On Fri, 07 Jan 2011 22:26:49 -0800, Paul A. Suhler wrote:

On 1/8/2011 3:40 PM, John Szalay wrote:
Kerryn wrote in

Didn't the original research for stealth come out of Russia (or at
least was done by Russian mathematicians...

In a-round-about way,

According to Ben Rich's book, the original formulas were from a
scottish physicist James Maxwell,developed a century ago, later
refined by a german electromagnetics expert Arnold Sommerfeld, then put
in a paper by a russian radio engineer scientist named Pyotr
Ufimtsev ,paper was called "Method of edge waves in the physical theory
of diffraction" that paper was ignored for 9 years until translated and
discovered by a Skunk Works mathemation named Denys Overholser. once he
understood the theory, stealth came into being.

REF:
Skunk Works" by Ben Rich& Leo Janos. page 19

IMHO:
One Hellofa read, well worth having on your book shelf.

Check out Ed Lovick's "Radar Man: A Personal History of Stealth." Ed
invented some of the original techniques during the work on the A-12.
It predates the computational work based on Ufimtsev's paper. His is --
as far as I know -- only the third memoir by a Skunk Worker.

There were other pre-Blackbird stealth efforts as well. the
Wright Air Development Center covered a T-33 in RAM in the
mid-50s, and achieved significant signature reduction.

--
Pete Stickney
Failure is not an option
It comes bundled with the system