Mysterious aircraft spotted at Area 51 in satellite image
thedrive.com
thedrive.com
I have had acquaintances and a grad school mentor that worked on projects out at the remote test site (among other facilities). They had very, very good situational awareness about what was overhead and when, and established & practiced procedures on sanitizing things before anything got to where it could image the site. We also have decades of lessons-learned on things like heat signatures where airplanes were parked, such that their shape could be divined even when the test article was safely ensconced in a hanger.
We also practiced (and I would assume still practice) a variety of denial & deception activities to foil all manner of collectors and confuse the opposition, from RF to visual to various MASINT measures. One example is the Wet Site at China Lake, which was covertly built to assess the RCS of various maritime platforms (most famously Sea Shadow). When Soviet birds went overhead the radar dishes were pointed in a different direction and radiating on misleading frequences. The dirt spoil and vehicle tracks from the concealed construction of the test facility's saltwater pond was hidden like the tunnels in The Great Escape. Cool stuff.
Whatever civilians believe isn't of great importance.
You have a high opinion of state analysts. There have been notable failures in the last few decades, and it’s hard to believe they were all intentional failures.
Statistically they're much less likely to be wrong than us. Now, I also understand that nobody is perfect.
We can't say, though, until the secrets are uncovered.
At Nellis I saw one of these temporary shelters for sensitive aircraft with an overhead image of a different aircraft printed on the top.
If the centerline didn't extend under the covering, I'd be sure that is what we are looking at in the enhanced photo.
Why wouldn't they paint such a detail on it? If they went to the lengths of painting the aircraft (as opposed to just covering it) then presumably they want it to be credible.
I'm no expert in this stuff but to me the shadow of the plane matches other shadows pretty well, and also the shadow off the side of the hangar is light and looks like the rib structure, rather than solid so the roof is probably not solid. That seems much harder to fake.
You can also see the roof beams over the plane. Although that kind of detail could be painted on or come through the canvass if it wasn't perfectly tight.
The shelters are mobile. It wouldn't be practical to paint the runway/taxiway lines on it, and I don't know how you'd get them to line up from different angles.
E-ink.
Like a satellite? (Agree this would fail with multiple satellites.)
Look at the top of the wall shadow. The canvas/whatever material isn't attached at the peak and is sagging, and you can see the shadow of the top portion of the arch above it.
I'd say they pulled the cover back to the end and it's hanging over the side.
Actually, that's probably not even be a 'wall' shadow, but just the roof covering hanging. Which would sag but otherwise look like a wall.
With the proliferation of private imaging satellites in the last decade, this might be less doable than it used to be.
The only things getting released in hi-res are the things they don't mind you (or want you) seeing.
Especially if it's of a military operating area, let alone a site as infamous as Area 51.
But in this instance, it's a US company.
They didn't get "caught out". It's an acceptable or even intentional release, rubberstamped by the overseers, likely of the NGA flavor.
And since the jet was there on multiple days, it's almost like they wanted countries with less than full satellite coverage to have time to get a peek.
If you are talking about EO satellites, China is already launching them.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/m.economictimes.com/news/intern...
If I remember correctly $3k per 30 seconds @ 30fps.
Synthetic-aperture radar is making the Earth’s surface watchable 24/7 https://www.economist.com/technology-quarterly/2022/01/27/sy...
Stealth for jets isn't primarily designed for plan view. (Referring to radar cross section isn't just a generic use of the term for "detectable area of return".)
Even if it was stealthy from above, it would be easy to identify and defeat, especially on the ground: just look for the plane-shaped area without a ground return.
Or separately, a pair of co-orbital following satellites would entirely defeat all (publicly known) radar stealth (with the transmitter offset from the receiver). The US admittedly has similar pairs of these for "scientific purposes". I assume the military/IC have access or have their own.
And synthetic aperture radar can be disguised such that its nearly indistinguishable from background noise. It's one of the features that makes it superior to old school dish radar. That's not even a secret. It's currently deployed throughout the military: ground, sea, and air. Space based platforms probably had it first.
10x distance requires 100x the signal.
When it comes to being stealthy from above, jets bank to turn. Pilots can handle much higher g loads vertically than horizontally.
So the transmit power is the same as background noise and you can still get useful radar pictures out of it? Amazing. I roughly know you can recover repeating signals that are below the noise floor, but still amazing.
As satellites need to detect returns bounced off the ground hundreds of miles away they have some hard minimums for high resolution images vs aircraft or ground stations. 10x distance needs 100x the signal.
