I wish you wouldn't publicly make a fool of yourself by accusing others of callousness and jingoism, while you yourself fail to properly look at an image you're referring to, to back up your claim.
It is very clear that the RQ-1 made a controlled landing and didn't fall out of the sky. You don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to notice the deployed and mangled landing gear, under the fuselage.
Well I'm not the one who is resorting to pointless attacks rather than being able to prove through technical terms they are right.
If there is deployed and mangled landing gear it could be of two reasons:
1. the Drone had a mechanism to lower gear at low altitude
2. There was a malfunction that resulted in the drone thinking it had to land and it did(This has happened before to a MQ-1)
RQ-170 is a flying wing which is inherently as unstable as it get , you cut the power and it'll dive nose down and there will be no flying leaf
another flying wing is B2 that need 3 different computer work with each other just for stabilizing it , you cant compare these planes with glider like planes like what you showed
time to time? really? instead of bringing a ridiculous example for a funny statement(survive intact after loss of control), show us a theory in which a tailless drone can fall down on enemy field intact.
possible theories:
engine failure( or loose of everything including engine):
stall is unavoidable, unless pilot or AI decided to give a gift to Iranian. in this case your example will be rejected cause that aircraft had a working engine (plus a pilot that keep it's balance, and his final act, ejecting caused enough thrust to avoid crashing)
communication loose:
drone will return to it's base, unless someone has already detected it and ambushed a GPS spoofing net for it.
control(hydrolic) failure:
drone will keep flying till ran out of fuel, stall would be unavoidable (again your example doesn't match cause that aircraft had a working engine.)
In none of the cases have you given solid counter examples. A loss of control does not entail an engine failure or otherwise.. Nor does it mean that the drone will always head to base. There are two examples of MQ-1 and MQ-9 systems going "rogue drone" in which they did not respond to operator inputs nor did they assume RTB programs in case communication was lost.
Moreover, your assertion that flying wings are unstable has nothing to do with their susceptibility to wing stalls. Infact, they are MUCH more susceptible to it as compared to conventional aircraft in both symettric and assymetric stall scenarios.
Your attempt to guide the conclusion to GPS-Spoofing is also tripping on the rug from published knowledge that Drones still essentially rely on Primary INS guidance with GPS correlation. These are based on tolerances that tell it what levels of difference between two data feeds is acceptable. So if the GPS said it was 500 km away from where its should be, even the most least sense programming would include a flag that would make the drone ignore GPS inputs and rely on INS. Such programming exists on even on smart phones with dual GPS/GLONASS systems. One would think the US defence industry knows better.
Especially airframes like of RQ-170 which resemble
maple seed and prone to
autorotation
It could be anything, perhaps the drone did decide to land when it ran out of fuel. But historical evidence indicates that in all these scenarios Drones tend to pitch down to blow themselves to pieces. A second thing ignored by the GPS spoofing landing claims forgets that if the drone landed in the area where they showed it being airlifted by the chopper.. it would not have been intact and rather have tumbled over and broken up in the terrian where its gears would have caught onto every other thing.
However, counting on jingoism.. we have certain releases that came out in the same vein as the esteemed members assertion.
Supposedly the drone made a perfect landing
Only later it dawned it was a different US drone under going testing in the California desert..
And if this screen grab is to be taken.. I dont see any gears there(although it looks like CGI)
