Iran displays captured US drone

I am sorry, as much as some people here so desperately want the US to fail or be embarrassed or whatever...this thing just looks like a mockup or something. It looks like something that was molded from something else and taped together. It looks like the wings have tape covering seams where they were attached...and looks like it is plastic or fiberglass. Even the color looks fake.

Why did they not have video of the thing at the site of recovery? Why is the underneath of the thing hidden by all the banners and crap. Looks staged to me.

Not buying it until there is more convincing proof.

Originally posted by spy66
Its all about having the right signal frequencies. If you have that down and send it to the drone it wont know the difference, it wont know if it is from the US or Iranians. The drone will respond.

I'm pretty sure it'll know the signal isn't from the US when it runs the signal through its crypto chip and gets garbage out.

Originally posted by Dimitri Dzengalshlevi

Originally posted by LordOfArcadia
The RQ-170 is very old technology

If it is so old then what drone is being operated at a higher technological level by the US military/CIA? And I will not take you seriously if you claim that it is something so classified that we will know nothing about it for 20 years

Dimitri, RQ-170 is designed as a tactical platform and as such is designed to be possibly expendable.

The rumor is the flyaway cost is very low, about $6M which is born out by the lack of stealth sophistication in the airframe (lack of serrated edges on gear doors, access panels etc.)

While obviously an embarrassment for the U.S., it is highly doubtful any of the technology onboard is anything new to either the Iranians,Chinese or Russians.

The US doesnt have their drone get captured, unless they want it to get captured..... Now ask yourself, why would the US intelligence community want Iran to get this drone??? I may be wrong, but I feel like there's more to this story....Do you honestly believe that they "hacked" the computer system and landed it? If thats the case, than the US military has some major major issues.....

Originally posted by FurvusRexCaeli

Originally posted by spy66
Its all about having the right signal frequencies. If you have that down and send it to the drone it wont know the difference, it wont know if it is from the US or Iranians. The drone will respond.

I'm pretty sure it'll know the signal isn't from the US when it runs the signal through its crypto chip and gets garbage out.

How can it know the difference if the signal sent by Iran is the same as the US ?

There is a reason why these signals are keep a secret; So that they cant be duplicated. They have to be detected. But as soon as they are detected, they can be duplicated by a different system and used.

There exists detection system that can measure the exact radio signal, and Iran has these types of Electronic Support Measures "ESM".

reply to post by jhn7537


Are you saying that the USA wanted francis Gary powers to be shot down? Or seal team six to be shot down? Just face it man this is a battle the USA lost. Us sources are confirming that this is the drone that was lost. Now does it look like to you that it crashed fully intact from 60,000 feet

Originally posted by jhn7537
The US doesnt have their drone get captured, unless they want it to get captured..... Now ask yourself, why would the US intelligence community want Iran to get this drone??? I may be wrong, but I feel like there's more to this story....Do you honestly believe that they "hacked" the computer system and landed it? If thats the case, than the US military has some major major issues.....

edit on 8-12-2011 by jhn7537 because: (no reason given)

I wondered this myself. What if it was a mock RQ-170...something close enough to the real thing, but with some hidden tracking device or devices. What better way to discover where their military science center might be?

I recognize this is all speculation and wild at that, but what a perfect way to get an electronic Trojan horse into the fold. What they show in the pics/vid just looks suspicious.

Originally posted by Drunkenparrot

Originally posted by Dimitri Dzengalshlevi

Originally posted by LordOfArcadia
The RQ-170 is very old technology

If it is so old then what drone is being operated at a higher technological level by the US military/CIA? And I will not take you seriously if you claim that it is something so classified that we will know nothing about it for 20 years

Dimitri, RQ-170 is designed as a tactical platform and as such is designed to be possibly expendable.

The rumor is the flyaway cost is very low, about $6M which is born out by the lack of stealth sophistication in the airframe (lack of serrated edges on gear doors, access panels etc.)

While obviously an embarrassment for the U.S., it is highly doubtful any of the technology onboard is anything new to either the Iranians,Chinese or Russians.

I'm quite aware of all of this.

However, it does nothing to answer my question that I asked which is: If this technology is so old, then what is currently deployed that is apparently much more advanced?

You basically gave the same answer that I have for this very question: that this technology is designed to be expendable since it is flying in contested territory. This is now a question of redundancy: what is the point of arguing that this is "old" technology, when you guys are also saying that the US only deploys such technology in actual combative/hostile conditions because "new" technology is too valuable to let fall into enemy hands?

Even by using this logic, you must still concede a massive failure by the US because now Iran has an example of currently deployed technology which they will study and learn how to counter much more effectively- meaning that the US now has to deploy even more sensitive technology.

Originally posted by jimmysinger
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.

Air Force's Falcon Hypersonic glider missing
Air Force's Experimental Hypersonic Aircraft Disappears Again

They do lose drones.

I highly doubt that the Iranians have the capability to SEE this drone let alone hack into its operating system. And if it were hacked I would imagine that the operator would have the ability to destroy it before it ever reached a landing zone. My guess is that the pilot somehow lost control of the vehicle, it crashed and burned on Iranian soil, and the Iranians made a replica of said drone.

At first I thought that it could've been hacked, but now after seeing the photos, I believe it is all a sham. Iran is instigating us into a conflict that they know will draw the ire of its surrounding allies.

Syria's major pipeline headed to refinery attacked. Smoke trail as far as the eye can see. www.bbc.co.uk... Iran gets this drone and syria gets their pipeline blown.

reply to post by moebius


Good point. I would think though if they added the engine grate they would spend a little more time with right angles all over the aircraft. Looking at High Definition pictures of the F-22, there are no right angles and the RQ-170 seems to be littered with right angles. I understand the F-22 faces radar from all different angles, but so could the RQ-170 in some ways. They are even visible on the wings, can't tell from the bottom cause its covered up.

www.nellis.af.mil...

