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Crashed Helicopter Sparks Concern Over Stealth Secrets
Hugh Pickens writes "The crash of a helicopter involved in the raid on Osama bin Laden's Pakistani hideout has prompted intense speculation about whether the aircraft was specially modified to fly stealthily — and whether its remains could offer hostile governments clues to sensitive US military technology. Remnants of the helicopter, including a nearly intact piece of its tail, suggested that the aircraft involved in the raid wasn't the typical Black Hawk flown by special-operations forces. Aviation experts who scrutinized photos of the scene say the tail had unusual features that suggested the helicopter had been extensively modified to fly quietly, while appearing less visible to radar. 'The odds are fair — based on my knowledge of the subject area — the vast majority of the special MH-60s aircraft were purpose-built to make those aircraft as stealthy as they could possibly be,' says aviation expert Jay Miller, adding that the remnants of the aircraft suggested extensive use of nonmetallic composite parts, which reflect less radar energy. Experts also say the tail rotor's design suggested an effort to reduce the 'acoustic signature' (video) of the helicopters to make them fly more quietly."
Or a new design. That tail rotor is not from any know US or even NATO Helicopter. How much was compromised? Maybe some materials It will depend on if Pakistan gives it back or not. They will probably pass some parts onto China since they are working with them on new aircraft. Or we will sell them some more F16s cheap if they give back to US.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Military tries to improve on itself.
Nuke Gay Whales for Jesus.
The fact that civilian aviation experts were able to look at the pictures and say "gee, that's a so-and-so modification to reduce noise" suggests to me that this is hardly top-secret technology. Also, the fact that special forces have relatively stealthy helicopters is hardly surprising.
What next; controversy about a crashed police car 'revealing' secret tuning and suspension modifications?
This is a substitute for a clever sig that fits within the maximum number of characters.
Only now it appeared on Slashdot? And below a picture of the possible appearance of the helicopter:
http://cencio4.wordpress.com/2011/05/05/stealth-black-hawk-down-revised-sketch/
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
The key factor is that this mission was so important - even the President was personally involved in its planned - that the very best, most advanced technology available would have been employed. If there are secret helicopters and eavesdropping equipment and spy gadgets, then they would have been employed for this. I think the design (5 blade), material and aerodynamic shape of the tail rotors would be the biggest thing up for grabs after this incident. It also makes me wonder if China, Russia, etc, have their act together enough to quickly place buyers in Pakistan to purchase whatever photos, or even actual pieces of the wreckage, they can. One thing is for sure, China and Russia are very good at reverse engineering.
Better known as 318230.
Airwolf.
Seriously, though, what kind of "stealth" is this? It showed right up in the picture.
Godaddy is a scam and a ripoff.
That we have a stealth helicopter or that its 'secrets' might be out there now?
Concerns are irrelevant either way. We worked on a stealth helicopter design for a while (RAH-66) which failed to materialize, but it makes sense lessons learned from the project could be put to use. In regards to people knowing about it (or having access to its parts), well, if you use it in combat you might lose one, and then it's out there for everyone to see.
It must have been a Stealth Blackhawk in BETA - never seen before and bound to crash at least once.
All kidding aside, it is quite unfortunate that it's debut was the result of a crash in a country that has been known to export nifty knowledge and new technology they acquire (i.e. A.Q Kahn and nuclear weapons).
Why they didn't follow up the raid with a B-52 strike featuring a couple of Daisy Cutters. All evidence would have been erased and the Pakis would have realised we were not amused.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
Helicopters are the opposite of stealth.
Naval Aviator: "You know how a helicopter flies?"
me: "uhh.. the main rotor, lift, drag, etc?"
Naval Aviator: "Wrong. They make so much goddamn noise the Earth gets away from them"
It could only be heard by blogers with giant flyswatters
If it crashed its not stealth anymore. Problem solved.
