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Originally posted by alphabetaone
Originally posted by Lonewulph
Interesting we aren't trying to be stealthy about it at all...
Yes.
What's most likely is, that in an effort to give Tehran a false sense of security about the shortcomings of US surveillance technology, it was, in fact, an intentional breach.
Originally posted by Zaphod58
reply to post by KaiserSoze
They lost an RQ-170, but Iran didn't bring it down. It had a mechanical failure, and it crash landed in Iranian territory. Lockheed operated it, not the USAF, and they didn't have the usual self protection software (self destruct) onboard the aircraft.
Originally posted by Zaphod58
reply to post by Lonewulph
This is the first I've heard that one. All my sources say normal mechanical failure.
Iran’s story about the electronic ambush of America’s sophisticated drone, the RQ-170 Sentinel, is that their experts used their technology savvy to trick the drone into landing where the drone thought was its actual base in Afghanistan but instead they made it land in Iran. They used reverse engineering techniques that they had developed after exploring less sophisticated American drones captured or shot down in recent years. They were able to figure how to exploit a navigational weakness in the drone’s system. "The GPS navigation is the weakest point," the Iranian engineer told the newspaper. Read more at: phys.org...
Originally posted by Zaphod58
The ScanEagle is a small class UAV that is catapult launched and recovered by flying into a cable and hooking a wingtip. There's nothing really stealthy about it, except that it's small. It's almost like a missile body with a long wingspan for long loiter times.
www.boeing.com...
Originally posted by ajay59
I seem to remember reading something about the Iranians having Keshe tech. and the ability to to simply take control of all communications in a given area. Maybe there is something to this?
Originally posted by MrInquisitive
Apparently newer drones use encrypted signals, which make it much harder to hack the drone navigation system, but why wasn't this implemented in the first place?
Originally posted by Zaphod58
reply to post by Lonewulph
A flying wing has a tendency to come down more gently than a normal tube design would. If they had spoofed the GPS and made it think that it was where it was supposed to land, I would have expected no damage at all. There was damage consistent with a rough landing, not a nice smooth landing like they claimed it made. If there was a loss of comms then it would most likely have flown until it ran out of fuel and then came down. One of the more interesting quotes I've read was that if Lockheed hadn't been flying it, it would have had self destruct equipment installed, and would have been in small pieces, not intact.
Originally posted by Zaphod58
reply to post by Lonewulph
A flying wing has a tendency to come down more gently than a normal tube design would.
Because it lacks conventional stabilizing surfaces or the associated control surfaces, in its purest form the flying wing suffers from the inherent disadvantages of being unstable and difficult to control. These compromises are difficult to reconcile, and efforts to do so can reduce or even negate the expected advantages of the flying wing design, such as reductions in weight and drag. Moreover, solutions may produce a final design that is still too unsafe for certain uses, such as commercial aviation.
For any aircraft to fly without constant correction it must have directional stability in yaw.
Flying wings lack the long fuselage which provides a convenient attachment point for an efficient vertical stabilizer or fin.