I read a year back or something that the RQ-170 is not the cream of the crop, because of something just like this was to happen, and with the spy photos that got released showed the lack of stealth properties. And the video actually proved that in a way.

nationalpost.tumblr.com...
Good illustration showing some of the reasons

Aircraft malfunction all the time, check out this video of the Global Hawk prototype crashing. With a little manpower and gorilla glue, someone could make it seem like it never crashed. One would think though a flying wing would have a more gentle touch down if it crashed on fairly level land.

www.aviationspectator.com...

Assuming Iran could reverse engineer, or retrieve new technology from the drone, what is the likelihood of it sharing this information with another non-Western power that is playing an increasingly active role in the Persian Gulf (say China or Russia). I recognize the advantages of Iran keeping such information to themselves, but wether Iran does or does not have a suffecient economic and political structure to convert the resoures it has into advanced military capabilities including a drone is another question? Maybe it wil develop some sort of trade with China who would be eager to recieve the technology of the drone. Although I do have my doubts. This will certainly be interesting.

Originally posted by spy66
How can it know the difference if the signal sent by Iran is the same as the US ?

Unless you know the crypto mode used by the UAV, and have successfully implemented it, and have the traffic encryption key used by the UAV ... you are not going to talk to that UAV.

There is a reason why these signals are keep a secret; So that they cant be duplicated. They have to be detected. But as soon as they are detected, they can be duplicated by a different system and used.

It has more to do with direction finding, jamming, and traffic analysis than spoofing.

The people who hacked the drone didn't need to have control of it. To have it's engines malfunction would be enough. The drone would then glide to a crash landing and damage the landing gear, which is why the undercarriage is hidden. That way there would be questions about what actually happened.

If you were able to see the undercarriage damaged you would know it glided to a crash landing and also know what I explained.
If the drone was shot down it would have been destroyed and to suggest it was put back together again is silly.

I believe that this was a deliberate ruse by the CIA. They knew if a drone went down relatively intact in hostile territory that the capturers would attempt to reverse engineer it and sell the technology to their friends (our foreign enemies).

Since the drone looks relatively undamaged I believe that the story the CIA gives that it "lost control" was a deliberate attempt to place the aircraft in enemy hands, Specifically targeting the fools in Iran into believing it was the real deal.

I believe that the drone in question is a special technology decoy which has "bogus" technology that might be harmful if replicated in a copy of the drone.

I think it's the CIA's way of throwing a red herring into the effort by Iran to acquire our technology and pass it off to the Chinese, North Koreans and Russia.

What's better than the US to make a big hubbub about losing a device specifically designed to deceive the technology thieves so they buy into the story. They'll think they have the real thing, but the CIA will be ROTFL.

I'm confident that if this was an elaborate plot by US operatives to deceive Iran and their allies (our enemies) so they would not acquire or continue to seek out our real capabilities.

americans can't even secure windows. what chance does a stealth drone have.

obama and the pentagon said it a hundred times. america is way, way behind countries like china and japan in cyber warfare.

they must be shaking their heads in the white house. a billion dollar project handed on a silver plate to the enemy.

if a stealth drone has no chance of infiltrating iranian air defence, what chance do outdated israeli and american 5-16's and 15's have.

Originally posted by spy66

Originally posted by buddhasystem

Originally posted by spy66
Well if the ESM detection system can spot the exact radio signal to the RQ-170 and block it.

It sure can duplicate the signal and use it to take control.

I doubt the control system is that simple. It is certainly encoded, and not in a way that will work by reproducing a particular signal. It can be encoded with part of the key being timestamp or some pre-determined sequence like in SeucureID. There is no way it can be hacked so simply as you describe.

Its all about having the right signal frequencies. If you have that down and send it to the drone it wont know the difference, it wont know if it is from the US or Iranians.

Seriously, what I wrote went right over your head. Do you understand the concept of encryption and how the keys can be time-dependent or single-use? I doubt that you do.

After reading about the lost drone and now seeing the video linked above, i have a few questions.

If the United States lost the latest and greatest top secret drone, does it not have at least 1 form of GPS on it?

If it does have a GPS, then i certainly wouldn't want to ever be standing anywhere near it after capturing it. Given how shady it is to fly an unmanned drone over another country's forbidden airspace, do you think even 1 crap would be given about dropping a bomb on its GPS location?

And finally, seriously, do you think Iran could hack something as complex as the latest top secret drone? Haven't you seen the flying boat video???

A self or remote destructive mechanism should have and I would assume has been placed within the unit. Maybe they will detonate it when the Red Chinese experts try to open it? I hope that they do. I am sure they are listening to whatever is going on from within the unit. If not, this is a huge error for The USA. With that being said, Iran has every right to shoot it down, even though by the looks of it, it was never shot down. Maybe a malfunction or also could be the result of a Red Chinese hacker. ~SheopleNation

Many have speculated that this was intentional on Americas part as a trojan horse type tactic.
Do I believe it? Not necessarily. It is possible though.
There's no telling what DARPA has been cooking up in secret. I know they've called for nano technology and other small surveillance 'drones' such as bugs and whatnot. Perhaps it was designed to fall into their hands, and once there, the 'nano probes' and other tiny surveillance equipment sneak out and start gathering intel.

Iran claims it was shot down. I don't see too much damage on it indicating that it was shot down. There are some nicks and dents here and there, which could mean it was hacked and crash landed by them. Iran isn't showing the underside of the drone for a reason.

I like to think America simply crashed it intentionally in order to somehow gather intel, and due to it having crashed, have the luxury of using that as an excuse.

I guess only the deep inner circle of elites will ever know.

Cheers