Iran claims to down US stealth spy drone
- Thread starter Hendrik_2000
- Start date
plawolf
Lieutenant General
Except, if this was indeed what happened, why on earth are the Iranians allowing one of their scientists to shoot his mouth off like that to an American (Christian to boot) publication?
For someone to have as much access to the downed RQ170 as this Iranian scientist claims would require a very high security clearance level, and there is just no way someone like that would, or even could, meet with western journalists to give an interview in person or electronically.
If the Iranians really did manage to pull something like this off as claimed, they would have to be stupid to spill the beans like this when the Americans are insisting the drone crashed on it's own.
If Americans want to believe that, so much better for Iran, as they could pull this same trick and snag another drone. Why give up that advantage?
If they really wanted to tell the world to prove that this was not just a case of very good luck, it would have been some general out in front of the cameras claiming all the credit, not some nameless scientists. I mean, to do it this way, Iran looses all advantage for none of the propaganda gains.
Just doesn't make sense.
In addition, the theory behind the claim sounds very suspicious for a number of reasons.
Firstly, even missiles have a combination of INS and GPS for navigation. For an advanced drone like the Sentinel, there would be no question that it would be carrying an advanced INS in addition to it's GPS system. By having both systems onboard, a very basic requirement for the flight control software is to develop a set of protocols to deal with situations where the GPS and INS data does not match up.
If you simply jam the GPS signal and feed the drone a fake one telling it it is somewhere else, the INS is going to disagree and the software should be able to easily tell that the new GPS signal makes no sense and rejects it.
Gradual spoofing might be possible if you feed small incremental changes to the GPS over a long period of time to gradually send it off course without raising any red flags when the software checks the GPS against INS data.
This might be possible when you want to make a cruise missile miss it's target as you won't need to send it off course by much. However, to make a drone think East is West? That just won't work as the changes would be too great to avoid detection by the software.
Especially since this drone would have been manned all the time via ground controllers. If they pulled a gradual spoofing trick of that magnitude, the drone would have missed a waypoint or it's intended target way before the Iranians could have changed it's GPS position enough for it to think Iran was Afghanistan, and the controllers would have scrubbed the mission and called the drone back.
Secondly, there is no evidence or even hints that anyone has come up with an auto-landing system for UAVs. If something like that was to be developed, it would have been implemented on the likes of the Predators and Reapers first before being put in something like the Sentinel to work out all the kinks first.
After all, chances are there will be some kind of problem, so would you rather loose a Predator or Sentinel to find that out?
This means that just spoofing the drone to make it think it was over friendly territory isn't enough, to land it, you would need to also be able to hack into it's direct control system to manually guide the thing in.
Now, having said that, it could be possible that they stretched the truth a little here, so instead of making it do a perfect wheels down landing at an Iranian airfield, they just further spoofed the drone to make it think it was flying straight and level when in fact it was descending all the time, and just had it fly into a very flat bit of desert as gently as they could manage.
This would explain both how they managed to recover it so intact, why it took this so long to showcase it, and also how the damage to the underside was sustained.
But that is not what the story is claiming is it?
For someone to have as much access to the downed RQ170 as this Iranian scientist claims would require a very high security clearance level, and there is just no way someone like that would, or even could, meet with western journalists to give an interview in person or electronically.
If the Iranians really did manage to pull something like this off as claimed, they would have to be stupid to spill the beans like this when the Americans are insisting the drone crashed on it's own.
If Americans want to believe that, so much better for Iran, as they could pull this same trick and snag another drone. Why give up that advantage?
If they really wanted to tell the world to prove that this was not just a case of very good luck, it would have been some general out in front of the cameras claiming all the credit, not some nameless scientists. I mean, to do it this way, Iran looses all advantage for none of the propaganda gains.
Just doesn't make sense.
In addition, the theory behind the claim sounds very suspicious for a number of reasons.
Firstly, even missiles have a combination of INS and GPS for navigation. For an advanced drone like the Sentinel, there would be no question that it would be carrying an advanced INS in addition to it's GPS system. By having both systems onboard, a very basic requirement for the flight control software is to develop a set of protocols to deal with situations where the GPS and INS data does not match up.
If you simply jam the GPS signal and feed the drone a fake one telling it it is somewhere else, the INS is going to disagree and the software should be able to easily tell that the new GPS signal makes no sense and rejects it.
Gradual spoofing might be possible if you feed small incremental changes to the GPS over a long period of time to gradually send it off course without raising any red flags when the software checks the GPS against INS data.
