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Ask Slashdot: Can You Identify This UAV?
garymortimer writes "It's not as sexy as the Beast of Kandahar RQ 170 Sentinel, or as well known as a Predator. But we think the bird-shaped drone that crashed in Pakistan last week might be a U.S. special forces tool. At first it was thought to be a homemade job, but packs with FMC (which means 'Fully Mission Capable') written on them, and an American date style as well, really points to something else. sUAS News is not AvWeek or Flight International so getting scoops is tricky whilst holding down a day job. Our exclusive pictures of the damaged C130 that struck an RQ170 was pretty good for us. We would love to identify this drone. Maybe it is just a homebrew job, maybe it's not. It's not a Festo Smartbird, though, the most popular choice of pundits."
This is an espresso machine. No, no wait. It's a snow cone maker...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
To my (somewhat) trained eye, this looks like any other R/C airplane run by amateurs who fly them strictly within line of sight (though many have been putting FPV equipment so they can fly them with a first person view, often a few miles away.)
From time to time our R/C planes do malfunction and will fly off out of our control, or something will go wrong and they'll crash and we won't be able to find and recover them. Perhaps it's just some hobbyist's plane that got away from him? It certainly looks like something a hobbyist made rather than an expensive commercial/military model.
Though I guess this does bode poorly for the hobby -- ham radio operators don't bring their radios with them when they go to many countries because people often equate radios with spies ... I guess the next step is to equate people flying R/C planes with spies?
I think Bellisario should sue... They totally ripped off the Airwolf intro music.
On a side note I love how they took the festo smart bird video and dirtied it up to look military lol...
http://www.festo.com/cms/en_corp/11369_11439.htm#id_11439
---In a time of Chimpanzees I was a Monkey.
Do you really think that anyone who could identify that UAV, provided that it's a UAV, would respond to your question?
Let's reason.
Those who really can do it would be among:
- people from the company who built it
- people from the DoD who required/bought it
- people from the army/company who operated it
- spies from a dozen of countries.
Now check one by one these categories. None will answer here as a comment. And not even as a private message, as Slashdot has none and because online stuff is traceable.
I would also exclude the email (gary@yyyyyyyyyy) and the phone (0778 6666666) for the same reason.
I would expect a few fake money request into your post box in the Somerset.
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
FMC is the usual term for Fully Mission Capable, and while I've never seen masking tape used to mark aircraft it is light enough to provide a good background for magic marker. (When marking light-colored surfaces, grease pencil was common in the Air Force years ago.)
There is obviously no place for a "781" forms binder in such a small machine. :)
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
This does not look like a top secret device. No, really, it doesn't.
It looks like a low cost "expendable" craft intended to fly over restricted air spaces.
I say that because the wing and airframe profile appear to have been modeled on the "gliding" look and behavior of a large goose. It would be exremely wasteful of military ordinance to shoot down everything that looks like a goose 100ft in the air that flies over a restricted area.
If I were to design such a craft, it would 1) be very slow and as near to silent as possible. 2) contain absolutely no stealth technologies that might give enemy engineers clues about our radar abilities, and 3) implement an FPGA based one time pad data encryption system to transmit recon data to the nearby recon team.
Ths way if the craft crashes, gets shot down, or captured the expense of replacement is 1) very low due to nearly 100% plastic construction and cheap electronics. 2) data forensically uninteresting from either an engineering pov or from a data espianage point of view. 3) cannot be used to break mission critical data encryption technologies, due to 1:1 one time pad pairings, with quite possibly cheap commercial encryption methods. (256AES, etc.) By the time it is recovered and studied, that pad is black listed as belonging to an mia drone.
This thing has "field recon" practically painted all over it. Lightweight plastic airframe, electronic only propulsion, small battery... all add up to being a disposable device with very short range, low airspeed, and short active runtimes.
Whoever deployed this device was close by. (Unlike a predator which uses petrolium fuel and has a rigid metal airframe that can handle a reasonably fast cruise speed and can perform long mission flighttime, this device has none of those features, and as such cannot realistically be launched from miles away like a predator can.) This looks like it could well be a "backpack" type kit, that folds up for storage and portability. (That's how I would commision such a device anyway.)
All that said, this kind of setup would lend itself well to commercial mass production, since nearly the entire airframe could be injection molded on the cheap. For similar reasons the design would lend itself well to hobby enthusiasts with access to fab labs. Having access to aviation grade CAD equipment, I would *LOVE* to get some detailed photos of every inch of the airframe (with a mm scale metric ruler in the shots) and of the internal cavities.
I really would like to make some community models of this vehicle.
It's a badly put together Rumpler Taube model, you can even see the wooden interior in one of the pictures.
I'm aging rapidly, I bought a new game and had no idea if my machine was good for it.
Don't be ridiculous. What you have there is the Bolivian Navy on maneuvers in the South Pacific.
Grease pencil on weapons placards was common (the Navy may still use it).
