Iranian TV Shows Downed US Drone 612
First time accepted submitter loic_2003 writes "Iranian TV has broadcast footage of an advanced U.S. drone aircraft that Tehran says it brought down using electronic methods to override its controls. The BBC's James Reynolds watched the footage and said the fact that the drone appeared undamaged provided some evidence to support Tehran's version of events. The film was captioned 'RQ170 — advanced U.S. spy plane' and carried on the Vision of the Islamic Republic of Iran Network 1 channel."
Re:Anyone else not surprised? (Score:4, Interesting)
On most modern 2.4 Ghz R/C radios (such as Spektrum, etc), there is a 'bind' procedure that locks the transmitter and receiver together and prevents someone else from overridding the controls and to prevent interference from other transmitters. Granted the system used to control this drone is more sophisticated (hopefully), but you would think a similar system would be in place.
That may be a bad assumption seeing as there was an article recently reporting that it was possible to intercept the video feed from U.S. drones.
Re:It sounds feasible (Score:4, Interesting)
If they did override the controls then surely it wouldn't have to be in Iranian airspace in the first place. Radio waves don't stop at the border after aren't frowned upon like firing missiles into neighboring countries are.
Undamaged Replica? (Score:5, Interesting)
I think this is a mold reproduction of whatever they did get, faired out the damaged areas, swapped over a few parts and the paint is is still wet. There is nothing underneath it, its just a surface shell that looks right.
Re:Undamaged? (Score:5, Interesting)
Just like the CIA changed its story, you mean? "Drone, what drone?" to "It's possible we've lost one in Afghanistan, but no one took it down" to "Yeah, it's probably ours. But it didn't enter their airspace" to "Well, it might have strayed accidentally into their airspace." At some point in the future, when all is said and declassified, I'm sure we'll learn it was on a spy mission in the middle of Iran.
Re:Oh Iran ... You Are Too Cute (Score:4, Interesting)
So you've downed a pristine intact drone from your mortal enemy. Do you A) keep it secret to have an upper hand and send it to a lab to analyze all of its weaknesses and offer this information to your allies or B) take pictures in front of it with propaganda surrounding it and show the world? Well, I guess when you don't know how to do A you have to go with B!
I guess they have the ability to do A, but given the recent assassinations of their nuclear scientists and the explosions at their rocket plant and centrifuges, option B is probably a better bet.
It will force the US to rejig the comms to their drones, and promote one hell of a fuss in the US command chain as arses are covered and blame transferred to the least well protected elements.
It also gives them something to crow about, and can legitimately be used to justify at least one retaliatory action.
Boom? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Anyone else not surprised? (Score:4, Interesting)
It's impossible to prevent radio interference, no matter how fancy your "bind" procedure is. All you need is a simple jammer that broadcasts over the entire spectrum that the enemy is using.
The idea that you could replace human pilots in military planes with remote control was always idiotic.
Aggression by whom? (Score:5, Interesting)
When this story first broke, it was cited as response to an American act of aggression. Now we hear that they overrode communications and forced the drone to land. At the very least, the latter seems to me to be something that you'd have to be well prepared to do, in advance. So perhaps the drone was deliberately encroaching on Iranian airspace, but they must have been patiently waiting for their opportunity to pounce.
It's also possible that the drone was patrolling the border from inside Iraq or Afghanistan, and Iran sent radio waves across the border to make the intercept. That's unknown. But by pateience and pouncing or by cross-border override, in either case it seems to me that they've given up the right to shriek in righteous indignation about being violated. The proper response to "Oh No!! Our airspace is being violated!!" would have been to shoot the thing down. There's an air of deliberation here that doesn't square.
Re:Uhg... (Score:4, Interesting)
The SR71 was rendered obsolete by satellites. The Wiki article on the RQ-170 is pretty sparse on details (since the thing is shrouded in secrecy), but at appears to have some weapons capability, something the SR71 never had.
The real element that makes aircraft like the SR71 more immune to being downed by the Iranians, however, isn't flying high and fast, it's having a human pilot in the aircraft instead of relying on easily-jammed radio for control.
Re:They Are Showing It Off Outside? (Score:4, Interesting)
It's going to be pretty funny if the US moves all its military aircraft technology to unmanned operation (which seems to be the trend at the moment), and suddenly someone figures out how to take control of them all electronically, rendering the US military completely impotent overnight.
Re:It sounds feasible (Score:4, Interesting)
The US claimed it was flying over Afghanistan. Not that I am one to believe what comes out of Washington but what we have is a mostly intact drone that Iran claims brought down via "electronic" means.
