Where is the mountain placed? Is it even Iran?
Mount Damavand, the highest peak in Iran, has a special place in Persian mythology and folklore Mount Damavand - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Really. Then please explain how they got it without severe damage. The odds on a malfunction, without a damage crash are what? Highly unlikely that it failed without assistance. Remember, we denied it was in their airspace, which apparently wasn't true, right? So why believe anything we've said about that drone. Maybe they had help, but somehow they got it landed without extensive damage. If it has failed at 50,000 feet which is where those things fly, I've expected a large hole in the ground, with very small pieces. Oscam's razor. They continued to surprise us with their technical achievements, so why not now? If they weren't that capable, why did the Israelis go after their scientists, why did we sabatodge their facilities with a virus designed to destroy their facilities? In short, there is a lot of koolaide going around. Try to avoid it if you can. Art
It's really quite an interesting thing, the first "hack" of an aircraft rather than traditional air defenses. My guess is that some other more technically adept country (China or maybe Russia) wanted to try out their latest tech against our drones and Iran was the perfect place to do it. Probably a sign of things to come in any conflict with China.
It will be quite the sight to see our Air Force brought to its knees because someone has figured out how to block or jam the drone signals. Talk about a perfect asymmetrical warfare scenario. As far as Iran goes, you don't have to be smart to be successful you just have to have enough money to hire smart people.
The drone that the Iranians have shown looks as realistic (to me) as their new 'stealth' fighter. I don't think they've even shown the landing gear... only pics I've seen have a 'curtain' around the base.
Hah! They wouldn't even need to do that. If all the printers in the AF went down the Canadians could pretty much just walk south and take over while everybody was trying to figure out how to map the printer in order to make things happen. More seriously.... We are so F'ed if/when somebody figures out how to deny GPS.
I don't listen to what the gov't says about anything..I look at what I know about the technology, what the possible scenarios were, and which of those scenarios is most likely based on my knowledge. I'm guessing you know little to nothing about this technology and what is required to fly a drone (I don't know much either, but I read enough to be able to make educated guesses about these things)...I suspect you think it's a lot like a video game, and some guy with a xbox controller is flying this around. It's not. Iran would have to do way too many nearly impossible things to be able to take control of and land a drone like this. Whereas in the more likely scenario, all that has to happen is the drone some how loses the satellite communication uplink and goes into some kind of auto pilot mode, which happens all the time by the way, and either because of a software malfunction or GPS jamming, it lands itself in the desert. Did you know that drones can land themselves without a human in the loop? And if Iran had complete control, why would they land it in the desert and not on a runway??? An untrained pilot would have destroyed the thing trying to land it anyways, so the fact that it was in such good shape points to auto pilot more than untrained human in the loop.
Are you a pilot? I am with thousands of hours of experience. That's why I suggested that they did take it over, and tried to land it. Like most first times it probably wasn't perfect. I don't know where it landed, but I can say that it most certainly wasn't on a desert. If you've seen attempted landings on desert with tricycle gear, the damage is usually quite extensive. That drone didn't appear to be that badly damaged, probably just sheared off the landing gear, at best, probably from a hard landing? They probably had help, but it most certainly was something to wake people up. Art
So you think the video they posted was a fake to make us think it landed in the desert? Even after they claimed they took control of it? It doesn't make any sense. I'll bet it's easier to land a plane like a cessna without any experience than it is a large UAV with a joystick. In both cases you're flying a real plane, but in the latter you have no physical feedback and you're looking through a soda-straw video feed with limited depth perception. But it's irrelevant, because they would have had to pull off so many nearly impossible things in order to even get the chance to fly it that it's a waste of time to debate further.
The only credible answer is that the drone landed itself and the Iranicals found it. Probably damaged the landing gear as that's always been cloaked by a bed ruffle.
Art- That thing has the radar cross section of a hummingbird, so how were they supposed to even know it was there? Comm from the bird is also undoubtedly shielded from below and uses the latest low probability of intercept technology with changing frequencies, pulse widths, etc, so that transmissions do not even show up on receivers. So she malfunctioned, the automatic come home feature, if jammed (unlikely she was jammed) or comm is lost, did not work, she ran out of fuel and made a gentle descent into the ground with minimal damage. Plus the command destruct did not work. They are built like gliders, so descend very slowly. Still, trying to reverse engineer those coatings or materials for the Iranians will be like a dog watching TV. Something is going on, but not sure exactly what it is.
You probably know more than me, but what you postulate is also difficult: multiple failures, combined with a very lucky landing, also terribly improbable. I suspect they had help, which is probably quite a bit more probable. Question: how much smaller is the drone's signature than an F117a's? The Serbs figured out how to see the latter some ten plus years ago. Art
Multiple failures are not improbable for things this complex. Just not long ago, a predator drone went haywire and lost comms and it wouldn't return home, they had to have a F-16 shoot it down before it drifted into Pakistan airspace. Drones lose comm links ALL the time, and many crash in the desert that we never hear about because it's Afghanistan or Iraq. This just happened to be a high profile incident of something that has happened probably dozens of times. No one actually knows how the auto-destruct functions work on this aircraft, or if this particular drone even had one (may have been an operational demonstrator), so there is no guarantee that even failed. Iranian taking control is not a logical answer relative to the alternative, but it certainly is sexier. And the radar cross section on the RQ-170 would most likely be two or three orders of magnitude stealthier than the f-117.
They didn't really figure anything out they simply got lucky and spotted the 117 when it opened its bombbay doors opened.
I'd read this, it's 5 years old but clearly the Russians are working on that problem and may have solutions. The real question is: have they shared the technology? Russian / PLA Low Band Surveillance Radar Systems (Counter Low Observable Technology Radars) Art
I will start with this as nobody has brought it up yet..... Insurgents Hack U.S. Drones - WSJ.com And how about this one?
Mark, neither of those stories are relevant. The first one is just stealing an unencrypted video feed which is trivial and has absolutely nothing to do with taking control of a UAV. there is aboslutely no hackery at all, you literally just need a receiver, a laptop, and a simple piece of software and to be in the footprint of the signal. The 2nd story is also non-story. Creech virus a common 'nuisance' virus aimed at online gaming - News - ReviewJournal.com The media has blown both of these stories WAY out of proportion.
Those kinds of radars are useful for detecting stealth at longer ranges, but that's pretty much all they can do. They can tell you that a stealth aircraft is there, but not with enough accuracy to shoot at it. And also as the article mentions, these radars are big, immobile and easy targets - i.e. they cannot be hidden, and we would never let a stealth plane fly right through one of these, and in a war would be destroyed on the first day. If we didn't already know where it was from satellites, then the planes passive sensors would detect it and would fly around it. Like the pakistan raid on bin Laden, everything we would have been doing over iran would have flown around (as much as possible) their radar nets. Not to mention the RQ-170 is far smaller than the B-2, and also like that article says, those low band radars are only useful for detecting very large aircraft. Not to mention the implications if Russia sold Iran such a system, which would be nearly impossible to hide..just look at the fiasco with the S-300, that even Russia decided not to sell to Iran. Stealth is not unbeatable..these aircraft can be seen by radar, but it's extremely difficult, and even harder to shoot down. Stealth simply decreases the range at which a radar can detect and track your aircraft (detection and tracking are two separate things, and often times require two separate radars or sensors..), and because of the laws of physics, it makes it extremely difficult for a single type of radar to be effectively "anti-stealth".
I completely disagree..... Being able to hack a video feed is very useful in conjunction with a GPS spoofing attack. As for the virus.... that may not have been a threat but it did get onto the computers. If you can't stop a stupid gambling virus then how do you expect to stop a determined attacker?
Well, you wouldn't need a video feed for a GPS spoofing attack. But a stealth plane flying in "denied" territory would not have an unencrypted video feed in any form ..kind of destroys the whole point of stealth announcing "here i am and here is what I'm looking at!". The predator feeds were unencrypted because the military took a calculated risk..even if those were intercepted, there was little to no intelligence value to anyone who was watching in Afghanistan where every road and every house looks the same. It's a different story if some Iranian is looking at the Sentinals feed and sees an easily recognizable landmark like a nuclear reactor under its nose. As for that virus, hacking in real life is not like hacking in hollywood. And these kinds of trivial things happen every day to "secure" networks. That was an accident because some IT boob used an infected hard drive, not an act of premeditated espionage in which a dedicated attacker seletively infected the hard drive so that it would infect the UAV cockpit. The probability of any given network getting infected is extremely high just by the sheer volume of viruses in the world..the probability of a secure network getting infect by a dedicated attacker is much lower. These networks are not even on the internet, so even if a dedicated attacker were able to infect them, getting information out would be another challenge. I'm not trying to claim that these things are impossible, but neither is getting struck by lightning and winning the lottery in the same day. The probability of some entity successfully doing all of the things required to do what some people are claiming because of sensationalist media accounts is so incredibly low, especially when the alternative is completely logical and actually happens with some regularity, that it makes absolutely no sense to even entertain this as a serious possible series of events.
Art- The low observables technology on that drone was about four generations newer than that on the F-117, which was a first generation system designed with a 2D (planar) stealth code before we had the 3D stealth codes used on the B-2 and later stealth platforms. The F-117 was shot down because the dummies used a planning tool that showed where the threats were and then planned a route to avoid them. The threats had not been updated for a while so the F-117As were flying the same ground track every day (night), just like the Buffs during the Christmas 72 raids in SE Asia. So the bad guys knew where the ground track was and put an SA-6 battery right under it. They managed to get enough of a radar signature to hit the F-117 after an almost preemptive launch. The semi-active missile receiver got enough of a return once it got close enough to guide to the target. The radar signature on an F-117 was probably an order of magnitude or more than the drone's. The MMH per sortie for LO maintenance on the F-117 and its 1st generation LO coatings was very high, one reason they were retired.
I've wondered why there was no SLEP to replace the panels with the coating on the F22. Any idea? Was it because the brass intended to order more F22s than what were delivered?