When we deployed to Al Dhafra, grease pencils were even used for nose art:
http://www.f-16.net/interviews_article33.html
Note the old-school white placard on this O-2:
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/54/432712455_fda36d0f7d.jpg
Tape is available and produces the required contrast. There is no functional reason not to use tape and marker.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
In the world of unacknowledged weapons and surveillance systems pretty much anything could be anything. Just because someone slapped some US military lingo and American formatted dates does not mean anything. Maybe it was built by someone who had been in the States and thought nothing of it but is not connected with the US officially, maybe someone else made it and used surplus American components, maybe someone wanted to try and embarrass the US by making it look American, maybe someone else is spying and does not want it know so just made the thing to look American encase it was captured.
Just off the top of my head it could be:
ISI
CIA
Israel
Some engineering students who have been recruited by extremists
A hobbyist
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Somebody lost it in a bar.
I eat only the real part of complex carbohydrates.
Yes. the TED Video is a demonstration of the FESTO Smartbird, see also Youtube Video. This Video is a stupid mash-up. They seem to have found an small video drone, bird shaped, with fixed wings. Any of intelligence agency or a good RC plane builder can build those. But Smartbid is entirely different. As you can see in the above TED Video it has many organic build internal conjunction. The above shown picture and open body is much simpler. So maybe the found a RC Plane that looks like a bird. Maybe it was even used by a foreign power in an Arabic country. But that video does not give you any clues beside some shaky videos and pictures....
You don't generally get too many hobbyists in war zones.
Looks pretty close.. http://www.suasnews.com/2010/07/421/afrl-bird-sized-uav-project/
Interestingly featured in this Pakastani military website.
Took about 45 seconds to find on Google. Most of the time was spent opening the beer can.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
or a red and blue striped golfing umbrella.
[Insert pithy quote here]
I watched the video, which has additional views of the interior.
The part mark plate on the component marked "fmc" and the few metal components of the fuselage of the airframe look suspiciously like lockheed martin's work.
(Disclaimer: I work in aerospace. This looks like their engineering in the metal bulkhead design. If not them, a subsidiary. Do not know the model. The part mark placcard stinks of LM. BOEING uses inkjet partmarking, as did raytheon aero before hawker beech bought them.)
Claymores have "Face Toward Enemy" written on them. Nothing would surprise me.
This is clearly a marketing ruse to encourage us to buy SilverHawks on DVD, which has a cyber-bird named Tally Hawk.
Hmmmm it appears to only be $10 now....
This website: http://defensetech.org/2011/08/29/mystery-drone-crash-in-pakistan/#more-14195
Notes that this Drone is likely a modified Lockheed Martin Desert Hawk. From the looks of it, it very well could be.
"Claymores have "Face Toward Enemy" written on them. Nothing would surprise me."
OK. Picture a PLAIN Claymore. Not particularly intuitive.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
I didn't know Pakistan was in Arkansas. I really have to get an atlas.
No such thing. It is actually cast into the metal..
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c1/US_M18a1_claymore_mine.jpg/300px-US_M18a1_claymore_mine.jpg
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
3) implement an FPGA based one time pad data encryption system to transmit recon data to the nearby recon team.
I'm not sure if you're just not sure why a one-time pad encryption method is absolutely secure, and you're just throwing out buzzwords to sound like you'e providing security, or if you're thinking of a highly convoluted process that can be accomplished much more simply.
Realistically, you need a true random pad to be generated and sent to both receiver and transmitter, and then once the pad is used, it need be "burned" (or otherwise reliably destroyed). As the pad needs to be generated prior to sending out the UAV, the whole transmitter could honestly be accomplished with a simple Z80, and a large store of RAM... there's no reason to complicate things by throwing an FPGA into the mix... if you intended the FPGA system to generate the pad on the fly, then that isn't a one-time pad... either the pad would end up being deterministic, and thus not be truly random (which I grant you, could still make the decryption intractable, but it wouldn't make it unbreakable, which is the whole purpose of a one-time pad... we have intractable encryption routines already, and they're well tested.), or it would need to additionally communicate the random pad to the receiver, which requires a secure transmission channel, and at that point, why not just transmit your communications through that channel instead?
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
From what I've seen and heard, there are actually surprisingly large number of R/C hobbyists in the military. Sometimes those toys find their way into the line of fire.
Supporter of the +1 Over Dramatic mod option. In memory of apk.
I had to look it up. Learned they were used for reconnaissance.
Some good pictures here for those who are curious:
http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showthread.php?t=252658
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
While not very technically advanced, I'd say (based on my R/C and Military experience) that this is in fact some type of close recon UAV, deployed out of a backpack. These guys that are "interrogating" the craft are probably very lucky they weren't the intended target, as the person that launched it is probably on the next hill.
I will add to the date controversy with this tidbit. The US Military writes their dates Day/Month/Year. It was one of the first things I had to learn. Hell I still do it to this day. I get asked all the time why I use the European convention. Then I have to explain, "no, it's the military convention".
So let me suggest that it was deployed by an American, "civilian" organization? Who could that be?
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Dude, the light source is almost certainly vehicle headlights. Not single source, not point, not distant.
The scary thing is that they are more dangerous because they believe things like the geneva convention only apply to the army and such forces. The lack of accountability is truly troubling.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
FMC is Aerospace-ese for "Flight Management Computer". Lots of companies both big and small (USA and foreign) make them.