New Stealth Spy Drone Already Flying Over Area 51 | Hacker News Reader

New Stealth Spy Drone Already Flying Over Area 51

wired.com

31 pointselectic15 comments

As a side note: Aviation Week is an incredible magazine. Next time you are at the magazine rack, be sure to check it out. Our office has a subscription and it just blows me away what is happening in the aviation sector. They cover everything, from jets, military, spy technology, to satellites.

Aveation Leaks article is much more informative: http://www.aviationweek.com/Article/PrintArticle.aspx?id=/ar...

Yes, it is more informative. Does Wired just steal the content by adding the words, "according to Aviation Week and Space Technology", to their own article. Or do they pay a fee to Aviation Week to license the content? If it's the latter, why don't they just reprint the original and better article? Can anyone familiar with the magazine business explain this?

Sounds to me like this is the UAV follow-up to the U2 programme rather than the SR-71. It almost certainly flies s-l-o-w-l-y as per a B2 rather than at SR-71 insane-mega-speed. It has 24 hours or so of loiter time with no in-flight refuelling.

Good luck with that, flying over the Crimea, with Russian S-400 missiles just a few kilometres away. Imagine the consequences, anything up to full-on war just because they shot down one of our drones.

That's my impression too. The most basic air force can defend against drones, let alone Russia's. Even this supposedly stealth drone is very obvious, from behind. Any IRST system would detect it immediately.

There are numerous IRST mitigation systems.

IR attenuates rapidly in the atmosphere and is only useful for very short range detection (short range missiles, TV remotes, "laser" tag guns). The artist's concept seems to show the standard flat exhaust intakes (first employed on the F-117) which increase efflux "surface area" (versus a circle) to promote mixing with ambient air. There might be pre-exhaust mixing too.

IRST systems are actually quite long ranged for detection, it's identification that is more problematic. F-14D IRST systems were quite good at long range detection, and those were much older legacy systems with nothing like today's technology.

Yeah, but still very limited by aspect angle to engine exhaust. Detection is ok, tracking is poor unless very close or with LoS to the tailpipes. Anything ground-based will almost never be able to stare directly at the aft end of an aircraft except during egress (i.e. after it's done its job). What I'm getting at is there are huge limitations to passive tracking of IR emissions, otherwise we'd be using it instead of (active) radar.

An aircraft moving at near Mach speeds has a significant amount of friction caused by air. It's not necessary for an IR system to be able to see the exhaust of an aircraft. In fact, all aspect IR missiles have been around since at least the AIM9L which was used in the Falklands War in 1982.

This is the follow-up to the U-2 as long as you ignore the beast of Kandahar and the sentence stating as much in the article:

"It’s the successor to the Lockheed Martin RQ-170 Sentinel, known as the 'Beast of Kandahar'”

BTW, the best and the brightest tried to call you on AUTOVON, they want their cold war threat model back.

Surface to air missiles are never the real problem, its the radar system. You cannot shoot what you cannot see, and you cannot open your eyes (turn on the radar) without letting everyone know where you are.

Russia is sure to have deployed their most sophisticated (non-export) S-400 radar configurations in or just outside the Crimea ... but this drone is sure to be incredibly stealthy.

If a F-22 has a radar signature of a steel marble ... this relatively small drone probably has a signature closer to a tiny ball bearing ... in the middle of a large sky. Its precise signature will be highly classified, making it very, very hard to spot.

If someone else is running a reasonably powered radar from more than one known location at a known frequency (both the broadcast frequency and, say, a pulse every 0.5 seconds), is there a technical reason that you couldn't use the echos from their radar without broadcasting your own?

> is there a technical reason that you couldn't use the echos from their radar without broadcasting your own?

Yes, there is. The only way to exploit someone else's radar for your own target detection would be to reflect so much of the original signal out into space that your craft would be assured of detection. It contradicts the idea of stealth.

All you can do with someone else's radar is locate the radar. Anything else would jeopardize stealth, which is a big issue in modern times.

> ... both the broadcast frequency and, say, a pulse every 0.5 seconds

Military radars don't broadcast continuously, to avoid making it too easy to track the source. Also, modern radars use frequency-hopping and irregular pulse intervals to avoid predictable patterns. Phased-array radars even go so far as to randomize their search patterns in three dimensions, to further confuse the enemy about the nature of the signal and its source.

What I'm curious about is, what sort of advanced technology are our rivals and 'allies' flying over us? Is our air/surveillance superiority absolute, or do they spy on us like we spy on them?

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