Su-57 invisible to US radar when entering Syria
According to Jpost, the US reconnaissance network is having a headache trying to figure out how two Russian Su-57s entered Syria without being detected.
Jpost quoted a US military source as saying that the entire US reconnaissance system in the Middle East was surprised after Russian media publicly released images of a pair of Su-57 stealth fighters operating in Syria.
According to this source, after being surprised, the US is having a headache trying to find an answer as to why the highly sophisticated US reconnaissance system deployed in the area could not detect the two fighter jets weighing tens of tons when they were sent by Russia to Syria.
Although the US has not been able to answer, according to experts from Jpost, the secret entry of the Russian 5th generation Su-57 fighter into Syria can be explained in the following ways.
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| A pair of Su-57s are present in Syria. |
The source said that the Russian fighter jet may have taken a detour, bypassing Azerbaijani airspace, flying through international airspace over the Caspian Sea, into Iranian and Iraqi airspace to reach Syria.
Mobilizing a pair of heavy fighter jets to travel a distance of more than 2,000km, through the airspace of three countries, under the watchful eyes of US and allied reconnaissance satellites and radars, is not a simple task.
The US military has long deployed numerous airborne early warning and control (AWACS) aircraft at Incirlik Air Base in eastern Türkiye and several bases in Bahrain. In addition, Israel's Gulfstream G550 airborne early warning (AEW) aircraft also regularly patrol the airspace.
These aircraft are equipped with modern radar systems that can detect targets within a very wide control range with a radius of up to 500 km. The airspace over the Caspian Sea and northern Iraq are all within the control of American and Israeli early warning aircraft.
However, no reconnaissance and early warning equipment, both airborne and ground, of the US and its allies detected the Russian plane flying to Syria. Jpost believes that in order to successfully carry out the flight, Russia may have used covert tactics, turned off friend-enemy identification equipment, and caused interference...
According to this assessment, the Su-57 pair can easily outmaneuver the US and its allies by coordinating in a narrow formation, equally spaced, flying above the A-50U or Tu-154M aircraft at an altitude of 10km at a speed of about 1,000km/h.
Under these conditions, the early warning radar systems of the US and Israel can easily detect the large aircraft because of its large radar cross-section. The Russian fighter planes will safely "hide" because the radar wave reflection between Russian planes is uniform.
In addition, the Jpost newspaper also said that the Russian plane may have turned off its friend-foe identification device to quietly fly to Syria. This device is used to identify friend and foe aircraft in each country's air defense zone when within the coverage range of air surveillance radars.
Not only that, Russia can take advantage of its electronic warfare strengths to actively jam. Specifically, Russia could have used measures to suppress all active radars, jamming the entire operating frequency range of radars in the area the aircraft would fly through.
However, the Jpost newspaper believes that a larger and very simple possibility is that the Russian Su-57 fighter jet took advantage of its stealth strength to quietly bypass the entire reconnaissance system of the US and its allies to enter Syria.
If this assessment is true, the Su-57 deserves to be the world's leading stealth fighter because before that, no aircraft could do this, including the US Air Force's advanced F-22 or F-35 - fighter jets that have been detected by Russian and Chinese radars.
