Unless they fixed the GPS issue this one may get captured as well. I read an article where they Iranians, but sent fake GPS signals to the drone. The drone gets confused and then performs an emergency return to homebase. But with the fake GPS data...it gets directed to an Iranian airstrip.
Sad thing is the Iranians did this on a less sophisticated drone earlier in the year. Why they didn’t include a self destruct mechanism is beyond me. If something is so easily hijacked they should put some ordinance on it that can blow up kep components and maybe kill a couple of the hijackers. Or blow it up in mid-air so then it really is less useful.
“Unless they fixed the GPS issue this one may get captured as well. I read an article where they Iranians, but sent fake GPS signals to the drone. The drone gets confused and then performs an emergency return to homebase. But with the fake GPS data...it gets directed to an Iranian airstrip.”
There are a few things about this that I don’t understand. First of all, unless the enemy knows the drone is there, there’s no way to spoof the GPS. The Avenger had better be painted black and should only fly at night. I would also think (though I’m not completely sure) that GPS spoofing must come from above since the GPS antennas “look” upwards at satellites. Therefore it may be quite difficult for the Iranians to spoof very high-flying aircraft.
Finally, there’s a fairly easy fix for GPS spoofing. If the flight control software detects that the position of the aircraft has shifted in a way that is totally out of whack with the flight plan (in other words a shift of many miles in a few seconds), it should revert to inertial and/or compass based navigation and head for friendly airspace, possibly using evasive maneuvers. Once in friendly airspace (if not sooner), the GPS should revert to a working condition. I’m very surprised the RQ-170 didn’t have this capability.
The Iranians claim they did this.
Frankly, I doubt it. The GPS signal used by the military is encrypted. Unless they broke the encryption, they won't be able to spoof it.
And frankly, I doubt they broke the encryption -- even if they somehow got their hands on a device that uses the encrypted code. It's standard to use one-way encryption -- i.e. you might be able to decode it, but you can't generate an encrypted message that will be accepted.