Discussion: Video: Iran Shows Off Captured U.S. Drone, Swears It’s No Fake

Two ways to get it down intact. a) It got fed up and defected. b) It's a Trojan horse full of midget SEALs.

Another possibility. The U.S. lost some drone near the border; Iran announced that it captured the drone, showed an RQ-170 mock-up it was using to test radar, and now watches as U.S. officials and the media expose the whole program.

As someone who fabricates aero prototypes, my guess is this is the real thing. Couple of reasons, the complex grill on the air intakes doesn't match any of the public photo's I was able to find, and if Iranian modellers were trying to show off a fake, why add a conspicuous detail that doesn't match photos. Also the ding in the port leading edge shows damage, why add damage to a model that was supposedly flown down rather than crashed. Lastly, the very carefully hidden undercarriage shows that likely more damages is concealed on the underside, which makes sense, as even if Iran was able to take control of the flight surfaces (unlikely) the idea that on a first try they would get control and have knowhow of flight surfaces and landing gear etc. is very unlikely. Most likely the drone was programmed with a flight path to get it to target, then was to be updated with new path once initial video was examined. The Iranians likely just managed to jam the update, and the plane ended up in some sort of loiter mode, till it ran out of gas, and probably self landed/automated crash, in such a way that was designed to bring it down with minimal damage. That kind of programming would make sense, if you loose a drone by mistake or equipt failure, especially an advanced prototype that spends most of it's time flying over relatively friendly territory, you'd set it up so that if it lost com, it would crash land itself, so that you could recover parts, and data

Yea, nice analysis. However, wouldn't a US drone have some kind of fail-safe self destruct mechanism to take out the electronics and hard drives to prevent from falling into enemy hands? Could this be why the underside was obscured by propaganda flags?

Maybe the US government is waiting for the Drone to be moved or inspected by TOP IRAN officials and then they will detinate the Mini Nuke killing everyone around the drone... Probably even have mini cams working right now to record Audio and Video inside the boarder. Hopefully someone in Iran was smart enought to remove the battery first... HAHA.

Yeah, but it's likely not the sort of thing that would trigger automatically. If operators lost control of the plane, they would probably also lose the ability to detonate it. (speculative)

I wasn't thinking blow up self destruction but like wipe your drives, burn your processor, fry your electronics type self destruction. Send it a kill command to wipe everything from way points, images, and flight controls and just let it come down. Can't really do much with an air frame on wheel with no control system.

it would return home to its point of origin after loss of signal, there would be some fail safe when it reaches the point where it would not have enough fuel to return and no longer continue loiter, because it assumed the loiter is over hostile airspace.

the grille on the Iranian drone is a dead give away that their drone is a fake. No stealth aircraft would have a grille like that as it's nothing but a giant reflector for radar. The whole point of having a stealth aircraft is to reduce the radar cross-section as much as possible. Any incoming radar signal would just bounce all around the lattice structure of the inlet and get reflected back to the radar system.

Also, notice the straight edges (parallel to a line normal to the direction of flight) on the inlet itself. Likewise, the panel on the top of the Iranian drone also has straight edges.

Take a look at pictures of the F-22, F-117, and B-2. You won't find a single straight edge (again, straight as defined as normal to the direction of flight). What you will find are edges that are at 60/30 degrees from the direction of flight. These edges are designed such that any incoming radar signal is deflected away from the direction of incidence to reduce the radar cross-section of the vehicle. The straight edges only increase the radar cross-section (as the whole edge gets reflected back to the radar device).

The fan blades are a big problem when you are flying head on, perhaps the grille is meant to absorb a radio signal at a certain frequency, like the metal grille on a microwave oven, this larger gap would work well on something lower frequency than microwave, and I had heard lower frequencies work better to detect stealth aircraft. The US had been monitoring iranian radar sites from outer space for the last few years.

That was a pretty much anti-Iran piece.

Can't stand the fact that Iran did bring down the drone with its sophisticated hacker tech., without a scratch. ???

Just admit it was a blunder of epic proportions to test Iranian electronic warfare tech/defenses.

The author of this piece has shown nothing except propaganda to defame Iran and its capabilities.

Looks like the country will dissect this RQ drone and extract everything, reverse eng. it and use it in the near future against US forces.

