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Iran--U.S. RQ-170 incident From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia On 4 December 2011, an American Lockheed Martin RQ-170 Sentinel unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) was captured by Iranian forces near the city of Kashmar in northeastern Iran. The Iranian government announced that the UAV was brought down by its cyberwarfare unit which commandeered the aircraft and safely landed it, after initial reports from Western news sources inaccurately claimed that it had been “shot down“.[1] The United States government initially denied the claims but later President Obama acknowledged that the downed aircraft was a US drone and requested Iran to return it.[2][3] Contents [hide] 1 Capture of the drone 2 US acknowledgement 3 Complaint to UN Security Council 4 Request for return by the United States 5 Reverse engineering of the drone 6 Decoded footage obtained from captured US drone 7 References Capture of the drone[edit] The government of Iran announced that the aircraft was brought down by its Cyber warfare unit stationed near Kashmar[4][5][6][7] and “brought down with minimum damage“[8] They said the aircraft was detected in Iranian airspace some 225 kilometers (140 mi) from the border with Afghanistan.[9] The government of the United States initially claimed that its forces in Afghanistan had lost control of a UAV on 4 December 2011 and that there was a possibility that this is the vehicle that crashed near Kashmar. According to unnamed U.S. officials, a U.S. UAV operated by the Central Intelligence Agency was flying on the Afghan side of the Afghanistan-Iran border when its operators lost control of the vehicle.[10][11] There have been reports that “foreign officials and American experts who have been briefed on the effort“ state that the crashed UAV was taking part in routine surveillance of Iranian nuclear facilities inside Iranian airspace.[12] The drone appeared to be largely intact, except for possible minor visible damage on its left wing. Dan Goure, an analyst at the Lexington Institute, stated the largely intact airframe ruled out the possibility of an engine or navigational malfunction: “Either this was a cyber/electronic warfare attack system that brought the system down or it was a glitch in the command-and-control system.“[13] However, some US officials state the drone broke into three pieces during impact. They claim that it was reassembled for display purposes and was painted by Iran to hide the damage.[14] The Department of Defense released a statement acknowledging that it had lost control of a UAV during the previous week, claiming that it was “flying a mission over western Afghanistan“ when control was lost. The statement did not specify the model of the aircraft. The U.S. government also stated that it was still investigating the cause of the loss.[15] A Christian Science Monitor article relates an Iranian engineer's assertion that the drone was captured by jamming both satellite and land-originated control signals to the UAV, followed up by a GPS spoofing attack that fed the UAV false GPS data to make it land in Iran at what the drone thought was its home base in Afghanistan. Stephen Trimble from Flight Global assumes UAV guidance could be targeted by 1L222 Avtobaza radar jamming and deception system supplied to Iran by Russia.[16] In an interview for Nova, U.S. retired Lt. General David Deptula also said “There was a problem with the aircraft and it landed in an area it wasn't supposed to land“.[17][18] American aeronautical engineers dispute this, pointing out that as is the case with the MQ-1 Predator, the MQ-9 Reaper, and the Tomahawk, “GPS is not the primary navigation sensor for the RQ-170... The vehicle gets its flight path orders from an inertial navigation system“.[19] Inertial navigation continues to be used on military aircraft despite the advent of GPS because GPS signal jamming and spoofing are relatively simple operations.[20]