This might be possible when you want to make a cruise missile miss it's target as you won't need to send it off course by much. However, to make a drone think East is West? That just won't work as the changes would be too great to avoid detection by the software.
Especially since this drone would have been manned all the time via ground controllers. If they pulled a gradual spoofing trick of that magnitude, the drone would have missed a waypoint or it's intended target way before the Iranians could have changed it's GPS position enough for it to think Iran was Afghanistan, and the controllers would have scrubbed the mission and called the drone back.
Secondly, there is no evidence or even hints that anyone has come up with an auto-landing system for UAVs. If something like that was to be developed, it would have been implemented on the likes of the Predators and Reapers first before being put in something like the Sentinel to work out all the kinks first.
After all, chances are there will be some kind of problem, so would you rather loose a Predator or Sentinel to find that out?
This means that just spoofing the drone to make it think it was over friendly territory isn't enough, to land it, you would need to also be able to hack into it's direct control system to manually guide the thing in.
Now, having said that, it could be possible that they stretched the truth a little here, so instead of making it do a perfect wheels down landing at an Iranian airfield, they just further spoofed the drone to make it think it was flying straight and level when in fact it was descending all the time, and just had it fly into a very flat bit of desert as gently as they could manage.
This would explain both how they managed to recover it so intact, why it took this so long to showcase it, and also how the damage to the underside was sustained.
But that is not what the story is claiming is it?
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AssassinsMace
Lieutenant General
Whether they jammed it or not I would guess that it came down because it ran out fuel. Anyone know how long this UAV can stay in the air? Might account for some of the time questions. So when the US lost communication, the flight controls were locked. There have been a couple of incidents I know of where aircraft ran out of fuel and just glided down until it reached the ground. Could be why they covered the bottom because the damage is apparent there. Could also explain how they were able to spot a stealth UAV. If it were loitering around for hours, it increases the chances of being visually spotted.
I find catastrophic failure questionable simple because of how intact it is. I would believe catastrophic would be if it were hit and seriously damaged. If the US is keen on safety measures, how would everything fail at once without being hit and then see how intact this bird is after crashing to the ground? And if it were shot down, the US would probably know it was crashing before it lost communication but it sounds like they just lost communication and don't know what happened.
I find catastrophic failure questionable simple because of how intact it is. I would believe catastrophic would be if it were hit and seriously damaged. If the US is keen on safety measures, how would everything fail at once without being hit and then see how intact this bird is after crashing to the ground? And if it were shot down, the US would probably know it was crashing before it lost communication but it sounds like they just lost communication and don't know what happened.
solarz
Brigadier
The Art of War says, "When weak, appear strong. When strong, appear weak." If Iran is trying to get the US to back off on its threats of war, the ability to disable some of the most advanced technologies fielded by the US is a very good way to do just that.
AssassinsMace
Lieutenant General
You don't plan for a malfunction either. If it kept flying because of a malfunction, whether intentional or not, it would eventually run out of fuel.
SteelBird
Colonel
Your comment agrees to mine. There must be some type of accident, otherwise, the aircraft won't ran out of fuel.
i find it implausible that unauthorized or enemy force can override the command of such UAV, data encryption (even simple ones) or hard coded encryption is almost impossible to break, unless you have unlimited time and supercomputers
GPS jamming or severe EM jamming will also force the UAV to rely on INS or TERCOM, like wolfie said, also remember such bird has redundancies built into it
malfunction or ran out of fuel, otherwise we need Iran to spit out more truth other than the drone is in their hand
bird strike? or the fuel gauge broke down
many things can go wrong in a machine, didn't a drone also crash down in Seychelles a few days ago
GPS jamming or severe EM jamming will also force the UAV to rely on INS or TERCOM, like wolfie said, also remember such bird has redundancies built into it
malfunction or ran out of fuel, otherwise we need Iran to spit out more truth other than the drone is in their hand
bird strike? or the fuel gauge broke down
many things can go wrong in a machine, didn't a drone also crash down in Seychelles a few days ago
AssassinsMace
Lieutenant General
Well my guess was based on there was a malfunction whether it was orchestrated by the Iranians or not. I wasn't going by the conclusion that it was lost just because it ran out of fuel.
Like I said before, the UAV looks too intact for something to have damage and caused multiple failures in its systems. It would have to have knocked out communications, knocked out GPS, knocked out INS... The idea of having some of these is to keep it in check and operating properly. Did they design all its critical components close together in case someone took a shot at it that it can take these systems all out at once? The idea that catastrophic failure without it being struck severly seems improbable unless they designed it crappy.
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