Yeah I remember their fighter jets flying into Ukraine with a TomTok GPS somebody dropped off at a Salvation Army store in New Jersey before some Igor bought it and FedEx’d it back to Siberia. So impressive.
I watched an F22 Raptor practice for an air show recently and it was pretty mind blowing to see. The maneuverability of that thing is insane. And they don’t even show its full potential at air shows.
What’s crazy to me is that we haven’t seen USAF stealth technology in combat since the F-117s in Serbia. Those things were basically undetectable without their weapons bay open and they were only 1st gen designs, plus I bet radar tech hasn’t nearly kept pace with stealth since then.
Sometimes I want NATO to intervene in the skies over Ukraine just so I could see the f-35 and f-22 in real combat scenarios. But then I remember that war sucks and think maybe not.
F-22 and F-35 were both deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq. The F-117 wasn’t a fighter and never engaged in air-to-air combat (because it couldn’t, it was subsonic had poor maneuverability and no active radar) so the F-22 and F-35 both meet the same standard that you are using for “combat” with the F-117.
F-117 did have radar, it also could carry AIM-9 Sidewinders internally. They trained pilots of 117s to take out AWAC planes… I flew with pilots who trained as such.
Just more bullshit from the internet “know it all.”
If you’re going to try to harass me, you should make sure you aren’t botching your comments. You edited your comment so now it looks like you are criticizing your original comment, not anything I said.
I meant combat against a competent foe with air defense or fighter capabilities. Airstriking some Taliban in the desert isn’t exactly flexing your stealth that much
If my airforce was comprised in bulk of early to mid era cold war museum pieces with a (very) small handful of late cold war era jets as my flagship units then I would be impressed with anything developed after 1991 as well.
I mean, that’s fair enough in itself. There’s plenty of nations out there still rocking their Falcons, Flankers, Frogfoots, Frogger, Tornados, Mirages etc etc completely respectedly. But they also allow their pilots more stick time in half a year than the vast majority of NK’s pilots get in half a decade.