It was a very common thing to see a few them take off in the morning during breakfast just before going off to school. Especially Draken made such a glorious sound when taking off:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7L7_3cwptk (remind yourself that this is a 1955-1959 aircraft when you see it taking off)
Fast forward to now and its likely I saw the contrail of an aircraft with a scramjet This is like what I saw but there was a gap between each button mushroom. https://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/a2712a44ce6c....
Some call it doughnuts on ropes which might be something called pulse detonation?
(the F-16XL is a very interesting story and would have been an interesting airframe to explore! It's sort of like the relationship between the F-15E and the F-15, a heavier fighter-bomber airframe built on the F-16 airframe.)
But people are over-thinking it here. There's not enough information in the photo to determine (other than the aircraft isn't white).
There's enough that I can say it's not an F-16XL. The mystery aircraft is much larger - 20 meters long x 15 meters wingspan, vs the F-16XL at 16m x 10m.
Sure, but surely that was then and now is now.
Surely in today's world, you are increasingly fighting a loosing battle if you think you can play whack-a-mole with things passing overhead ?
With every day, week and year that passes, more and more things get launched into space by both friend and foe.
If you continue operating on the premise that you think you can hide every time a non-national satellite passes overhead then surely you are only playing a loosing game where eventually you can't get any work done because you're hiding all the time from birds overhead ?
A bit like checkmate in chess. Eventually the king is surrounded and can't go anywhere without being intercepted.
Also, it's "lose" x2 (sorry, the wrong word makes it hard to read). I'll remove this line if you could fix please.
I extend my profuse apologies for my keyboard fat fingers.
Regrettably there seems to be a time-delay on edits on HN, I no longer have an edit link to use.
It's possible that this is an existing aircraft modified to test alternate aerodynamic configurations similar to the F-15 STOL. Alternately it could be a flight-ready version of one of the tailless NGAD designs.
proportions are different
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Saab_SK_35C_Draken_(Drago...
and if anything we have various candidates like this one https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/42480/mysterious-steal...
>nothing like this ever gets "caught out" by a satellite
there is nothing secret in a 3m resolution image of a new gen fighter given that its shape looks in that resolution like any other modern aerial development platform.
Draken: 15.35 metres long, 9.42 metres wide. Mystery aircraft: 19.8 metres long, 15.2 metres wide.
That kinda assumes that there are gaps in the coverage of surveilance. That might have been practically true, but what makes it so? Couldn’t an adversary in response to such measures park their surveilance satelites in a geostat or near-geostat orbit? Or step up the number of surveilance sats such that they barelly leave any gaps?
This is what the Earth looks like from a geostationary orbit
The image you linked were made by a weather monitoring satelite. It was optimised to capture a wide are of the globe. This is clearly not the type of lens you would use to surveil military activity. It is not even the right modality to capture radar signals.
> A geostationary satellite with a similar resolution is simply not possible to build and launch in this age.
I think I will have to read up on that specifically more. I was aware how far GEO is, but I don't understand what makes the optics impossible. (Clearly it is as you say, all the sources agree with you.) Thank you!
https://warisboring.com/secret-military-aircraft-possibly-ex...
An opaque painted tarp seems much more likely.
It's also important to keep in mind that spy sats get far better resolution than this publicly-released image would lead you to believe.
Disclaimer: I am a Planet Labs employee.
The simple explanation for the shadow is that they left the solid end (wall) of the structure up. (They're often made of a different material like aluminum, or are otherwise more difficult to disassemble due to doors or other things mounted to a semi-permanent wall.)
(ETA: If you look closely at the very top of the shadow, it appears to be a fabric/tarp wall that is sagging slightly at the peak and not attached at the very top of the arch. You can see the shadow of that portion of exposed arch/ frame pretty clearly above it.)
Having the painted-on jet shadow match the actual time of day shadow I suppose is doable if they wanted to deceive a specific satellite passing overhead at a known time, but I doubt it, since it got seen multiple times over at least 3 days.
I mean, you could, because if it was an opaque tarp rather than “uncovered skeleton” like the article claims, it would have a solid shadow visible somewhere when the sun isn't nearly directly behind the satellite, but the “skeletal” beams would not have a shadow on the ground, because you wouldn't see the ground through the tarp.
But, that's exactly how this looks, so...
Whoa. I didn’t know that daily satellite imagery was available to civilians.
How much of the planet’s surface is imaged and available daily?
Edit: Ooh, just posted and relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30193804 . 10cm imagery from high-altitude balloons!
So using a balloon is novel, but using aircraft in general is much more common than satellite. It just isn't all marketed to the public. "Satellite imagery" has had more success as a publicly known term than "aerial imagery", and it doesn't occur to most people that they're different things.
