Lesson 26 — Aircraft RF Signature

An aircraft's radar signature is not one number but a budget of contributors — cavities, apertures, speculars, edges, and seams. This lesson assigns each one a design verdict and prices the fix with the fourth-root law.

Reading

Aircraft RF Signature

The signature contributors, the shape/mask/treat/manage verdicts, planform alignment, and the loudest-first RCS budget.

Flashcards

Review deck

Key terms and relations from the lesson, in a self-test deck.

Pre-flight

Pre-flight quiz

Five questions to work before class — anyone can be called to the board.

Slides

Lesson slides

The deck we work through in class — an HTML deck you can annotate in the browser, with a print view for saving a PDF.

Demo

Planform Alignment

Drag three planforms — fighter, flying wing, diamond — and watch two dozen spike directions collapse to four while the surviving lobes grow taller.