Of course, even with the wings breaking off, the intactness of the Sentinel is still pretty surprising and I and many others on the net are not fully convinced the drone crashed that intact. On the ACIG Forum, someone suggested the unstable design of the Sentinel makes it impossible to have simply glided to the ground "safely". They attempted to prove this point this a video of a Global Hawk losing control, going into a spin, and hitting the ground at a relatively slow speed and it SHATTERED. Now I pointed out that Sentinel's "flying wing" design is actual quite stable as proven by the Horten brothers many gliders (especially the similarly dimensioned Ho VI glider).
But regardless of that, it does raise an important issue. IF the "go home" function of the autopilot failed to return the drone to base, what are the chances the whole autopilot system functioned after the SATCOM link was lost (whether intentionally or not)? IF the autopilot did fail completely, I have a hard time believing the Sentinel could have glided to the ground on its own regardless of how stable it's airframe design is. Any major headwind could cause it to spin out of control and hit the ground like the Global Hawk did in that video and there wouldn't be much left to pick up.
So to me, the following are the possibile scenarios of what DID happen:
1. SATCOM Failure- The drone lost SATCOM link (either intentionally or in error), but continued flying on autopilot but failed to return home, and ran out of fuel and glided "gracefully" the ground with the only major damage is torn off wings and roughed up underside.
2. Hacking- Somehow, Iran managed to gain some control of the Sentinel (maybe with China's help since they actually have known cyber unit abilities) likely in a premeditated action. IN other words, somehow Iran got ahold of the access codes needed and waited for a Sentinel drone to wander close enough to an Iranian base to take control and "land" it safely.
3. Hoax- A Sentinel drone did crash in Iran, but was not intact enough to display satisfactory on television or gain much knowledge from and so Iran wouldn't look empty-handed so they build a very detailed mock-up in most aspects but then very slopy in other areas (such as the tape at the wing roots).
Now I know alot of folks here won't buy Option 2 for a second but Option 1 is pretty hard to wrap my head around too. Option 3 I think is the least believable of them all.
Thoughts?