What about that guy who tweeted that the copters were shaking the windows?
http://eu.techcrunch.com/2011/05/02/heres-the-guy-who-unwittingly-live-tweeted-the-raid-on-bin-laden/
It seemed a little odd that when a helicopter broke down a quarter mile away from a supposedly allied military base, the U.S. military would blast it to pieces rather than just asking Pakistan to keep an eye on it till it could be picked up. For a random helicopter, scuttling it in nominally friendly territory is wasteful and over-the-top, but for a super secret stealth helicopter, it's quite prudent.
According the NYtimes the reason it crashed was not mechanical failure but lack of lift. two reasons were given 1) thin air 2) the walls of the compound created a vortex. So apparently just some modestly walls to guide air will reduce the lift enough to crash this thing. I wonder how it is supposed to land between buildings? I wonder if perhaps the noise reduction and stealth features came at a price of reduced performance.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Seeing the behavior of the US government in the last decade, I really hope secret stealth technology is in fact discovered. We simply can't let a country have too much of an advantage, especially a country that proves every day that it believes human rights mean nothing, allies are people to spy on and wars can be started against anyone for any reason.
Seriously, we should even force the USA to get rid of all it's nuclear technology at this point. There's a massive Genocide in Iraq (100k dead Iraqis), Obama thinks he can have people assassinated without a trial, the police no longer respects people's rights and privacy and judges give them that power constantly... The USA is the biggest threat to the Western World.
Why is it that the USA develops military technology that can only be used against military enemis, such as railguns, when today the only people who'd attack the USA are guerillas and terrorists? Because the USA plans to conquer more territory, or at least wants to keep this option open.
The only image I could find was a drawing depicting what it might look like compared to the Blackhawk.
Full Wired Article
seal team 6 is going back in to assassinate whoever has the parts and taking them back
This is worse than Goatse.
Both videos are fake/rickrolls.
Well, usually making a helicopter quieter reduces its performance. Possibly why this one had problems.
Sure, if you want to be the one to pay for it... Quiet doesn't come cheap.
Our good friends and allies, the Pakistanis, are just going to give us back the helicopter, and protect it's secrets from our enemies... right?
Comming up with a solution to a problem is an entirely different matter than understanding a solution presented to one. So drawing the conclusion this isn't top-secret technology is a fallacy.
The hard part of these things lies in having the basic idea and the details of implementation.
Just by the design of it, it does not look large enough to be used for anything other than a precise surgical assassination mission.
Doesn't make a sound, can hover over a Window or get a nice line of sight, seems perfect for sniper type assassination missions to me.
So all those crazy conspiracy theorists were right.
We DO have black helicopters with whisper mode.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xf17mCO1Rs#t=3m27s
Search your logs like the web: splunk!
How did they fit 24 commandos, 4 pilots, a dog, a body, and retrieved materials into the remaining stealth Blackhawk? Did the military developed stealth midget commandos for this mission?
The Admin and the Engineer
If people could do it, they would. Noise is wasted energy. Wasted energy is greater fuel consumption.
The trade off making it quieter is presumably that you get less thrust to move the chopper around with. There are suggestions that this lack of manoeuvrability is what caused the crash in the first place.
The first time I heard about this whole mission, I thought, whoah, American helicopters managed to fly 150 km into Pakistan without being noticed? Pakistan isn't a slouch when it comes to military equipment: they've fought several wars with India, and are used to trying to track some of the finest military hardware in the world. Yet two helicopters flew in, invisibly. It sounds like they were supported by two Chinooks, that came in a bit later, and those *were* seen by the Pakistani air defense, but the first group in weren't seen. A lot of other countries are going to want to figure out how we did this.
There have been a lot of US projects in making low-observable helicopters, from the modified Hughes OH6 Loach used to surreptitiously place wiretaps on lines during Vietnam, that also used increased numbers of blades, and the cancelled RAH-66 Comanche, that was supposed to be quiet and have a vastly reduced radar signature. The ones used Monday are probably Blackhawks modified based on the stuff learned from the Comanche, but they could be completely new aircraft: the descriptions of the amount of personnel and material taken in are at the very edge of what two stock Blackhawks could carry, and adding lots of stealth technology adds a *lot* of weight.