Straight to China (Score:4, Interesting)
Would it give Iran any great insight into US technology? Or anything of that nature?
Intelligence agencies think that China has been providing a lot of technical assistance to Iran (as well as other nations). The Iranians have some experience reverse engineering older, simpler aircraft (Their Saeqeh [wikipedia.org] fighter is a virtual clone of Northrop's F-5. The only visual difference is twin vertical stabilizers), but no one thinks the Iranians have any experience with things like shaping, radar-absorbent coatings, or composite structures.
No, on something like an RQ-170... which is state of the art stuff... they're probably going to need Chinese help. China has a lot of advanced US tech already (recall the F-35 tech that fell into their hands), and is working on actual stealth aircraft themselves.
I seriously doubt the Iranians brought the drone down with "cyber-warfare". Witness how they were absolutely owned with the virus in their nuclear facilities. It was probably a malfunction on the part of the drone that brought it down, but regardless, the technology is almost certainly going to be in Chinese hands soon. Maybe that's for the best, in a perverse way, as USAF puts entirely too much reliance on stealth technology (when there are much, much cheaper ways to counter that technology in combat). Perhaps the US will start to build fighters with traditional fighter attributes again, and ones that don't cost $150 million+ apiece. I'm not quite in the Pierre Sprey absolute-minimalist school of fighter design (Pierre thinks that things like radar are a bad idea), but I do think we should build military aircraft that are affordable enough (and more reliable) to buy in large quantities. 183 air superiority fighters... no matter how good they may be... ain't gonna get it. But when 5 fighters cost you over a billion bucks, right off the production line, well... that's all you're going to get.
Re:Anyone else not surprised? (Score:5, Interesting)
There's a lot more to jamming than that. Unless your transmitter is absurdly more powerful than the one you're trying to jam out, spread spectrum transmissions can be extremely difficult to jam. The receiver is looking for (simplified here) modulation in a signal pattern. If you know the exact pattern you are looking for, you can very effectively filter out the noise. Then you just demodulate the signal to get your information out clean.
So when brute force isn't going to cut it, you have to really know what you're trying to jam, and more than likely you are going to have to be able to adapt, because critical control systems like this will have multiple fail-over procedures in place to automatically hop to a different band, modulation, whatever they care to mix up to render your jamming ineffective.
Providing a very simple example of why brute force doesn't work: get a whistle, and some really loud speakers and stereo. Have a friend stand by the speaker, occasionally blowing the whistle (maybe in a coded pattern that provides you with information), while the stereo cranks out the sound at ear-splitting levels. Standing 300 feet away, can you hear when the whistle blows? No you can't, the music is jamming you. Now get out a little handheld mic with headphones, and $15 in radio shack hardware for making a notch filter, tuned to the frequency of the whistle. Listen to that. You may hear a very faint trace of the music, but the whistle will be loud and clear every time its blown. Jamming is overcome. Doesn't really matter if you crank up the volume on the music either. Now what if the music happens to hit the note of the whistle and plays a solid or repeating tone at that frequency? So you start hearing that and can't tell when its the whistle or the music. Now your friend can see you waving your arms around indicating you can't hear him, so he puts that whistle in his pocket and takes out a different whistle. You flip a switch on your gear to switch the notch frequency for the next whistle. Now you're back in business. That's how jamming works, brute force often is ineffective.
Re:It's suprisingly large (Score:5, Interesting)
Roughly the same cost as an F-15. Cheaper than an F-22 (around 200 million a pop depending on how you count things) and about what a hit movie [msn.com] brings in on midnight showings. (Just for some perspective).
Re:It sounds feasible (Score:5, Interesting)
Or you haven't been keeping up. According to various sources (so who really knows), the drone is supposed to go to level flight if it loses control signals, try to figure out where home is and then fly back.
In any event, it's supposed to try to land safely as opposed to destruct or crash. That may have allowed Iranians / Talibans / Islamic Aliens to find the plane, put it on a truck and and make all manner of manly tales of derring do surround it's capture.
I would imagine that folks are re thinking the logic of letting it stay in one piece after control is lost.
Re:It sounds feasible (Score:4, Interesting)
Training to land a plane? Iran has plenty of pulots and test pilots capable of jumping into any plane and figuring out how to flyit.
Iran has been studying USA drones over afgahanistan for 7 years. They figured out theunencyrpted video feed quickly. And supplied the Taliban with equipment to recieve such signals on a large enough scale.
