Predator UAV lost over Syria has been shot down

[Major Shaitan Singh]

An MQ-1 Predator was lost Tuesday while flying over northwest Syria, according to a defense official.

Syria's official news agency claimed the drone hwas shot down, but the defense official was unable to say exactly how the unmanned aircraft crashed.

The Air Force is in the process of phasing out Predators in favor of the newer MQ-9 Reaper. The service's proposed budget for fiscal 2016 would raise the number of Reaper combat air patrols from 55 to 60 within a 24-hour period while lowering the number of combat air patrols Predators fly from 10 to five per day.

Reapers can carry eight times the payload of Predators and armed with a mixture of Hellfire missiles and Joint Direct Attack Munitions, or smart bombs, said Benjamin Newell, a spokesman for Air Combat Command.

"MQ-9 is also equipped with Synthetic Aperture Radar," Newell said in a Feb. 12 email to Air Force Times. "MQ-9 has one-and-a-half the range of an MQ-1, can cruise nearly three times as fast and carries six times more fuel."

The Air Force hopes to retrain about 60 Predator pilots to fly Reapers next fiscal year, he said.

But Air Force officials have long warned that the current generation of remotely piloted aircraft cannot survive airspace that is defended by enemy aircraft and ever-more sophisticated anti-aircraft systems.

A Predator armed with a Stinger reportedly got into a brief dogfight with an Iraqi plane in 2003 — and lost.

In 2013, a spokesman for U.S. Central Command said remotely piloted aircraft sometimes needed to be protected by fighter escorts. That September, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Welsh jokingly recounted one incident in which an F-22 pilot warned off two Iranian F-4s that were trying to intercept an unmanned aircraft over the Persian Gulf.

"After he rejoined on them, flew underneath their aircraft to check out their weapons load without them knowing he was there, and then pulled up on their left wing and then called them and said, 'You really ought to go home," Welsh said on Sept. 17, 2013, at the Air Force Association's Air & Space Conference.

But Gen. Mike Hostage, then head of Air Combat Command, was much more serious when he told reporters at the same conference that Predators and Reapers are "useless" in contested airspace, Foreign Policy reported.

"Today … I couldn't put [a Predator or Reaper] into the Strait of Hormuz without having to put airplanes there to protect it," Foreign Policy quoted Hostage as saying on Sept. 19, 2013.

 

[Major Shaitan Singh]

Syria air defence shoots down US drone: state media

Syria’s military has shot down a US drone over the coastal province of Latakia, a stronghold of President Bashar al-Assad, state media said on Tuesday.

“Syrian air defences brought down a hostile US surveillance aircraft over north Latakia,” the official SANA news agency said in a breaking news alert.

The agency gave no further details on the incident.

It appeared to be the first time Damascus had engaged an American aircraft in its airspace since a US-led coalition fighting the Islamic State group began strikes on Syrian territory in September 2014.

Syria is not participating in the US-led strikes against the militant group, but has so far refrained from taking action against the aircraft involved in the coalition’s operations.

Damascus has said it was given prior warning before the coalition began the strikes, and Foreign Minister Walid Muallem said last year that Washington had pledged its strikes would not hit the Syrian army.

The coalition’s strikes in Syria have largely been focused on Aleppo and Raqa provinces, where the Islamic State has strongholds.

But it has also targeted the group elsewhere, and hit positions believed to belong to fighters affiliated with Al-Nusra Front, the Syrian wing of the Al-Qaeda.

IS fighters have been largely absent from the northwestern province of Latakia, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitor.

But Al-Nusra fighters are active in the province, which is home to the Assad family’s ancestral village and is a bastion of the Alawite sect of Shiite Islam to which the president belongs.