Posted on 12/17/2011 1:10:45 PM PST by indpndtguy
WASHINGTON—U.S. officials believe the downed spy drone on display in Iran crashed and broke into several pieces, and the Iranians reassembled it to make it appear as though it landed intact.
Officials also believe the Iranians repainted the drone, perhaps to conceal damage done to the body of the plane. In an Iranian video, the drone appears to be white, whereas the actual one is charcoal gray, they said.
Iranian officials last week showed video footage of what they said was the downed drone, the RQ-170 Sentinel. They have variously claimed that they shot it down or remotely skyjacked it before landing the craft in one piece.
The stealth drone was developed for the Air Force, but was flying under the authority of the Central Intelligence Agency when its remote pilots lost control of it late last week, said several U.S. officials.
With one of the most-sophisticated U.S. spy planes now in Iranian hands, U.S. officials continue work to assess how much U.S. intelligence capability may have been compromised. Iran's ability to reassemble the drone and put it on display has prompted U.S. lawmakers to ask why the unmanned drone lacked a feature that caused it to self-destruct if it malfunctioned, a congressional official said.
U.S. officials familiar with the American assessment of the incident forcefully dispute Tehran's assertion and say the pilot lost control of the craft. "They did not commandeer it and steer it to the ground," said an Obama administration official. "It crashed, and they put it back together to make it look whole, like a puzzle being put back together."
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
Interesting twist.
There was a time when we could believe our government. Now, not so much! They’ve become such good liars about everything big and small. They lie even when they don’t need to.
the grill on the thing looked bogus and it also looks like it is shrink wrapped or something.
Whom to believe, this administration or Iran? Decisions...decisions.
I’ll wait for Pravda to report what really happened.....U.S. officials can’t be trusted.
Obama get’s hammered for doing nothing to blow the dam thing up and now many days later, the story is that it crashed into “pieces”... sure it did, sure it did.
Will we learn in a week or two that Zero gave it to them? The BS never stops.
from another source:
Tale of RQ-170 Hijack In Doubt as Told in Tehran
Purported Iranian engineering specialists have been taking liberties with the laws of physics in their descriptions of an electronic hijacking of the RQ-170 unmanned reconnaissance aircraft, say U.S. analyst.
Holes in the account start with the fact that it took days for the Iranians to discover the lost aircraft. In fact, intelligence officials at one point thought the Iranians might simply never stumble across the crash site because it was in such a remote and uninhabited part of northeastern Iran.
Electronic attack of the Sentinel is “certainly possible, but there’s no indication that they even knew it had crashed in Iran for some time,” says a veteran black-projects manager.
That scenario is validated by an aerospace industry ISR specialist, who agreed that “if they were not aware [of the Sentinel’s presence in Iran for days], then there is no reason to believe they had any semblance of control.”
And then there are technical issues that make a hijacking, as described by the Iranians, unlikely.
“Among the reasons to doubt the claim that GPS jamming had anything to do with the loss of the RQ-170 is a simple overlooked fact,” says a third U.S. analyst. “GPS is not the primary navigation sensor for the RQ-170 or for most other air vehicles. The vehicle gets its flight path orders from an inertial navigation system, which is essentially unjammable unless you want to monkey with the local gravitational field. The GPS updates the INS and cancels its drift. So, even a full GPS blackout would simply cause the vehicle to be a bit less accurate,” he adds.
“If the GPS was ‘spoofed’ with a fake signal — and even JDAMs have anti-spoofing GPS receivers today, so that might be difficult — any abrupt change in the GPS reading would cause the Kalman filters in the GPS/INS to conclude that the GPS was malfunctioning and cut it out of the loop,” he says.
The continuing discussion of why the RQ-170 went down was renewed by a Christian Science Monitor interview with Iranian military technologists who say they were able to “cut off communications links” to the Sentinel using knowledge gathered from the inspection of at least three other U.S.-operated, non-stealthy, unmanned aerial systems (UAS). The trick, they say, was to scramble the GPS coordinates that guided the aircraft to make it think it was landing at its home base in Afghanistan, and only imprecision in the altitude data caused the Sentinel to land with its wheels up.
The report went on to quote an Iranian engineer as saying the “electronic ambush” was accomplished “by putting noise [jamming] on the communications, you force the bird into autopilot. This is where the bird loses its brain.”
www.aviationweek.com/aw/blogs/defense/index.jsp?plckController=Blog&plckBlogPage=BlogViewPost&newspaperUserId=27ec4a53-dcc8-42d0-bd3a-01329aef79a7&plckPostId=Blog%3a27ec4a53-dcc8-42d0-bd3a-01329aef79a7Post%3abca8e6e2-70ef-40a3-8c56-f83aa6fc7ade&plckScript=blogScript&plckElementId=blogDest
” There was a time when we could believe our government. Now, NOT AT ALL .... there, I fixed it
1. They pick up a drone on the ground that is grey and put it back together white?
The Iranian ain’t exactly stupid...
2. The pilot lost control as simply a function of the pilot losing control?
...uh huh...dare the DOD to let hackers at the yearly Reno confab have three days at it...betcha there’s lots of holes in that thing virtually speaking.
=8-)
Why argue about words? It doesn’t matter whether or not it crashed or came down intact. The problem still remains. Iran has it.
Sad isn' it? Up is down, right is left...
Anybody that believes anything coming from this administration..
SHOULD SLAPPED HARD... nose twisted and switched with apple switch until begged to STOP..
and then done again several times..
...and soon US officials will make public an animated video to prove just this.
dam thing=damN thing
right on the bull’s eye.
If the aviotionweek blog is correct, then I dont get it
why 0 refused to authorize one of the 3 options to
neutralize it when he had a few days to do it!
Yes, disgustingly sad.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.