(Prelude edit: A few people seem to be missing the point I'm making here. I know quite a lot about the predator, and a bit about the Global Hawk. I do not know much about the Sentinel. The jab about building a drone with parts on my kitchen table is a joke, meant to illustrate that this is either an absurd level of incompetence on the part of Lockheed Martin [not likely] or the article is incorrect, the latter being most likely. The Global Hawk, for instance, uses inertial navigation as well as GPS. Spoofing GPS against that platform would be annoying to the people controlling it, it would not get you a free Global Hawk. It is a near-certainty that the Sentinel has a similar navigation system.).
Some clarification on these drones:
Some of them require a human being with Line Of Sight to land them. "Predators" (what a lovely name), for instance. This thing is basically a gigantic R/C plane, and a pretty nice one at that.
You taxi it to the runway, take it off, and fly it via remote control. There is a human watching it the entire time (although the human may not be in close proximity to the plane. The militarized versions, for instance, have pilots living in Nevada, and planes living in Afghanistan).
Another plane, called a "Global Hawk", is much larger, and requires almost no human intervention at all. You open the hanger door, press the go button, and then leave it alone.
It taxis itself to the runway, powers up, takes off, flies its mission, comes home, lands, taxis back to the hanger, and powers down.
If this article is accurate, it would mean that this drone model requires no human intervention, which makes sense if it's primarily a passive, camera-platform.
What becomes really really scary about this is the idea that they're relying solely on GPS to fly.
How do I get into defense contracting, again? I have the parts for a "drone" sitting on my kitchen table right now that, from the sound of things, is about navigationally equivalent to this thing.
(By that I mean a $30 'duino, $50 worth of gyros and accelerometers, and $60 worth of a GPS. Hey government, here's a cost cutting measure: hire me to build you some drones.)
I won't comment on the UAV in the article, but you'd have to be a pretty wealthy person and have some really weird stuff on your kitchen table to have what is on the global hawk. I won't comment on specifics, but there is nothing simple about its gps and inertial navigation systems. Your categorization of UAV's was fairly simplistic and there are many more categories than two.
The Global Hawk is a much more expensive aircraft than the RQ-170 and is in a completely different category of aircraft. What happen to RQ-170 could not be done to the Global Hawk with they way its navigation works.
I don't want people thinking that autonomous aircraft are some simple thing that anyone can do. If that was the case, other countries would make them instead of buying them from the US.
Of course I don't have the requisite materials or fabrication equipment to build the type of inertial navigation equipment used in missiles.
My point was that, if the article is to be believed, and RQ-170 relies completely on GPS and gyros, then I have the stuff needed to build its guidance system.
(The point here being that of course I don't, and of course it's likely more complicated than a GPS, so the article is probably incorrect)
I plus +1'd your comment, I get what you were trying to say, sorry I came across wrong. I was trying to supplement it a bit by saying there are many tiers of UAV's. I was joking about you having crazy crap on your kitchen counter, but typed a bit too fast to make a point of me getting what you were saying.
You can see in my other comments that it is pretty nuts if they actually captured the plane the way they claim. Based my knowledge of navigation design, it seems to be pretty impossible to convince a properly designed plane that it is somewhere it isn't without turning off the inertial navigation equipment (what is done during testing in anechoic chambers).
I didn't get that entirely from the article. They had already cut off communications links, so it sounds like it was already running in some sort of backup mode, meaning that GPS and gyros were perhaps all it had left to go on.
> absurd level of incompetence on the part of Lockheed Martin [not likely] or the article is incorrect,
I am also working in the area of government military contracting and I would claim your credibility in LM's competence is baffling. Are we talking about the same company here?
Absolutely. Lockheed's an enormous company, so generalizations are risky, but they sure do some low-quality engineering sometimes. Their Littoral Combat Ship program is a textbook example of a clusterfuck.
No, the article clearly says that Iran severed the pilot's communication channel.
> "By putting noise [jamming] on the communications, you force the bird into autopilot. This is where the bird loses its brain."
> made the drone “land on its own where we wanted it to, without having to crack the remote-control signals and communications” from the US control center
I believe this channel is over satellite, whereas the take-off/landing channel is line-of-sight like your R/C plane.
What about the argument that a military plane would have multiple levels of internal defense such as automatic destruction? I read an argument by a supposed engineer who wrote that the auto protect mode would cause the plane to fly vertically towards the ground to cause as much damage to the plane as possible, which is why he/she was skeptical that Iran had a fully intact aircraft. See http://www.offiziere.ch/?p=6868
"How do I get into defense contracting, again? I have the parts for a "drone" sitting on my kitchen table right now that, from the sound of things, is about navigationally equivalent to this thing."
I don't know how serious you are, but every state and local law enforcement agency in the US will be looking to buy smaller, more affordable drones for traffic and crime uses in the very immediate future (if they aren't already).
I know this is an aside to the original article ... I just wanted to say that, if you were serious, I would totally invest money into such an endeavor :)
What becomes really really scary about this is the idea that they're relying solely on GPS to fly.
GPS is pretty damn precise, especially once you add local ionosphere corrections (via WAAS or similar) and get to use the military signal. It's certainly good enough for navigating an airplane, because it's more accurate than what was in use before GPS (VOR).
Yeah. I'm not a pilot but am a bit nostalgic for "the old way". A modern autopilot system that's linked to GPS will let you type in waypoints and then it will just fly to them, keeping the heading adjusted to account for the wind data it gets from a satellite weather uplink.
I believe what happened was that some hackers went to known locations on the planet, listened to the signal, then used these pairings to reverse engineer it.
Some clarification on these drones:
Some of them require a human being with Line Of Sight to land them. "Predators" (what a lovely name), for instance. This thing is basically a gigantic R/C plane, and a pretty nice one at that.
You taxi it to the runway, take it off, and fly it via remote control. There is a human watching it the entire time (although the human may not be in close proximity to the plane. The militarized versions, for instance, have pilots living in Nevada, and planes living in Afghanistan).
Another plane, called a "Global Hawk", is much larger, and requires almost no human intervention at all. You open the hanger door, press the go button, and then leave it alone.
It taxis itself to the runway, powers up, takes off, flies its mission, comes home, lands, taxis back to the hanger, and powers down.
If this article is accurate, it would mean that this drone model requires no human intervention, which makes sense if it's primarily a passive, camera-platform.
What becomes really really scary about this is the idea that they're relying solely on GPS to fly.
How do I get into defense contracting, again? I have the parts for a "drone" sitting on my kitchen table right now that, from the sound of things, is about navigationally equivalent to this thing.
(By that I mean a $30 'duino, $50 worth of gyros and accelerometers, and $60 worth of a GPS. Hey government, here's a cost cutting measure: hire me to build you some drones.)