US Air Force MQ-9 camera footage: Russian Su-27 Black Sea intercept | Hacker News Reader

US Air Force MQ-9 camera footage: Russian Su-27 Black Sea intercept

eucom.mil

69 pointsmzs58 comments

In the prior threads some posters were speculating “how do we know the Russians hit it, couldn’t the fuel have done it…” I don’t know how one can watch the jet’s trajectory on both passes and doubt it hit on the second.

Yeah, I've been in the room with Reaper operators many times and held my tongue hoping they'd release a video. Those things have so many cameras and sensors... I would not be surprised if they could tell you which pilot was flying the Su-27. The ISR capabilities of the Reaper platform are amazing.

The video is 100% consistent with either the jet hitting it or the fuel hitting it.

1. We don't know the field of view of the camera, which makes it impossible to judge distances and positions correctly.

2. We don't know whether the camera cutting out is actually the point of impact or some time before it (perhaps there is a buffer that got lost, or the US cut it early to mislead).

How does the propeller blade get bent?

I'm not an aviation expert, but it's not implausible to me that the propeller is fragile enough to get bent by a stream of jet fuel traveling at fighter-jet speeds.

On the contrary, a mid-air collision that just bends a couple of propeller blades and not the rest of the drone seems like either incredible flying or incredible luck.

Propellers are quite fragile things. If you hit a traffic cone with one on a small trainer aircraft, it's unairworthy immediately and requires an inspection of the propeller and engine.

It's not a "fighter jet speed" collision, since the drone is travelling at drone speed. It's the difference, which seems fairly small.

The US military said there was a collision, and with this video there seems no reason to doubt them.

https://www.eucom.mil/pressrelease/42314/russian-aircraft-co...

Well, to this non-aviator, the flying as shown is immensely impressive. I mean, a jet approaching a drone heads-on and turning a few yards away? Russian military might not be all that popular on the english speaking internet at this time, but credit were credit is due -- mad respect for that pilot's skill.

It’s not head on, the jet is already turned to pull away but the pilot either misjudged distance a bit or intentionally did it. Because they’re pulling away the collision is at a low relative velocity

It's not head-on. The MQ-9 is a pusher-prop design (the prop is in the rear), so both aircraft were flying in the same direction. If there had been a direct collision, the impact velocity would have been the difference between them, not addition.

Ah, right, thanks.

The idea of fuel bending a propeller blade would to me imply that the drone cannot survivie e.g. rain. This doesn't seem intuitive. However, jets making closer and closer passes while trying to foul the sensors with fuel dumps, culminating in one pass that is so close contact is made, seems more likely.

You say "bends a couple of propeller blades and not the rest of the drone" but there's no telling whether contact was made with the drone airframe. We don't get a look at the Russian airframe either (to look for impact marks). The MQ-9 vertical stabilizers are "taller" than the propeller blades. I wonder if the Russian craft struck those, and the propeller was damaged by jet exhaust as the Su-27 pulled away.

It’s entirely possible the propeller would be not damaged by rain but would still be damaged by a much larger “glob” of fuel.

Fuel is less dense than water (.8025 g/ml vs. 1.0) and the MQ-9 is designed to fly in all weather conditions. So it's highly unlikely the fuel bent the tip of the prop.

Given that just one blade is bent, the contact had to be very fleeting (there wasn't time for the next blade to come around and also strike the Su-27). It's bad luck on the Russian pilot's part to cause something undeniable like this - but this isn't stopping Moscow from making obviously untrue claims.

Cold-war story time. In college I had a roommate who was former Navy, and he told me of the time that they pranked the Soviets. Their group of ships had been shadowed by a Soviet "fishing vessel"[0] and they had gotten tired of them stooging around. At the time it was normal for ships to dump their trash overboard [1] in weighted bags. So they prepared a bag by filling it with the 80's best "adult education material" - only with all the good parts cut out and various insults scribbled on the pages. And topped it off with the messiest of slops from the galley. They intentionally did not add the steel weight, and tossed it off the stern. A gleeful crowd gathered to watch as the Soviets swooped in to collect their floating "intelligence haul".

Moral of the story - pranking is one thing. Intentionally or accidentally causing a collision? Not cool.

[0] Probably one of these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primor%27ye-class_surveillance...

[1] They now compress and store most waste until they return to port: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpFF6c3C730

My father tells almost the same story of dumping their porno mags in the garbage for the trailing Russkies to retrieve. Mediterranean float, late 80s, USS Inchon I believe. He also spent time in Iceland watching for Spetsnaz.

Fuel is less dense than water (.8025 g/ml vs. 1.0) and the MQ-9 is designed to fly in all weather conditions. So it's highly unlikely the fuel bent the tip of the prop.

