How the Serbs Shot Down An F-117

Presentation by Zoltán Dani himself (with English subtitles)

This probably been discussed to death already, but i only have the chance to see this video recently because someone post it in F-16.net, anyway, there are many surprises and interesting facts that most seem to forget when they talk about the events.

0) They used P-18 radar to detect F-117

1)It requires the lowest frequency setting L1 at 140 Mhz to detect F-117 (8:31)

2) Zoltán Dani got intel from Janko Aleksic regarding when to turn on his radar, as he had no target on his radar screen (18:31-19:10)

3) Following the order from headquarter, Zoltán and his team turn on their radar, switch through the frequency setting, start at L2 then L1 , L3 , L4. Only at L1, targets showed up, and they are all at distance 30 km or closer.

The last bit is particularly interesting when we know P-18 can detect a target with RCS =2.5m2 from very long range: 110 km if target cruises at altitude = 3 km and 250 km if target cruises at altitude = 10 km (

According to Zoltán, F-117 was cruising at altitude = 6 km)

Rough extrapolate from the table

With radar height = 6.35 meters, P-18 will detect targets with RCS= 2.5 m2, cruising at 6km altitude from 132.5 km, reduce RCS by 10 times and we get 44% detection range reduction => F-117 RCS is smaller than 0.025m2 at frequencies >140 Mhz.

With radar height = 10.35 meters, P-18 will detect targets with RCS= 2.5 m2, cruising at 6km altitude from 180 km, reduce RCS by 10 times and we get 44% detection range reduction => F-117 RCS is smaller than 0.0025m2 at frequencies >140 Mhz.

This is surprisingly small.

Yeah, that is very interesting, your math that is. The downing of this aircraft proves it's not impossible to detect a stealth aircraft, but it also emphasises that it was still VERY difficult to detect, and occurred mostly as a result of overconfidence and sloppiness. They did quite well against the Iraqis using similar systems in a very integrated layered system.

Proper video embedding:

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Just remove the spaces from the YouTube brackets.

You only need the part after ?v= from the YouTube link.

Very interesting video, thanks for sharing (though I only skipped through very quickly)! :thumbup: