It was not hacked in a maner that allowed control. No one seems to think its a little strange that the Iranians are showing what appears to be a fully intact vehicle? I am calling BS on the Iranians. Thats a mock up they threw together to score PR points. Notice it has no visable undercarraige! I will bet that the real drone is a smoking hole in the mountains and they could not retreive it. I frankly am glad that the US is spying on Iran and fully expect that to be done with drones. That means occasionally one will go down due to failure. When it does it wont look like it just landed at Ayatollah International and rolled up to a terminal.

This is pointless. I woudl imagine that the Iranians did manage to get a hack running on it, but the internal security stopped the hack before it managed to establish control, thus crashing the drone.

I also think it the displayed drone is a mock-up. I'll bet there's a plastic model of the drones out already. I had a model of the stealth plane before it was debuted.

This looks to me like there are bigger problems than the US is fessing up to. You don't just 'lose control' of an unmanned drone and lose it outright to the point you don't know where it went. They routinely fly these drones and there are no doubt, redundant safeguards built into them like the before mentioned 'Return to Base' feature.

It is clear to me that the drone was in no way shot down or damaged in flight. Iran has hidden the undercarriage for some reason or another. My guess is the drone belly landed in the desert (perhaps a built in safeguard) and the bottom is banged up. Or maybe Iran doesn't want anyone to know if if belly landed or if perhaps they did in fact 'take control' in flight and hijack it. As it stands from the video, its impossible to know if it landed on a runway or skidded into a field.

Either way, I have no doubt that Iran had a significant role in its landing in Iran instead of wherever it was supposed to. Given that it is pretty stealthy, it shows clearly that we can't sneak into Iran with our conventional Stealth technology. Taking F117, B2, etc... off the table for sneak attacks.

Also, if Iran did 'take control' of this thing in-flight, who is to say that they can't hijack an armed drone and do some damage. Maybe a US drone attack on Israel. Just sayin'...

There are a lot of possibilities here but one thing is clear, they got a hi-tech drone of ours and it didn't simply fall out of the sky and land in 1 piece like that without some very cleaver intervention.

From the video, the Drone looks unusually intact for an aircraft that crash landed. I would think that first incursion vehicles such as stealth drones would have some kind of self-destruct mechanism which would be activated on loss of contact (i realize some are designed to fly back to base) or upon some kind of severe impact.

Originally posted by jimmysinger
Either way, I have no doubt that Iran had a significant role in its landing in Iran instead of wherever it was supposed to. Given that it is pretty stealthy, it shows clearly that we can't sneak into Iran with our conventional Stealth technology.

It shows that we can't sneak into Iran all the time. It doesn't show that we can never sneak into Iran. There have been perhaps hundreds, even thousands, of successful sorties that we haven't heard about because they weren't shot down/crashed.

Iran are saying they SHOT this drone out of the sky because they don't want their enemy knowing they have the capability to hack and take control of their equipment.

You never show your hand.

Originally posted by SLAYER69
Speaking on a strictly "Strategic" point of view...

Who the hell is running that monkey show over at Langley or the Pentagon? Stealth chopper parts left in Pakistan {Shared with China} Drone captured by Iran.

With people like this running the show who needs to worry about spies?


Oh Never mind...
I forgot who is occupying 1600 Pennsylvania ave presently.

I believe they are all Americans running the Show in the US.
I guess we all know who to blame.

But Iran will get the blame for having sophisticated ESM detection and tracing system, which is a bitch for the US doing as they please.