zero-one wrote:The fact that no one is using it on front line fighters, to me, speaks volumes.
by the way the RQ-4 has a V-Tail and Iran had no problems shooting it down. It isn't considered VLO anyway.
This here shows you making wrong conclusions from data without understanding the engineering aspects.
Before fly-by-wire, v-tail has issue of yaw and roll coupling, which is why you don’t see them on older fighters. Once you have fly-by-wire, the pilot no longer directly pulls the control surfaces so the problem is significantly mitigated. Paul Metz highly praised the YF-23 handling. Even with fly-by-wire, before 5th gen fighters stealth was not a concern so the VLO benefit is also not considered. If you look at all the fighters after fly-by-wire became a thing:
Typhoon, Rafale, Gripen are all Eurocanards where stealth wasn’t a big factor and the configuration done at make much sense for V-tail anyways. You can put J-10 in this group too.
For 5th gen fighters other than F-22:
* Su-57 clearly puts a lot into post stall maneuvering, so they’re willing to give up the stealth and drag benefit of v-tail.
* J-20 is a canard delta either canted all moving vertical tails, so configuration is not comparable.
* F-35 has four tails and conventional configuration mostly because of Navy’s carrier landing requirements which require maneuvering at very low landing speeds, which is not what V-tail is good at. All variants have the same tail configuration for commonality.
None of this is because V-tail is somehow worse or not viable.