The government of Iran announced that the aircraft was brought down by its Cyber warfare unit stationed near Kashmar[3][4][5][6] and "brought down with minimum damage"[7] They said the aircraft was detected in Iranian airspace some 225 kilometers (140 mi) from the border with Afghanistan.[8]
The government of the United States initially claimed that its forces in Afghanistan had lost control of a UAV on 4 December 2011 and that there was a possibility that this is the vehicle that crashed near Kashmar. According to unnamed U.S. officials, a U.S. UAV operated by the Central Intelligence Agency was flying on the Afghan side of the Afghanistan-Iran border when its operators lost control of the vehicle.[9][10] There have been reports that "foreign officials and American experts who have been briefed on the effort" state that the crashed UAV was taking part in routine surveillance of Iranian nuclear facilities inside Iranian airspace.[11]
The drone appeared to be largely intact, except for possible minor visible damage on its left wing. Dan Goure, an analyst at the Lexington Institute, stated the largely intact airframe ruled out the possibility of an engine or navigational malfunction: "Either this was a cyber/electronic warfare attack system that brought the system down or it was a glitch in the command-and-control system."[12] Stephen Trimble from Flight Global assumes[13] UAV guidance could be targeted by 1L222 Avtobaza radar jamming and deception system supplied to Iran by Russia.
The Department of Defense released a statement acknowledging that it had lost control of a UAV during the previous week, claiming that it was "flying a mission over western Afghanistan" when control was lost. The statement did not specify the model of the aircraft. The U.S. government also stated that it was still investigating the cause of the loss.[14]
A Christian Science Monitor article relates an Iranian engineer's assertion that the drone was captured by jamming both satellite and land-originated control signals to the UAV, followed up by a GPS spoofing attack that fed the UAV false GPS data to make it land in Iran at what the drone thought was its home base in Afghanistan. In an interview for Nova, U.S. retired Lt. General David Deptula also said "There was a problem with the aircraft and it landed in an area it wasn't supposed to land".[15][16] American aeronautical engineers dispute this, pointing out that as is the case with the MQ-1 Predator, the MQ-9 Reaper, and the Tomahawk (missile), "GPS is not the primary navigation sensor for the RQ-170... The vehicle gets its flight path orders from an inertial navigation system".[17] Inertial navigation continues to be used on military aircraft despite the advent of GPS because GPS signal jamming and spoofing are relatively simple operations.[18]
US acknowledgement
On 6 December 2011, U.S. officials acknowledged that a drone crashed in or near Iranian airspace and that this belonged to the CIA and not to ISAF as was earlier stated. U.S. officials did not state that the drone shown on Iranian television was actually a real RQ-170 (which has been public knowledge since 2009),[19] although a former U.S. official confirmed that the drone shown on the Iranian state media was a U.S. RQ-170, used for surveillance of Tehran's nuclear facilities.
On 5 December 2011, U.S. military sources confirmed that the remains of an RQ-170 had been captured by Iranian forces. However, media reports indicated that various U.S. officials declined to confirm whether or not the drone in the video released by Iranian state television was authentic.[20] On 8 December 2011, a senior U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told the Washington Post that the U.S. cannot be certain the drone shown was real because the U.S. does not have access to it, but also stated that "We have no indication that it was brought down by hostile fire."[14] A second senior U.S. military official said that a major question is how the drone could have remained "virtually intact," given the high altitude from which it is said to have crashed. U.S. Navy Captain John Kirby, a Pentagon spokesman, told a news conference on 8 December 2011 that Pentagon analysts were examining the video.[21] Both Kirby and fellow spokesman George Little would not comment further on whether the U.S. military believed the drone was the one missing, both did say that the missing drone had not been recovered.[21] However, later that day, CBS reported that the US officials have confirmed in private the authenticity of the drone shown by the Iranians.[22]
Various experts interviewed by CNN stated that the drone looked real and noted a lack of damage that a firefight would have inflicted. They posited that system failure such as a "flat spin" or "falling leaf departure" would have resulted in damage to the belly of the aircraft but little damage to other components.[21]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93U.S._RQ-170_incident
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