Rain does't hurt. Getting nailed in the head with a water balloon hurts.

The density of rain and the density of a fuel dump are not equivalent.

A fuel dump and rain are completely incomparable. It's like trying to fly a plane through a waterfall because it does well in rain.

There are some attempts to do the math on whether just the fuel could have done it in the comments to this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVzLV-R_-kk).

Example:

The thrust from a propeller blade is typically proportional to the density of the medium it is operating in (plus other factors of course). The density of air at altitude will be somewhat less than 1 kg/m^3. Density of pure liquid kerosene is around 800 kg/m^3, but in this case the kerosene is dispersed as droplets in the air. If we take a hypothetical guess that the air/fuel mixture is around 25% fuel, 75% air, the net density of the mixture will be around 200 kg/m^3. On encountering the fuel mixture of this density, the propeller blade would experience a sudden increase in load by a factor of about 200. A sudden overload of this magnitude would be enough to bend most things. Of course we don't know the actual air/fuel ratio. It could be less or could be more. The velocity of the dumped fuel relative to the drone's airspeed could also be significant. Too many unknowns to be anything like accurate, but appears not impossible for a fuel cloud to bend a propeller blade.

It's not just bent, one blade is even broken in half and what remains is bent the way it would be if it had hit the jet.

It’s an artifact of the camera https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/21446/what-happ...

It’s not rolling shutter artifacts, you can see the one blade is bent in the same direction as it spins, unlike rolling shutter which makes most of the blades appears to bend towards the same direction regardless of which angle the propeller’s at. (Probably not the clearest explanation, but still doesn’t look like rolling shutter.)

It doesnt.

Relative velocity of blade tip much faster than jet wing tip.. Wing tip cant traverse bladed plane within 1/4 revolution of prop. Impossible angle to clear elevators and engine cowling and catch a single blade tip. Video is fabricated.

I think as regards point 2., we can definitely tell that the quality has been degraded. I don't believe for a moment that the best video feed to come off of a multimillion dollar surveillance drone is rivalled by an iPhone 3GS. I expect that this is a degraded or auxiliary video feed. The cutout seemed rather analog to me which is a bit interesting.

I don't think it's public knowledge how reapers get their video to the ground station (It supports satellite uplink, but I don't know if that's the only mode of operation).

I do generally agree that the video looks consistent with the idea that the drone was either damaged by the fuel or actually hit.

I thought that US military purposefully severely degrades videos before releasing them, probably to hide capabilities. This is in fact surprisingly high quality.

If you remember Trump tweeted a photo of Iran and twitter sleuths were all over it and calculated its capabilities.

Navy pilots who witnessed the UFOs said they saw much better quality video at the time of the incident.

The feed likely wasn’t from the primary sensor, UAVs have engineering and TOAL cameras that are far lower quality than their primary sensor electro optic package.

Also I believe the drone itself was configured for a SIGINT/SAR mission so it would have an SAR pod and a bunch of antennas instead of an electro optic sensor payload.

This is a very good thread geolocating this video but the answer as to why it shows contact is here:

https://twitter.com/GeoConfirmed/status/1636749222195101696

These are engineering or TOAL cameras also sometimes called flight cameras.

They are for visual inspection of key flight systems e.g. flight surfaces, rotors and landing gear.

As well as for assisting in non visual range take off approach and landing operations.

The primary sensors are which take the nice photos aren’t designed for that, their optics and sensors itself won’t be able to focus on objects so close and the gimbal and pod location aren’t suited for inspecting the aircraft.

The cutout in the stream is simply because the drone streams via satellite which is extremely sensitive to sharp disruptions in its location in 3D space so a drop in altitude or a rapid attitude change will cut the link. (This is also why the SpaceX stream often cuts out or at least used too).

These cameras have far lower quality than the massive electro optical sensors in the primary sensor package and they also are allocated far less bandwidth than the primary mission package whether it’s ElOp, SIGINT or SAR.

I certainly did not have "The US military pulls a Musk, releasing footage to prove the other party is lying or mistaken" on my bingo card for 2023.

The US has done that…a lot historically. Like, since before Musk was born. Not sure why you’d call it pulling a Musk.

In my social circles, it is called "Getting Musked" when you say, imply that "coast to coast full self driving" is coming in 2017, and its the year 2023 and you're still claiming that full self driving is coming.

IE: The Russians are pulling a Musk. They're trying to bend reality despite the fact that a spy drone would obviously have cameras on it that would give proof positive of reality.

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Could you care to explain what you mean as "pulling a Musk" in your context? Its grossly different from the way my social uses the term.

