North Korea Forced US Reconnaissance Plane To Land 417
First time accepted submitter ToBeDecided writes "A U.S. military reconnaissance plane was reportedly forced to perform an emergency landing during a major military exercise near the North Korean border in March. As revealed by the South Korean defense ministry, a strong signal transmitted from the north disrupted GPS in the area surrounding the position of the RC-7B aircraft. Without information about their position, the pilots were forced to abort their mission and return to South Korea. This raises the question whether the U.S. military would be able to perform operations in North Korea given how fragile their equipment seems to be."
Re:No it doesn't (Score:2, Interesting)
I've got a friend who lived in Yugoslavia when NATO attacked. NATO had these anti radar missiles, tens of thousands of dollars a pop. The Yugoslavs took old microwave ovens out into the field, rigged them to work without a door and pointed them at the sky. they would flick them on when NATO planes were reported. The plane would empty it's load of anti radar missiles and immediately turn home.
Needs confirmation (Score:5, Interesting)
This is all coming from one story from Agence France-Presse. More info is needed. The US DoD says they don't have a record of this happening.
It's possible that it might be a South Korean plane of a US type, not a USAF plane. If someone was just up on a routine training flight, they might choose to land due to a GPS failure. With no mission to complete, there's no reason not to. Wait for Aviation Leak to cover the story.
All major USAF aircraft have inertial navigation capability, and have for decades. Everyone assumes GPS will be jammed. Even "smart bombs" have a low end inertial navigation system, one that gets its initial fix from the much better INS in the aircraft and only has to guide for about a minute.
Disinformation? (Score:5, Interesting)
Why should the plane demonstrate whether it has ability to navigate under a certain type of jamming? I lived close to the inner-german border at cold war times and i saw the funny patterns which were flown, obviously to test the enemy radar capabilities and confuse them.
"Raises the question" ... if you are an idiot (Score:5, Interesting)
This raises the question whether the U.S. military would be able to perform operations in North Korea given how fragile their equipment seems to be."
Let's assume that the incident really did happen. The US has already denied it, but less assume it happened. Jamming is all about blasting a very loud signal that drowns out other signals. During a military operation GPS jamming the US is a pretty ineffective technique for a number of reasons.
First, there are a number of methods of navigating and targeting without GPS. GPS is easy and accurate, but if all of the GPS satellites fell out of the sky, they US military would still happily navigate its planes around and drop bombs. The US military is designed to go toe to toe with Russia and China. Go ahead and assume that the idea that their GPS satellites might be denied to them has crossed their minds. The US doesn't build stealth bombers to kill sheep herders. The US military might be good and killing sheep herders, but it is designed to fight a modern military.
Second, if you are dumb enough to turn on a GPS jammer powerful enough to knock out a plane's GPS navigation during a time of conflict, you pretty much deserve the missile that is going to fly up your arse a few minutes later. Jamming is done by blasting a very powerful signal out into the air. A very powerful signal is trivial to track. You might as well paint your GPS jamming equipment bright red and leave it out in an open field with arrows pointing to it. The first thing the US does in any sort of air war is to level anything that transmits. Normally, this is for taking out radar stations to blind air defenses, but it also applies to any attempts to jam. You really don't want to try and get into an ECM battle with the US. If you are screaming at the top of your long loud enough to jam GPS, you are being more than noisy enough for a missile to follow the signal back to the source.
Third, the airplane was not 'forced down'. If the story is true, what happened was they aborted their mission. That seems like a pretty legitimate thing to do if the mission isn't critical. I am sure they could have carried on if they wanted to, but they decided to play it safe. They were flying close to hostile territory doing a mission that will be fine if it waits a day or two longer. Hell, they might not even known they were being jammed until after the fact and were just concerned that their GPS equipment was malfunctioning. Delaying a signal flight for a couple of hours is hardly a stirring victory. If those plans had been sent to do something hostile, GPS jamming wouldn't have worked. The jammers would have been quickly destroyed or the plans could have navigated and hit their targets without GPS, or more likely, both would have happened. The jammer would have been destroyed and the plans on a mission would have merrily carried on without waiting.
This whole article is sensationalist crap.
Near the North Korean border, my ass! (Score:4, Interesting)
I doubt it was near the border, more likely the U.S. plane completely disregarded the border and the U.S. government is lying about the whole thing.
When I made my military service in the Swedish air force in the early 1990's, several NATO spy planes passed over Swedish air space every week. Since there was no point in letting U.S.A. know that the Swedish defence system was able to see them, Sweden only complained about a very small number of the really slow or clumsy ones and then got some lame excuse that they had navigated wrong. Since U.S./NATO had many moles within the Swedish Armed Forces, they likely knew that Sweden knew anyway, they also likely knew that we could have taken down at least 1/3 of them while they were still inside Swedish air space, even if the passovers usually took less then a second. The planes was way to fast, well camoflaged and agile to be civilian aircraft’s, there were never any doubt that they were military or that most of them came from NATO (unless NATO allowed foreign spy planes to land on their military bases and air craft carriers). [ Biting my lip to not expose anything that could still be a Swedish military secret ]
There were occasional Russian spy planes passing over Sweden too, but at the time I made my military service, the Warsaw pact and the Soviet Union had just ceased to exist and the Russian government was more focused on what happened inside their country then spying on foreign nations. At least at that time, Russian spy technology was also still more advanced then the NATO one, so they could likely get the same information as the NATO spy planes without flying into foreign territory.
P.S. Most of the NATO spy planes likely didn't spy on Sweden, but on Russia and other former Warsaw Pact countries, most of the spy planes passing over Sweden flew into such territories or turned just before they reached their borders, Sweden just happened to be in between. NATO/U.S. had easy and cheap direct access to that kind of Swedish military secrets through all their moles within the Swedish armed forces, no need to send expensive air planes.
Re:Calling it an "emergency" seems sensational (Score:4, Interesting)
The more interesting story here is that the US is doing exercises near North Korean airspace. Here is a militaristic country with nuclear weapons and with China on one side and South Korea on the other, as well as Japan close by. They have medium range ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons. Everyone wants them to stop antagonising their neighbours, launching missile tests over them, doing nuclear testing... And the US and Japan have perfectly good spy satellites.