Stealth drone in Iran

[Drunk On Love]

An American stealth drone, the RQ-170 was recently taken down mostly intact in Iran. This military vehicle penetrated Iranian airspace without permission. Our government is claiming that it came down due to an electronics error but the Iranians are claiming that it was taken down by an electronic warfare unit of theirs.

Do you think this technology might be useful to Iran in their future development stealth aircraft? I've read that the paint used on it was a secret they were not happy to let leak out. Might they sell this technology to a country with a more advanced aerospace industry like Russia or China? A while back Iran claimed to have been working on a stealth fighter of it's own and released some pictures of a mock up they made of it.

 

[Drunk On Love]

This is what the drone looked like

 

[Chamdar]

It looks kind of like a Cylon Raider.

 

[Drunk On Love]

Yeah, it does kind of.

 

[Chris81]

It doesn't look as though it worked very well. I mean it is supposed to be stealth, hence not be detected in foreign airspace, yet Iran brought this thing down. So much for "American Made"? This is kind of depressing. We can't build civilian products that people want to buy and now we can't build weapons of war that work very well. That's our bread and butter. No wonder this country is going down the tube.

 

[Drunk On Love]

It's possible it was sighted visually rather than spotted with radar. I would guess they might have electronic warfare units along the border because the US has been overflying Iranian airspace for some time. It's hard to say.

 

[dlamberth]

It doesn't look as though it worked very well. I mean it is supposed to be stealth, hence not be detected in foreign airspace, yet Iran brought this thing down.

I seriously doubt that Iran brought it down. It's good PR for Iran to say so, but I think there was a system failure that brought it down.

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[kiwimac]

Glad it came down.

 

[Drunk On Love]

Are we going to apologize now that there is incontrovertible evidence that we have been violating their airspace with military air craft? Lately we have been helping ourselves to other countries air space and ignoring their borders it seems. I see this as being excessively aggressive and war like. I can only imagine what would happen if Iran started over flying the US with military drones.

 

[dlamberth]

Are we going to apologize now that there is incontrovertible evidence that we have been violating their airspace with military air craft? Lately we have been helping ourselves to other countries air space and ignoring their borders it seems. I see this as being excessively aggressive and war like. I can only imagine what would happen if Iran started over flying the US with military drones.

There are some who feel that America has already started war against Iran. There seems to be signs that we are, is this one?

.

 

[Drunk On Love]

There is actually a good chance that Iran did bring it down. Iran said they brought it down by electronic means and the US didn't deny that instead they denied that they denied that Iran shot it down which they never claimed in the first place.

Here is an interesting article I read one it:

Reuters wrote that U.S. official says no sign Iran shot down drone. Of course Iran never claimed that it shot down the drone so this is a non-denial. Iran just "downed" the drone by some electronic warfare means.

The question now is "How did they do it?" Here are my speculative ideas on that.

As this is a stealth drone detecting it is the first problem. A usual monostatic radar where the emitter of the radar beam and the receiver which catches the echo from the airplane are in the same place would not find the drone. The drone's form and its echo reducing coating would scatter the beam too much. But by using bistatic radar where the emitter is separated from the receiver(s) by a distance that is comparable to the expected target distance even stealthy flying objects can be detected.


Detection by electronic means is also possible if the drone is receiving and sending information via its satellite link and not just silently following a preprogrammed flightpath. While the signal from the drone to the satellite is send in a highly directional beam a plane equipped with the necessary radios flying above the drone and near the line of sight between the satellite and the drone should be able to locate it. If the drone used its own radar to "look around" Iran the recently delivered Russian Avtobaza "anti-stealth" system will likely have detected it.


This RQ-170 drone type became known as the "Beast of Kandahar" when it first observed there four years ago. Flying U.S. stealth drones in Afghanistan is obvioulsy necessary to escape the Taliban's radars (not). The drone is quite big with an estimated wingspan of 65 feet (20m) to 90 feet (27m) and a takeoff weight of some 10,000 lbs.

When the drone is in the air it is controlled via a satellite link from a remote operating station. But during start and landing the drone is piloted via line-of-sight radio by an operator near the start or landing field. This is necessary because the remote satellite link has a delay of several hundred milliseconds which is just too much latency to correct wind sheer and other problems during takeoff and landing.

What the Iranians seem to have done is to take over the drone's line-of-sight control. This after electronically disrupting its satellite link. Disrupting the satellite link alone would not be enough as the drone would then have followed some preprogrammed action like simply flying back to where it came from. With the line-of-sight control active a satellite link disruption would not lead to a preprogrammed abort.

We can reasonably assume that the Iranians have some station near Kandahar Airport that is listening to all military radio traffic there. They had four years to analyze the radio signaling between the ground operator and such drones. Even if that control signal is encrypted pattern recognition during many flights over four years would have given them enough information to break the code.


Iran will take care to hide the drone well as the U.S. would likely try to destroy it if its location would be known. When the Chinese collected parts of a stealth F-117 stealth plane that was downed in Yugoslavia the U.S. bombed their embassy in Belgrade.

Having acquired an only slightly damaged state of the art stealth drone Iran will be able to copy a lot of its technology as well as to find new measures against such drones. There will also bee a lot of interests from other sides into this technology. We can bet that the military attaches from the Russian, Chinese, Indian, Pakistani and other embassies are already queuing up in the Iranian Defense Ministry and ready to make some very lucrative offers."

 

[chris4243]

Are we going to apologize now that there is incontrovertible evidence that we have been violating their airspace with military air craft?

No. We asked for the drone back.

 

[Chris81]

This is not what I expect from my government!

Why won't they just deny that Iran has one of our drones? Just claim that this story is a well crafted piece of Iranian propaganda.