Special report: Tension escalates in Iraq
BEIJING, July 17 (Xinhuanet) -- It's called the Reaper -- as in "The Grim Reaper" -- and sometime in the near future the turboprop, 300-mph-drone is going to unload a ton and a half of laser-guided bombs and missiles on insurgents in Iraq while it's "pilot" sits at a video console 7,000 miles away in Nevada.
The arrival of these jet-fighter sized
"hunter-killer" drones will mark aviation history's first robot attack squadron.
That moment, one the Air Force will likely low-key, is expected "soon,"
said regional U.S. air commander Lt. Gen. Garry North in an interview.
How soon? "We're still working on that," North said.
The Reaper's first combat deployment is expected in Afghanistan, and senior Air
Force officers estimate it will land in Iraq sometime between this fall and next
spring. They look forward to it.
"With more Reapers, I could send manned airplanes
home," North said.
The Air Force is building a 400,000-square-foot
expansion of the concrete ramp area now used for Predator drones at Balad,
the biggest U.S. air base in Iraq, 50 miles north of Baghdad. That new staging
area could be turned over to Reapers, reported The Associated Press.
At five tons gross weight, the MQ-9 Reaper is four
times heavier than the Predator. Its size ¡ª 36 feet long, with a 66-foot
wingspan ¡ª is comparable to the profile of the Air Force's workhorse A-10 attack
plane. It can fly twice as fast and twice as high as the Predator. Most
significantly, it carries many more weapons.
The new robot plane is expected to be able to stay
aloft for 14 hours fully armed, watching an area and waiting for targets to
appear.
"It's not a recon squadron," Col. Joe Guasella,
operations chief for the Central Command's air component, said of the Reapers.
"It's an attack squadron, with a lot more kinetic ability."
"Kinetic" ¡ª Pentagon jargon for destructive power ¡ª
is what the Air Force had in mind when it christened its newest robot plane with
a name associated with death.
(Agencies)
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