Among other interesting things I've read and observed: the stock Blackhawk is manufactured with sheets of aluminum riveted together along the edges, like most planes. The pictures show rivetless construction, and in one picture it looks like there's a long weld seam that appears to have been done by hand rather than machine, making me think there are a very small number of prototypes of this. I also saw a link somewhere, that I can't find now, to a press release by a company who was adding small servos into the collector linkages that added continuous slight variance to the blade angle, to minimize noise by distributing it across different frequencies, which seems pretty cool. I've even seen a few claims that the whole aircraft was covered in material that could emit low levels of light, to blend it visually against a lighted sky (a technique used back in WWII by putting headlights on the leading edges of aircraft wings so that they could dive-bomb submarines without being seen until it was too late for the sub to dive. This was distinct from the british Leigh lights, that were used in after-dark attacks along with radar.)
I'm betting a whole lot of people are bidding on the wreckage that was recovered -- which is, itself, surprising, at least to me, because it sounds like the commandoes were able to completely destroy the whole main fuselage, leaving just the tail. Under the hurried circumstances that's pretty surprising. (I wouldn't be surprised to find out they actually hooked it to one of the Chinooks and dragged it out along with them.)
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
You fools! You are all falling for the misdirection of the spooks! This supposedly crashed helicopter was really just a brilliantly cunning move in spreading disinformation. The helicopter was built with sub-optimal stealth technologies and then intentionally ditched and left behind in order to trick our adversaries into thinking they were getting a look at the bleeding edge of US military technology. These "stealth" modifications actually make the vehicle louder and give it a greater radar signature! If the Chinese reverse engineer it to build their own systems, they will have fallen into our trap. USA! USA!
It looks like the helicopter is a Blackhawk retrofitted with stealth components from the Commanche program. The Commanche program was quite public and nearly two years away from completion before it was cancelled. The technology has been around for a while, I just think it's crazy that they strapped America's flying cow with super sexy stealth technology.
If any one rtfa and viewed the slide show, you'd see that the US military came back and destroyed what was left of the wreckage of the helicopter, if that tail section was important I dont think they would of left it so intact.
Since this guy and his friends could hear the whole thing from several kilometers away, I doubt it was stealth at all... If it was, it sucked.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110501/23343014105/interesting-world-man-unwittingly-live-tweets-raid-that-killed-osama-bin-laden.shtml
Two stealth helicopters got them in; they had two helicopters in reserve to get them out.
paintball
I wonder if the world would have heard of this event if that helicopter hadn't have crashed. When that helicopter crashed and left a section of somewhat identifiable wreckage, the US lost capability for plausible denial. They had to tell the world.
I also have to wonder if, given the number of helicopters (two modified Black Hawks and two Chinooks), the original mission was just a capture mission. With this kind of carrying capacity, they could have removed everyone in the compound that wasn't killed in the initial raid. They would have landed the SEAL team first with the stealth Black Hawks, pulled out the Black Hawks and then followed that up a while later with a Chinook or two to pull out captives and the SEAL team. With no-one alive in the compound, the US would have had some degree of plausible deniability. On top of that, they'd have a large number of presumably senior al-Quaeda members to interrogate.
Instead, the crashed helicopter would have taken out a large chunk of the LZ (leaving no landing space for a Chinook), it would have taken up crew to dispose of the wreckage and tend to any wounded from the crash. Combine this with an already limited timeframe and being stuck with only one aircraft to remove the SEAL team and Bin Laden, and this may have suddenly become a kill mission.
It wasn't an MH-60. It was a SH-60. The tail is hinged so it can be stowed easily aboard an aircraft carrier.
