Hacker News Reader

Comment by mstipetic | Hacker News Reader

It landed in an area of Zagreb called Jarun. There’s also a place in Ukraine called Yarun. I think someone entered Jarun on Google Maps, selected the wrong place and entered the coordinates without looking.

More worrying is that no detection system has seen it.

View on HN

That doesn’t really make sense. It wouldn’t necessarily or even likely have crashed at its destination as it should have returned to base once it reached those coordinates and completed its mission. And even if it were programmed to loiter until it was out of fuel (which… why?), the drones are supposed to land with a parachute so it wouldn’t have just crashed and exploded. The name coincidence is only interesting if you assume it crashed in a specific place of interest as opposed to randomly along its course. It’s much more likely and common for someone to fat finger in coordinates with a small, random error like flipping a sign or swapping digits. Flipping the sign on latitude or longitude fools the drone’s GNC system into targeting a destination that is on the opposite side of the planet and the system just flies in a straight line in that direction until it runs out of fuel. It’s the same failure mode as googling the wrong coordinates but a more commonly occurring category of user error.

It did deploy parachutes. It’s almost exactly 1000 km away which is the range of the drone. There was no explosion so they assume it ran out of fuel. Keep in mind this is 1970s tech, not some advanced ai drone. The chances of hitting a city instead of some countryside are pretty slim.

Even more confusingly, they're both written "Ярун"—making this the most likely scenario in my eyes.

I don't think that's it champ. Croatians don't have the "Я" letter.

Croatians didn’t fire it, champ. It’s Ярун for both in Russian.

That spelling is valid in both Russian and Ukrainian

Being it a reconnaissance drone, why did it crashed in Jarun? I could expect this behaviour from a loitering munition, but a reconnaissance drone should come back to its airbase after completing its activity.

If the "operator entered the wrong coordinates" hypothesis is correct, the distance between the base and where the drone ended up might have been much greater than the distance between the base and the intended target, which could mean the drone didn't have enough battery and/or fuel to get back.

> It landed in an area of Zagreb called Jarun. There’s also a place in Ukraine called Yarun.

That might be a multiple comparisons issue. Yarun (Ukraine) is a quite small town, and if not Jarun (neighbourhood) you could have tested against a bunch of street names / shop names / etc that are located around the crash. In the end you'll always be able to link something around the crash site to anything in Ukraine.

Finally, is this drone even controlled using coordinate input?

edit: Seems I was wrong on the one of my points, now removed. Similar name in Cyrillic.

[deleted]

They aren’t saying it didn’t crash in Croatia, they’re saying that the similarity of names (identical Cyrillic) may be the reason why it landed there: A soldier didn’t verify the correct Ярун address.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com