We have managed to unravel the secrets of the drone - said Ayatollah Ali Khamenei - the UAV will be of fundamental importance for our future reconnaissance missions.
Now we will be able to start mass production of unmanned aircraft.
Since the 2011, Iran claims to have taken possession and managed to decode the secrets of the RQ-170 Sentinel, shot down in December of that year after entering Iranian airspace from the eastern border with Afghanistan. The United States initially declared that it had lost a drone near the Afghan border, only to confirm the killing of the Sentinel, during an espionage mission over an Iranian nuclear plant.
According to the United States, Iran would still not be able to unveil the Sentinel technology, due to the security protocols included in the drones operating on hostile territory.
In the report shown yesterday by Iranian state television, a drone, very similar to the Sentinel, would fly over an American aircraft carrier in the Gulf.
The episode was not confirmed by Washington
On 27 last October, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards presented in Russia an unmanned spy plane which - according to Teheran - derives from a process of reengineering a US drone captured in the 2012.
According to the Iranian press, in December of the 2012 Tehran would have captured at least three unmanned 'ScanEagle' aircraft. The reengineering process would have taken place precisely by the captured UAVs.
But what is the truth?
The US military has always denied losing ScanEagle on Iran.
However, the Canadian media, citing official documents, confirmed the loss of a 'ScanEagle' in the Arabian Sea in the 2012. Still from the Canadian Navy, however, they categorically denied that the lost drone had been recovered from Iran.
ScanEagle is a low-cost UAV, produced by a Boeing subsidiary. It weighs twenty kilograms, has a wingspan of 3,1 meters and can fly for 22 hours and eight minutes.
Quite another story for the much larger and more sophisticated Rq-170 Sentinel, UAV used by the Central Intelligence Agency.
In September last year, Tehran stated that it had completed the reengineering process from the Rq-170, announcing the sale to third parties of the acquired technology.
How true there is in Iranian utterances, perhaps we will never know, but the United States is not fault-free. Indeed, Iran has considerable experience in the field of reengineering, much of which is provided by the United States in the period in which relations between Tehran and Washington were excellent. Since then, Iran has been able to buy spare parts for most of its American hardware and has had to resort to re-engineering to keep it running.
Franco Iacch
(photo source: Fars News Agency, USMC, Lockeed Martin)
