Aircraft Sonar Detection?

Having read several of the new threads about F22s and some of the old ones, I see people saying that the F-22 is darnred stealthy and is inredibly hard to detect on radar. Not being a radar operator, I'm afraid I wouldn't know. But I do know that fighter jets are like engines with wings. They're fast and maneuverable. I also know first-hand that they make a LOT of noise. Even an F117 Nighthawk is prone to making loud noises.

My question is this- Would it be possible to do something like a Heat-Seeker missile with sound? Engines put ou ta lot of heat, which is why missiles can track them. Engines also produce sound and lots of it. Would it be possible to use a combination of radar tracking and sound tracking to hit enemies with missiles? Or would huge problems erupt with the missiles taking charge and blowing wingmates out of the sky?

Rather not.
Sonic detection was relativly popular during the ww2 but it is surely unsuatable for detecting jet airkraft since a jet strem sounds at distance much like the wind

Theres an israeli missle designed to hunt down helicopters by acoustics only...


Designed in the early 1990's to combat low flying fast attack helicopters, the USA looked at it for a while but i'm not sure what happend to it after the first gulf war...

i'll dig for it and find out any ore than this.


Mad G.

Actually there is a story about detecting planes with sonar during the cold war. I heard from an interview to Tom Clancy on the History Channel. He said that the Navy once told him, that the Tupolev Bear was so noisy that the submarine detection network set up in the northern Atlantic could track it during its reconnaissance flights...

i don't know how usefull it would be at low level. i was at the reno air races / air show and an f-18 did a fly by at just under the speed of sound for the altitude and air temp that day, a low level of around 100ft. like mach .99 and when he flew by there was absolutly no sound. maybe 1-3 seconds later there was the roar of noise but not when he was overhead.

it was eerily quiet when the plane zipped overhead and there was no way you could have heard it before it got there.

[edit on 1-5-2006 by bigx01]

Darkpr0,

Acoustic tracking dates to WWI, not II (though it was used then as well) and is actually relatively effective in a clear air environment. System appearance is similar to a giant set of tuba-like 'collector drums' whose az/el is manually dialed in based on amplitude. Clouds can and do create sound channels and general 'muffling' of wave phenomena but the fact remains that we can and do use sound as a tracking element in both ground emplaced (REMBASS and other UGS) and artillery hunting missions with _spectacular_ success. The BAT munition was also at one time a pure acoustic hunter.

During WWII the 'Kranich' acoustic fuze (for early guided AAM) worked on the principal of a stretched diaphragm resonating at bomber engine base-frequency levels until completing a circuit when the material contacted an armatures laid across it.

What people fail to understand is that, particularly for high altitude, supersonic, tracking systems, it doesn't /matter/ if you detect a threat a little late because the coupling of direct-air and P/S wave (micro-seismic and 7-10K fps through ground) systems gives you very good indications of both high frequency and low rumble overlap which can be correlated _in depth_, very cheaply.

Most have heard of the 'Aurora' reports of hypersonic travel along or into American airspace of a Mach 6-10 signature recorded on quake-detectors as well as by human auditory witnessing.

But what is not as well publicized is that the USAF supposedly closed down a wind-powered electrical generation 'windmill' facility in northern Nevada because it was interfering with exactly such a system. And it is known that Edwards also has an acoustic tracker.

IMO, if you can track a threat from the border inwards; you can kill it 'eventually' as a function of collating several aperture reports into trackfiles to which you fly out a weapon that _hunts_ (sustains pursuit of) for the target in a given TLE cube of airspace.

You would NOT likely want to do this with an acoustic 'seeker', simply because it wouldn't function properly at high slipstream levels (though you can hear a nearby burner light through the canopy on a manned jet) and would in any case have too limited a search cone.

Lastly, in regards to helos, the AHM which is most frequently derived from brilliant anti-tank munitions has now reached fruition in an acoustic-cued Russian built system which is being used against USAr assets in Iraq and which is reportedly responsible for an increasing number of S2A helo kills based on a dual channel (IR+Sound) cue-launched projectile which has variously been described as either a converted mortar shell (RF proxfuze) popup device or an EFP.

It can be done. Both indirectly as a function of tracking and directly (over limited radii and speed range) as a function of weapon cueing/guidance.

It's just that we do not because, having vested huge amounts of capital into RF, it is simpler to exploit an existing technology base.


KPl.