There were no stealth features. The mission to run it the previous night was CANCELLED because of clear skies. Stealth helicopters don't care about clear skies.
The helicopter was SHOT DOWN BY AN RPG. RPGs don't hit stealth helicopters.
The SEAL team blew up the avionics and control systems but left the superstructure there. Stealth helicopters get airlifted by any of the two CH-47s that were providing cover.
Other than Airwolf and Blue Thunder, helicopters are big things with a main-rotor that moves lots of air, makes lots of noise, and is not invisible to RADAR. They have bodies suspended underneath that main-rotor that are not invisible to RADAR. (Kudos to Josh for pointing out these two helicopters... )
I appreciate that the US media would like to pretend there's some magic stealth helicopter (it was painted black... does that count?) but there isn't.
I hold a rotorcraft license.
I've studied helicopters for decades.
I'm familiar with the difference between an MH-60 and an SH-60 and a UH-60. (Hint: they are all version of Sikorsky S-70, and commonly are called Blackhawks or in the SH-60 case Seahawks).
I am not currently in the employ of any US military agency nor a contractor.
E
Has anyone bothered to search /. or even check back-issues of Popular Mechanics? I feel like I've seen this design somewhere before...
Wasn't the guy live blogging it on Twitter saying that "The noise alarmed him"? Not sure the "stealthy" part worked out so well.
The real Sig captains the Northwestern. This one captains
The shape is not a big deal. Faceting a body is done by everybody now to reduce radar cross section. It was already done, by the US, as far back as 1988 on the RAH-66 Comanche program, flying in 1996. It is actually less advanced than the Comanche, considering its using an external tail rotor over an integrated fan unit. Other necessary features like retractable landing gear, a lack of seams, etc, are all common knowledge. You can buy this knowledge on the open market, at the end of the day, it's just math.
The composite materials are not a particularly big loss either. They've been lost before, across multiple stealth generations, from drones over the soviet union as far back as the 70s, to the shot down F-117 pieces which ended up on the black market.
Actually, mine isn't fake or a rick roll, just a nerd being just that.
Physics
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/aircraft/mh-x.htm
Don't be distracted by the first shiny thing you see. Top secret invisible helicopter coincidentally clips a wall while raiding the hideout of the most wanted man in the world, yet everyone somehow survives and they all fit--let alone escape--in the remaining craft while leaving big parts of the spookybird behind for neighborhood kids to sell on eBay? I don't think so. Remember that Liberion was a key member of the 501st Joint Fighter Wing that defeated the Neuroi way back in the '40s. Since there is still a vibrant domestic Wicca community, I would not be at all surprised if witches were involved in--nay, critical to--the Osama raid. Witches don't show up on radar, you know. They're in, they're out, they're gone. Mission accomplished.
According to the tweets about the incident, as it happened, if we've got a stealthy, quiet super-secret high-tech helicopter here, then I think we might have overpaid for it. Check out the article, and then read the tweets: http://www.cnn.com/2011/TECH/social.media/05/02/osama.twitter.reports/index.html?hpt=Sbin
According to the tweets about the incident, as it happened, if we've got a stealthy, quiet super-secret high-tech helicopter here, then I think we might have overpaid for it. Check out the article, and then read the tweets: http://www.cnn.com/2011/TECH/social.media/05/02/osama.twitter.reports/index.html?hpt=Sbin
Whoops - I see this has already been answered ad naseum. Please ignore my post as you should. That's all - thanks.
I hear there's one in Abbottabad that recently became available.
All you armchair aerospace engineers need to take some physics refresher lessons (and a dose of common sense). ....).
If the sight of a hub cover on a tail rotor is sending you into the heights of ecstasy, I'm not sure I want you as my wingman.
I'm no aerospace engineer, but I'm also not blind. I don't see any curved blades that seems to the all the rage. In addition, the constant width blades with a sharp cutoff tip is also contrary to prevailing movements (taper, winglet,
The turbine engine itself has got to be as loud as any aerodynamic noise.
