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| F-22 |
A comment on the FlightAware page piqued my curiosity:
A metallic coating of indium-tin-oxide is added to the canopy for stealth reasons, which gives it the gold color.
How does that work? I found several places that all say basically the same thing, but nothing that really makes any sense. I would have to see just how radar waves react to this stealth coating, but I would probably need some kind of security clearance to see it, and that ain't gonna happen.
But maybe it's not really for stealth, maybe it's just for defrosting:
ITO films deposited on windshields are used for defrosting aircraft windshields. The heat is generated by applying voltage across the film. - Wikipedia
3 comments:
Similarly, coating the cockpit canopy with a thin film transparent conductor (vapor-deposited gold or indium tin oxide) helps to reduce the aircraft's radar profile, because radar waves would normally enter the cockpit, reflect off objects (the inside of a cockpit has a complex shape, with a pilot helmet alone forming a sizeable return), and possibly return to the radar, but the conductive coating creates a controlled shape that deflects the incoming radar waves away from the radar. wiki
Yeah, I saw that, but it doesn't make any sense.
Sure it does, radar works on reflection so they eliminate as many reflecting spots as possible like the fuselage to vertical tail junction. The cockpit is full of those reflecting surfaces so the coating deflects the radar off on an angle rather from entering so it can't be reflected.
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