Getting your hands on something, does not mean you can reverse engineer it. China has been trying for half a century to build a jet engine, and still can't come up with anything powerful or reliable, regardless of the thousands they've purchased and dissected.

BTW, what part of this story wasn't true? Iran HAS released images of welded together oil drums, and claimed they were S300s. Iran HAS released a horribly photoshopped image of a missile launch fail to worldwide media, claiming it was real.

There's virtually no chance that Iran's non-existent "electronic warfare tech" had anything to do with the crash of this drone. Do you think Mexico's "electronic warfare tech" made the Border Patrol's Predator crash too?

China can build jet engines but they have a well documented history of trying (and failing) to build jet engines that can reliably power military aircraft for anything even approaching a real lifecycle. I think the docs I read suggested that their engines need rebuilds or refits after a dozen or so hours of operation.

I don't doubt even if they have a working jet fighter it would pale by comparison. But we can't take credit for building the jet engine, Hitler built the first jet engine and we gave the nazi scientist amnesty here in turn for them to continue their research for us. So, I dunno.. I have no point, I just wish it was friday...

The fist Jet engine was built by a Romanian born French guy called "Henry Coanda". He also discovered the "Coanda effect" while setting his wooden frame on fire with the engine.

Tudor, Can't confirm the Hitler jet engine was first, but definitely badass. Ran circles around the Brits and Americans. Fortunately for us, Hitler decided his V-Rockets were better and only built a small force of jets. If Britain had fallen, damn that would have been written differently.

That's because you have higher standards of quality control and design going into the rocket than you do in the jet engines. However I digress what I hear about Chinese jet engines are hearsay not facts and statistics.

the hardest systems to reverse engineer on this are probably the fly by wire software micro-calibrations, which are not possible just by having the drone, to make the CPU auto adjust control surfaces to the right degree so this thing that shouldn't fly can (a job my uncle did for various aerospace companies and rarely spoke of, until he passed in sept. 2010) .

The thing that makes me go hmmm however is why in the hell does the drone look like its made out of white chocolate? If the "radar absorbing materials"skin were removed for analysis by the Iranians, and this is what the beast looks like without its clothes on, is my best guess but it could just be what the easter bunny left.

They fished some booze RSA company in Taiwan to spoof the certificates, if the RSA wasn't so laissez-faire ;) about giving out certificate tokens it wouldn't have happened.

Well, the video is good quality and reasonably extensive, and shows the drone from a number of angles, it's certainly sufficient for the good people at the manufacturers, the Defense Dept and at the CIA to determine very accurately whether the dimensions and shape are correct.

If they are, and it's a fabrication, then you would have to ask the question how did they manage to fabricate the outline to the exact spec. It's also not the kind of thing that could just be fabricated on the fly and look remotely convincing, and I can't really imagine that the Iranians would go to a lot of trouble to mock one up on the off-chance that the US lost one somewhere in their neck of the woods.

First the obviously thing isn't the color, but grill intake for this aircraft looks like it was taken off a automobile, its not a stealth design much less a American stealth design.

A real stealth drone the intake looks much different this is the dead give away that it is a fake.
Also in the close ups you don't actually see anything inside where the engine turbofans would be.

If you search for "Phantom Ray Makes First Flight" you can find a video from Boeing that demonstrates a test flight of their Phantom Ray Drone which is similar in design to this airframe. In the video around the 14 second mark there is a close up of the intake you can clearly see that these do not even remotely match what is shown in these video.

In addition to that were is are all the avionics components and wiring, landing gear US serial numbers of parts etc, this thing why isn't that top section open exposing for all the world inside the spy gear, it looks like a industrial full scale model?

What about the spy cameras and the under belly of this aircraft why isn't this shown? All the wiring etc.

This thing looks like they did a Google search of a 4 view of this thing, then then have a bunch of university engineering students machine a replicate out of pewter. Then got someone to video tape it with their cellphone and upload it to you tube.

Lets see some high resolution HD video and them taking this thing apart and see some serial numbers, all this looks like is propaganda fodder for their uneducated peasants to believe the regime is actually more powerful then they are.

Video: Iran Shows Off Captured U.S. Drone, Swears It’s No Fake

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