I refer to Tesla's practice of releasing videos after Tesla crashes in an attempt to discredit the drivers involved, which came as quite a surprise to the drivers, who didn't realize that the cameras on the car they bought would rat them out.

On thing the US military is betting on is that nobody can tell WHERE this video took place. But geocoders on the internet work miracles. I recommend searching to see where this took place. Both the Russians and US lied in different ways. Both are trying to save face right now because we don't need WWIII

The video makes it clear that they're over the sea, and the wreck is in international waters. And the closest "disputed territory" is internationally recognized Ukrainian borders.

What exactly is controversial here? At best, Russia downed a US Aircraft when it was over Ukraine. If US story is to be believed, it was over international (and I find that more likely anyway).

Probably don’t want the bases and fly patterns to be determined. From there they can line up the AA. US isn’t the greatest at making their flight patterns unpredictable

Russia already knows where the encounter happened.

They've been flying surveillance drones along the same paths over the Black Sea for more than a year now - they leave their transponders on and you can look up the flight paths online (try FORTE11, for example). The US doesn't care if the Russians know where the drones fly out of.

It's easy to avoid WWIII if you just surrender.

> On thing the US military is betting on is that nobody can tell WHERE this video took place.

It took place in international airspace around 50km from the Crimean border.

This has been happening for decades, like when the USSR hid Francis Gary Powers when his U-2 crashed over the USSR, said they had something crash on their territory, the USA said they lost a weather balloon, and then the USSR bring up a CIA pilot proving the USA are spying on the USSR and have lied.

No, the US didn't try and claim the U2 was a weather balloon, though they did try and claim that it was a routine weather survey:

>...At first, and before they had confirmation that Powers had survived, U.S. officials claimed that the U-2 had been conducting a routine weather flight but experienced a malfunction of its oxygen delivery system that had caused the pilot to black out and drift over Soviet air space. On May 7, however, Khrushchev revealed that Powers was alive and uninjured, and clearly had not blacked out from oxygen deprivation. Moreover, the Soviets recovered the plane mostly intact, including the aerial camera system. It became instantly apparent that the weather survey story was a cover-up for a spy program.

https://history.state.gov/milestones/1953-1960/u2-incident

Such a small amount of footage. Not enough to get a true picture of what happened.

If the the Russian pilots were so effective in such a short time, they are truly magnificent. (Speaking as an ex-pilot myself)

Enough to see there was collision... the propellor was bent.

If you can fly so finely that you can bend one propeller blade and not damage any tail fins in the process, you're a far better pilot than I could ever dream of being.

Then again, we don't know what other damage there was, because nothing was shown. And why is the propeller blade bent the wrong way? It should be bent backwards, not forwards. (Propeller was shown as spinning anti-clockwise in first part of video, so it should be bent to the left instead of to the right in the second part)

I can't imagine the plan was to actually collide.

For the propeller reversing direction, that's a common optical illusion. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wagon-wheel_effect

It's a pusher-prop, You can see the way the blades are pitched (facing) for forward propulsion. Even the best planes don't fly backwards.

> If the the Russian pilots were so effective in such a short time, they are truly magnificent. (Speaking as an ex-pilot myself)

Im not sure thats the right conclusion, I think it's far more likely the pilot was super lucky and accidentally hit the drone.

This was a very Russian and unprofessional move. I just wonder what can be done to take down the Russian jet along with the drone.

US F15s took down a Mi-24 Hind that shot unarmed civilians in Iraq by flying close to it and blinding the crew with onboard lasers. They weren't allowed to engage. The USAF promptly reacted by banning any flights below 3000 m.

Could you link a source on that second bit? Seems like an interesting story, but searching online just returns articles about the pilot that took out a hind by dropping a bomb on it.

I read it in the F15 wikipedia entry under "Operations Southern Watch and Northern Watch".

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_F-15E_Stri...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655#Shootdown_...

Random thought: A good response might be to recover the cost of this aircraft and related losses from one or more of the bank accounts that have been frozen? Preferably those closely connected with Putin and his inner circle?

This presents itself as fighter aircrafts engaging in acts of trolling.

Another that comes to my mind is https://defence.pk/pdf/threads/the-story-of-iaf-mig-25-over-...

Trolling is a close flyby. Dumping fuel on another aircraft is an attack.

Trolling too is an attack of some kind.

> Trolling too is an attack of some kind.

Would it still be trolling if an American drone clipped a Russian plane by accident causing it to crash?

That's different. But yeah if an F35 is messing with a drone, dumping crap on it, That would be trolling in my books. I am not saying any of these acts are justified, but they happen to tickle my humors by their absurdity, the situation, the PR response, what these machines are capable of and what they did in comparison.

Try dumping liquids on another car on the highway then explain to the cops it was just “trolling” and see how that goes for you.

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