Iranian Army Hunts More RQ-Class UAVs

The Iranian Army has hunted two more advanced RQ type Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), a senior Iranian Navy commander announced on Wednesday.

“The air-defense units of the Army have hunted two enemy drones,” Deputy Commander of the Iranian Navy for Coordination Rear Admiral Amir Rastegari told FNA on Wednesday.

“These drones were from 11th series of the RQ class, and one of them was hunted in Shahrivar 1390 (August 21-September 19, 2011) and the other one in Aban (October 22-November 20, 2012),” Rastegari said, adding that the Army research center is now studying the two UAVs.

“Much of the data of these drones has been decoded by the Army’s Jihad and Research Center,” he said, but did not provide any further detail.

The remarks by the Iranian commander came almost one month after Iran announced on December 4 that the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) Navy has hunted a US UAV over the Persian Gulf after the drone violated the country’s airspace.

The IRGC navy commander announced at the time that the hunted UAV was a ScanEagle drone, adding that “such drones are usually launched from large warships”.

ScanEagle is a small, low-cost, long-endurance unmanned aerial vehicle built by Insitu, a subsidiary of Boeing.

Capable of flying above 16,000 feet, the UAV has also demonstrated the ability to provide persistent low-altitude reconnaissance.

Iran first announced in December, 2011 that its defense forces had downed a US RQ-170 drone through a sophisticated cyber attack.

The drone was the first such loss by the US. American officials have described the loss of the aircraft in Iran as a setback and a fatal blow to their stealth drone program.

The RQ-170 has special coatings and a batwing shape designed to help it penetrate other nations’ air defenses undetected. The existence of the aircraft, which is made by Lockheed Martin, has been known since 2009, when a model was photographed at the main US airfield in Kandahar, Afghanistan.