Personally i am going to take the superconspiracy theorist view that the CIA landed the plane there with second rate equipment, one to mislead iran, and two to convince the politcains of the weakness of UAV craft so they will order more F-22'S anf F-35's. Bothe of which are made by lockheed.
Re:Anyone else not surprised? (Score:5, Interesting)
You are describing signal jamming tech (single-channel, sine-wave) that is decades old.
Modern EW platforms are capable of covering entire RF bands, adapting and following hopping schemes, and efficiently spreading their energy over seemingly pseudo-random code-schemes.
In the end, there's only so much you can do with modulation techniques - it comes down to signal strength - and the inverse-square-law pretty much says that who-ever gets closer wins.
The control signal from the US base comes likely via LEO sat-link or over-the-horizon AWACS-type platform - both of which are going to be hundreds of kilometers away. You're not going to need "absurdly more powerful" anything to interfere with that. I have a wide-band I/Q generator able to modulate any mathematically describable code-sheme - which I could then hook up to our MIL-STD-461 susceptibility testing-chamber-amp - and knowing something about the signal band I could easily get the right high-gain antenna to track the bastard off the sky... and all this is with off-the-shelf COTS equipment!
Re:Oh Iran ... You Are Too Cute (Score:5, Interesting)
And less than sixty years ago we helped overthrow a democratically elected government in Iran and put in place the Shah. [Who was evil in ways that Hitler *would* understand.] ...and if I understand you, you're complaining that the Iranians used some props you find offensive.
Not to mention the minor fact that Allan Dulles bragged left and right about the CIA hand in the overthrow to the point where every kid in Iran knew the score ...
Re:Doh (Score:5, Interesting)
Never believe anything in politics until it has been officially denied.
— Otto von Bismarck
Re:Doh (Score:5, Interesting)
Remember this story from back in October?
Exclusive: Computer Virus Hits U.S. Drone Fleet [wired.com]
Ever since I read Iran claimed they didn't shoot it down, I've been wondering if or how much that virus and this "cyber warfare" attack might be connected...
Nope (Score:2, Interesting)
Even if you manage to disrupt 5% of the bits of a spread-spectrum signal, this can easily be repaired by sufficient amounts of Forward Error Correction Bits. Look it up in wikipedia. Proper spread-spectrum links such as SINCGARS (now decades old) are virtually impossible to jam effectively. You would need your own power station and transmitters capable of transforming that into RF to completely saturate from (say) 10 MHz to 85 MHz to take out a SINCGARS link.
I think this was the method (Score:2, Interesting)
ABC News: Drone is a fake (Score:2, Interesting)
According to this story http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/us-rq-170-sentinel-stealth-drone-shown-iran/t/story?id=15115781 [go.com] the drone shown on Iranian tv is, according to officials, a fake.
They claim inconsistencies in the design and with pictures of the crash site (like how it probably was demolished when it crashed at several hundred miles per hour).
I thought it looked like a fiberglass mockup. Anyway, good to know this, I read that to get any real use out of the drone, it would have to be almost completely undamaged because tolerances are very important when it comes to aerodynamics and stealth (I guess that's why those air force guys don't like it when I go about measuring their F-117s with my calipers at various air shows!)
Re:Holy crap! (Score:5, Interesting)
It looked more like a garage kit-bashed fiberglass ooh that would be cool concept of a drone.
Lets see, first the shape. It's a flying wing, and what the heck are those large things standing up on the back like that? It's completely different than anything I've ever seen on any flying wing design before. I'm not a plane expert by any imagination, but still, it looks like something a George Lucas wannabe would build, not the military.
It's totally the wrong color, honestly, nothing the military makes is that color, and there's reasons for it. If it was really a spy drone, it would most likely be radar absorbent black. By the way, the SR71 was NEVER flat black when they were in use, it was a special radar absorbent black paint that is still top secret. That paint was completely removed and then repainted with normal aircraft paints before they were transferred to their new non-military homes.
What the heck is that grill thing on top, but too far past that wide nose to be a sensor grill, and it's not an air intake either, unless if was cut from an old car radiator.
Cyber warfare implies they took control of it. Not impossible, but let's just say I highly doubt it. Maybe it was electronic warfare and they jammed the control signals. Far more likely, but don't even try and convince me that something that freaking huge for a drone doesn't have a backup plan involving an inertial compass and software to return it to a safe location if it's GPS gets jammed.
Did Iran get an American Drone? Maybe, but I'm pretty sure this thing is NOT it.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)