Deep breath...chill...
Fresh from US Defense Department contractor computers.
You have to use your secret military advantage to get value from it. The time to do that is when taking out the target is worth more than keeping the secret.
This op was worth it.
"Those five thousand ships, you say the Allies can't possibly have, they've got them! " - Maj. Werner Pluskat, defensive bunker, Normandy coast, June 6, 1944.
We have gps guided missiles that can hit the window in a building from 70 miles (or more) away and someone dosen't think that if there WAS something that presented a risk of exposure that that wreckage wouldn't have been blown to literal flinders shortly after the strike force took off? Really?
Another view is that by the time the military is allowing "advanced tech" to be seen in theater or in public, it is already far enough along the lifecycle that we don't care if it is divulged. I.e. the F-117 was already an obsolete machine when it was lost in Serbia, and perhaps this helicopter was also similarly obsolete before it got picked for a very high profile mission.
We probably wouldn't risk exposure of real secret stuff unless our backs were against a wall, and long-term strategic release of info is no longer a basis for decisions (think World War 3, not anti-terror skirmish #582). But recall, even in World War 2, the lore says that tactical losses allowed to fail in order to protect strategic secrets... there is rarely a situation so dire that strategy is off the table.
You make the edges pointy, and the radar bounces up and down rather than back to the dish. This is so old ...
The purpose of existence is to make money.
http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2011/05/06/world/06helicopter.html
what this tells me is that design went into making sure it wouldn't be easy for a random individual to open the fuel cap, and tamper with fuel. it also tells me that all these fuel caps have to be replaced, because now the ratchet with the right face needed open this fuel cap can be produced by our enemies for perhaps covert sabotage
and this is just the damned fuel cap!
imagine all the other intel this downed copter produces
it's definitely a loss. but in the larger scheme of killing bin laden, an acceptable sacrifice
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Any kind of mechanical device, out out in the real world, will eventually make it into the hands of the "enemy".
There have always been technology transfers via this mechanism.
If it was so damn important, it shoud never have been put into the field.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
That was a really good article. I had noticed that the tail rotor photos from the news showed blades that seemed unevenly spaced. I figured some of them had broken off, but from that article:
If we have advanced technology but never use it, whats the point of having it in the first place. This stuff is made to be eventually used and if this wasn't a good reason to use it, then there isn't a good reason!
The most elite unit of the special forces get special equipment...wow, could have ever imagined that?
What a seriously boring non-story.
If this explanation is correct, and I am now 99% skeptical of anything comming from the Obama Administration, this means they were using rookie pilots who did not understand the Ring Vortex Effect or the Dead Man's Curve.
You stay out of the Dead Man's zone by reducing translational velocity only with height. Each helicopter has its own curve, which also depends on air temperature density and humidity. You NEVER descend directly into your own rotor down wash, and if you do you do it very very carefully since it is the easiest known way to loose lift and crash out, especially loaded in warm thin dry air.
Mansion for sale: Damaged outer wall, newly installed ventilation, one wall has large stain.
Redundancy is good And also good.
Higher performance = higher maintenance = less reliability.
It had all these nifty features, but one in three of them crashed during mission. I hope they take the secrets and use them so their shit will start crashing too. Gratz on unreliably high-performance.
forget the stealth helicoptors ...what about the reports
that when the team struck
that the electricity was cut off in the neighborhood and that when they
left it came back on??
It could not have been an EMP (it would not have come back on...)
possibly they had team members cut/restore the grid (normal explanation)
but...this sounds a lot like some 'roswell' tech if they had some kind of electric field nullification effect.
anyone talking about this??
Humans with parachutes can actually have a larger radar signature than most modern stealth aircraft. Typically a stealth jet is attributed to the radar signature of a bird or smaller (perhaps an unladen african swallow?). No clue about a helicopter with stealth features, but it's safe to say that it's likely similar.