>Whoa. I didn’t know that daily satellite imagery was available to civilians.
There at least used to be a requirement that imaging satellite operators only release imagery up to a certain resolution, and that anything higher was subject to review/ approval (presumably from NGA). And in exchange for this cooperation, the operator gets a nice federal contract for providing NGA copies of everything imaged, plus they get their launch permit approved.
>How much of the planet’s surface is imaged and available daily?
I think Planet Labs claims full coverage every three days? But that doesn't equate to 1/3 every day, and coverage that isn't evenly distributed, due to the nature of orbital ground paths.
> The complete PlanetScope constellation of approximately 130 satellites is able to image the entire land surface of the Earth every day (equating to a daily collection capacity of 200 million km²/day).
Since then the constellation has grown; after last month's launch the contstellation is over 200 satellites: https://www.planet.com/pulse/so-you-launched-a-satellite-now...
Disclaimer: I'm a Planet Labs employee.
That's some pretty amazing progress.
A quick glance of the site doesn't immediately define med or high res. Do you have frequency of coverage by resolution listed somewhere?
Of course the resolution is very low, it is meant for Earth science monitoring
They know 100% who is buying what imagery, and when the satellites will be overhead.
There is 0% chance that this is a mistake. I wouldn't be surprised if the US can OK or not OK the images that make their way to Google Maps - in France, every government site gets censored before it makes its way to Google Maps.
There is a need. The F35 is really a multi-role fighter/attack jet. F22 reportedly still reigns supreme in air to air combat, but they killed that program and it would apparently be impossible to start back up, so there is incredible pressure to have a new viable air superiority fighter.
The F22 is also a short range fighter that the US has too few of to risk losing. It is valuable for domestic defense and NATO defense, but less valuable for defending airspace in places such as Ukraine or Taiwan.
Regardless of the NGAD program, and knowing F-22 can't reasonably be restarted, I still don't understand why we aren't developing a 2nd iteration of the f-22.
Japan's been begging for either an export version the f-22 or that they be allowed to use the technology with a new design since the beginning of the program.
A partnership could result in a cheaper, updated generation 5.5 fighter (along the lines of the F/A-18 development into the F/A-18E/F), and would result in a US ally in the western pacific (cough cough china cough) being able to natively host and support the planes.
Because it is completely pointless. It is cheaper to saturate the sky with missile trucks (human or remote driven) and play reverse Space Invaders. Also morale hit if any of "Super Fighters" would be hit would be disastrous and magnitudes worse than F-117 loss.
A second iteration wouldn't necessarily be a "super fighter", but a cheaper, relatively conservative improvement on the existing f-22 and a hedge against NGAD delays or failures.
An updated, lower maintenance stealth coating, a slightly scaled up airframe for additional fuel and range, and an updated communications suite (that's compatible with f-35's et al)... just that would be huge. As said, an fa-18ef update.
Since the tech is 30+ years old now, it's probably to our advantage to share at least some of it with our allies. Which spreads development costs and lowers $per/jet costs.
I don't know how you envision "missile trucks" working against, eg china, but humans on-board requires missile-defeating stealth, and cheap excludes the NGAD version.
And the morale argument is what? A reason to never build an awesome fighter jet again? Cool things worthy of national pride experiencing a failure will always hit morale. But a reboot of a 30 year old jet wouldn't be the prime candidate for that, anymore than people would currently think the new fa-18 is. It's an update of what will be a ~2 generation lag behind (publicly known) cutting edge.
F-22 is an air superiority fighter for the Cold War. It's a nice bird, sure, but it is... obsolete?
What tasks it can do _now_ what cannot be solved by a force of F-15/18 + F-35 with a complement of UAVs? The only one what comes to mind is a deep incursions into the enemy territory... which is realistically wouldn't be needed, because the only two countries what could require such operations by the time of such operations would required would already end the war or end the war by a nuclear fire.
> working against, eg china
Exactly like it's described. Bait at the front, trucks at 50-150km behind, local C2 and data aggregation in F-35s spread behind the front.
The difference between fighting a ragtags with AKs and a country with a sophisticated AA system is what you WANT to provoke AA so it would disclose its position and so you could react to it. Also it means you /will have/ a big amount of losses and of course you would prefer to lose UAVs or at most the type you have 3x in the inventory.
> A reason to never build an awesome fighter jet again?
Why not? Build it. But never let it fly where it can be actually shot down.
They track all observation satellites and meticulously schedule aircraft movements for when they're not observed. The problem is Planet Labs alone has over 200 satellites, and that's in addition to other commercial imaging providers and all the governmental earth observation satellites. That means in recent years the margin for error has become increasingly smaller.
