You Don't Know How Research Could Benefit The Society

In the 1960′s a minor mathematician named Pyotr Yakovlevich Ufimtsev began research for the Soviet electronic warfare unit.

Since the EW unit was mostly concerned with radio waves, he began to look into how radio waves bounced off of two- and three-dimensional surfaces. The equations he developed were extraordinary, but not given much thought by his superiors since there didn't seem to be any practical applications.

In fact, his bosses thought so little of his work they allowed it to be published, completely unclassified. The paper, Method of Edge Waves in the Physical Theory of Diffraction, was published in 1962.

Well, the book was translated into English by the U.S. Air Force foreign technology division in the 1970′s just when the US was experiencing a big problem in Vietnam.

The big problem was that the NVA kept shooting U.S. planes down with surface to air missiles, and there wasn’t a lot we could do about it. The lesson learned from this by the US and NATO in the '60s-'70s during the Vietnam war was that a sophisticated, radar-guided air defense network would likely cause tremendous initial losses to NATO aircraft during the opening stages of a confrontation with the Warsaw Pact in Europe.

Our allies the Israelis had a similar issue with Soviet-designed air defense around the same time. In the 1973 Yom Kippur war they lost over 100 aircraft to Soviet-provided radar-guided SAMs in the first few weeks of the war.

Something had to be done to neutralize that Soviet radar air defense threat.

After all ideas were considered, it was decided that the best option was to build a plane invisible to enemy radar that could penetrate the defended airspace, take out the radar control networks and allow the regular aircraft to flow in through the gaps punched in the line by the invisible plane.

But how do you make an object invisible to radar? Well, for starters you’d better know how radar waves bounce off three-dimensional things like planes. Which is where our old friend Peter and his long-ignored book of formulas for exactly that purpose come in.

At the time, the computers were only powerful enough to calculate how radar bounced off flat surfaces, so they had to build a plane entirely out of flat surfaces. It looked like this.

(Lockheed Have Blue flying prototype)

It was so good that when they put it on the radar test range they got no return at all, and the engineers thought the equipment was malfunctioning. Only when they hauled a test object out onto the range to verify everything was fine did they understand the magnitude of what they had created.

Refinement and militarization produced a truly astounding aircraft.

(Lockheed F-117)

But still made out of flat surfaces. These days we have better computers that can model radar reflections off 3-D objects.
So we have this,

(Northrop B-2)

This,

(Lockheed F-35)

and this, the most stealthy combat aircraft to ever take to the sky.

(Lockheed F-22)

And all thanks to our esteemed comrade Ufimtsev, the father of Stealth, ignored at the time but now one of the most coveted military technologies of all.

   - Damien Leimbach