"What is there a tank on the boat? WHY IS THERE A TANK ON THE BOAT?!?" L4D2
What about two nois as heck Chinooks flying in? How did they not raise any suspicion?
Everyone's focused on the tail rotors, probably because the tail section is all we're seeing in photos of the crashed helo. Most of the noise, though, comes from the main rotors and engine noise reflected off of them. Whatever stealthy helo they were flying it was most likely using Eurocopter Blue Edge blades, or something similar, like this concept shows here.
How do you know that their radar is pathetic? If you had been paying attention you would have noticed that it is a place run by the military with a focus on avoiding attacks from India. Pakistan have nukes (so why not good radar?) and their occasional enemy of India also has nukes (which Pakistan would really like to see in the air if it is on the way). Even if you push your master race argument of them not being as good as Americans so they can't possibly have even a single decent radar installation right in their capital, you've also missed that they have been fed US military hardware for decades and have a lot of US educated scientists and engineers. I'm assuming you didn't miss that so you just think the people are inferior.
It's cool to be ultra-patriotic I suppose, but incredibly stupid and offensive if that makes you consider the rest of the world to be inferior beings.
If there was a mission to use your best equipment on (and possibly risk exposing it) this was it.
He's was not one single supervillian with gadgets trying to take over the world or similar childish idea. He was one of many people up to no good so there would have been value in watching to see who visits. For one thing it may have shown who in the Pakistani military/government was on his side.
... about silent helicopter technology. Every night when I listen, I can't hear black helicopters hovering over my house. So their stealth technology must be quite advanced.
Have gnu, will travel.
Hey, don't insult the retarded. :)
Despite the profanity, there is some legitimacy to the point. The US may be disliked and sometimes more imperialist than it should be, but it has played a key role in building world democracy. The League of Nations may have failed to prevent WWII, but it set the groundwork for the UN and some early international law. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was put together under strong US leadership (Eleanor Roosevelt post-WW2), as was the UN. Our production figures made the difference in WW2, and France would probably not exist--certainly not as a free nation--without us. (Britain would eventually have been forced into a separate peace by the prolonged closure of the Atlantic supply lines, leaving Hitler to send the entire German war machine against Stalin.) Nor would much of Europe. Thoreau's writings on Civil Disobedience significantly influenced Ghandi, and through him the Indian Independence movement, and the world's largest democracy. Our Constitution and our legal scholars often act as key advisors in the formation of the governments of newly independent states. And American citizens, on the whole, give a great deal to private and nonprofit organizations that do good throughout the world, and themselves do much good through organizations that they join.
It may be the in thing to hate the US, and to focus more on the bad parts of its policies than the good ones. But it's also done a lot of good.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
They had two Chinooks there but left it behind anyway. Maybe they thought they didn't have minutes or maybe the thing was full of too much weight to lift. Either way it was blown up and left behind. A huge waste to you or me is possibly just expedience to somebody else with different proirities.
If that helicopter had been silent, Sohaib wouldn't have had to use his giant swatter.
Because "the enemy" could use it?
And in an unrelated story today, the Chinese government released photos of its first stealth helicopter...
I get a little tired of all this. First of all, could it really have been that stealthy if some guy heard it loud enough to twitter his friends about it? He even complained that it was annoying.
Secondly, how many more excuses are we going to come up with to blow things up? I'm sure they put many civilians at risk by doing that, if they didn't actually kill anyone. I would have a hard time trying to explain that to the family member of someone who might have died as a result.
Thirdly, doesn't it seem likely that this kind of self-importance and paranoia is actually part of what is fueling anti-American sentiment? This seems to me like the exact same kind of everyone-is-a-terrorist mindset that has marked the past ten years. I think we waste so much time looking at everyone sideways that we're eventually going to go cross-eyed and completely lose any legitimate ability for noticing threats.
Please, let's stop giving ourselves so many reasons to lose sleep at night!