Given all that, while it's certainly possible this was deliberate, I don't think it at all implausible for it to be accidental. Some occurrence that delayed them by just a few minutes could potentially have caused this.
I'm surprised that there are still windows of time where any piece of land isn't "seen" by satellite. I thought there was 24/7 coverage especially on special sites like Area 51.
Painfully obvious this is a purposeful leak.
>All that being said, we must underscore that spotting a totally new and exotic aircraft design in the open at Area 51 is largely unprecedented, and for very good reason.
At this point, people could have been born anew, grown up with the lore, had a full career and achieved decision making roles in using those bases with no budget oversight whatsoever.
Plus, anyone capable of seriously surveilling such a well-positioned base will most likely also be aware of any other "secret" base that's usable for launching stealth aircraft; the space requirements alone make those hard to hide.
It could make others invest in protection against such an airplane, or in copying an ineffective design.
We were always really sensitive to adversary satellite schedules and this would not happen for 5 minutes, let alone a few days.
My hunch is that the transparent scoot-n-hide is a custom job, the aircraft is real, and this was a show for some adversary.
As for what type of aircraft it is? Can't really tell. I could see it being anything from an F-16XL to NGAD to flat pieces of painted plywood cut out into shapes (it's been done before).
Maybe it's a captured enemy aircraft.
The Chinese aircraft depicted in the article has large vertical surfaces on the wing tips, but other prototypes depicted in the same article have no vertical control surfaces whatsoever.
I don't understand how you achieve controlled flight without those. Am I being dense?
Edit: specifically I don't understand how do you control yaw.
If you don't kill the bandit here and there, or if there's another, you're done.
Seems great in 1v1 merges, while abetter twr seems better in everything else.
Iirc, the B-2 has to "hide" certain control surfaces momentarily when getting pulsed with radar.
But they seem to have hidden this well enough, it has to come out of a hanger at some point and everyone's obviously looking.
- Test at night
- Test with clouds overhead
- Test indoors
Once the aircraft takes off or lands hiding it is easy. It's just for the few minutes that it's out on a tarmac that you have to worry about it being spotted.
One possibility is that this is a deliberate misdirection, there is no plane in that hangar or if there is it looks completely different from the one in the picture. The fact that so many people in this thread are going down the NGAD rabbit hole (a program which is barely fleshed out and nearly all of it is open for interpretation) may indicate that this is the path the US wants Chinese and Russian researchers to go towards in order to cover up the "true" path. I'm more willing to believe that than the possibility that they left a billion dollar aircraft out in the open with a publicly tracked satellite directly overhead. It's not like they don't know when Planet or other satellites are going to be photographing the base.
That said, I don't think you'd find it at Area 51 given the fact that it would have been in service for a while by now and that Area 51 is more about testing experimental aircraft.
Specifically, this aircraft is on the D1 taxi-way of the isolated EXTREMELY tall hanger 25 (H25) [2] at the south end of the runways, away from almost all other facilities.
Hanger 25 and the E1/D1 taxi-ways connecting it can be fully appreciated in aerial photographs [3] looking north published by dreamlandresort (DR). The hanger has direct links to both runways - the primary 14/32 (via taxi-way E1) and the short secondary (unmarked) 12/30 that only serves category A or B aircraft (via taxi-way D1).
Back in 2014 as hanger 25 was being constructed there were ground and aerial photographs that revealed the hanger's large size and especially its height which could accommodate a Boeing 747 tail rudder. There was much speculation [4] that it may support a project that has a mothership with 'parasite' aircraft attached.
It may be what we're seeing in this new imagery from Planet Labs is a 'parasite' flying-wing aircraft.
It's possible, based on remote location on the airfield, that this facility is supporting an ultra-high altitude or space launch system (think Virgin Galactic style). Mothership carries the parasite aircraft to a high altitude (taking off from runway 14/32) before it is released to climb to a higher altitude or possibly into very low earth orbit (100km+ altitude).
Note: structure references from page 5 of the Jeppesen HOMEY/KXTA airfield/airspace charts [0] published at dreamlandresort (DR) [1]
[0] https://dreamlandresort.com/maps/KXTA.pdf
[1] https://dreamlandresort.com/maps/index.html
[2] https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/5279/area-51s-massive-...
[3] https://dreamlandresort.com/area51/aerial_1220_07.jpg
[4] https://jalopnik.com/new-panoramic-images-show-area-51-s-new...
It never occurred to me that these would even publicly exist (unclassified, anyway), let alone that they'd be so complete.