which require inlet screens. The inlet ducts are curved to hide the fan section of the engine from enemy radar, with RAM and other engineering tricks to further reduce this traditional radar trap. On most jet aircraft the exhaust nozzles are round; on the F-22 they are rectangular slots, with movable vanes that can deflect the exhaust — in effect "steering" the thrust vector. These "2-D" nozzles (up to +/-20deg of vertical displacement from centerline) of the F119 improve aircraft agility and give the F-22 superb short-field takeoff-and-landing performance.

^{An F119 turbofan engine in a test stand, running at full afterburner. A pair of F119 engines will power the new F-22 fighter in the 21st century.}

^{Pratt & Whitney-United Technologies}

The cockpit will be an almost totally "glass" design (i.e., only MFDs), with only three analog instruments as emergency backups. No less than six multi-function displays of three sizes are arrayed for the pilot to configure as he or she pleases. The cockpit is a classic HOTAS design, with a wide-field-of-view holographic HUD. Also, a helmet-mounted sight for helping the pilots get weapons onto their targets is a likely upgrade. If the design for the F-22 works as planned, its flight envelope will vastly exceed that of any existing U.S. fighter, or even the MiG-29 or Su-27/35. Acceleration, rate of roll, and other control parameters are also planned to be superior on the F-22 when compared to existing designs. The quad-redundant, fly-by-wire flight control system is going to make the F-22 a true sustained 9-G airplane, able to rapidly turn and hold that load for as long as the pilot can stand it.

The F-22A/B will have the first fully integrated avionics suite ever flown on a combat aircraft. The Common Integrated Processor (CIP — the F-22 has two CIP bays, with room for a third) built by GM-Hughes is the core of the system and supports the Westinghouse-Texas Instruments APG-77 radar, the Lockheed Martin electronic warfare suite, and the TRW communications/ navigation/IFF subsystems. The electronics will be liquid-cooled, and they will run over one million lines of computer code. Total processing power for the F-22A/B with two CIP bays will be in the area of 700 Mips (700 million operations/sec — equivalent to four Cray supercomputers), with an expansion potential of something over 100 % already planned into the design.

As for sensors, the new Westinghouse APG-77 radar is a wide field-of-view (over 120deg) fixed phased array, which is virtually undetectable with conventional RWR systems. In fact, the APG-77 can probably be programmed to do virtually any kind of operation that a radar is capable of doing just by programming it with additional software and adding the necessary processor/memory capacity to the CIPs. Also, the F-22A/B will have an integrated countermeasures suite tied to the CIP bays. This will allow for rapid systems reprogramming in the event of a crisis, and should allow modifications to be handled quickly. The jammer/RWR antennas are contained in "smart skins" on the wing tips, with the communications, navigation, and IFF antennas in the leading edges of the wings.

The basic weapons package of the F-22 will be roughly similar to that of the F-15C, though it will develop in stages. The missiles will be fired off hydraulically extensible rail launchers out of three internal weapons bays (one on either side, and one in the belly). Since opening a door to launch or fire a weapon may suddenly increase the RCS of the aircraft from certain angles, the designers have provided actuators that rapidly open and shut those doors, so that the exposure time is minimized. As an added stealth feature, the 20mm gun is buried deep in the right mid-fuselage area, and fires through a door that snaps open at the time of firing, then closes immediately after the last bullet passes. Also, in a non-stealth configuration, an additional eight air-to-air missiles can be carried on four wing pylons.

^{A mockup of the "glass" cockpit design of the new F-22 fighter. Note the use of computer-style multi-function displays instead of traditional dial or "strip" instruments.}

^{Lockheed Martin}

The F-22 has been designed so that most of the access panels are at ground level, and require only eight more tools than are already in the standard kit of the F-15C. Also, the F-22 will require a bare minimum of ground support equipment, such as service carts and workstands. For example, the F-22 has its own onboard oxygen and inert-gas generators to supply the environmental control system for the pilot and to provide pressurization for the fuel system. Thus, maintenance hours per flight hour should be even less than the F-16 or A-10. There also will be a portable electronic maintenance aid, based around a handheld computer, which will plug into the aircraft, and a maintenance laptop computer, which will do all the diagnostic work on what needs to be replaced, filled, or whatever. One of the design goals was to increase sortie rates by achieving a fifteen-minute combat turnaround time — that's to both refuel and re-arm!

While the final production number is still in flux, a figure of about $100 million is a fair estimate of what each F-22 will cost the taxpayers. In spite of this, the F-22 remains just about the highest-priority acquisition program that the USAF has today. It should keep the Air Force pushing the edge well into the next century.