The Unmanned Reaper airplane is coming to Afghanistan, and will land in Iraq sometime between this fall and next spring.
This has to be the ultimate gadget! Check out the tech specs.
- The airplane is the size of a jet fighter.
- Powered by a turboprop engine, able to fly at 300 mph and reach 50,000 feet.
- It’s outfitted with infrared, laser and radar targeting.
- It carries a ton and a half of guided bombs and missiles.
- There’s no one on board!
- Its pilot will sit at a video console 7,000 miles away in Nevada.
- At five tons gross weight, the Reaper is four times heavier than it’s predecessor, the Predator.
- It’ 36 feet long, with a 66-foot wingspan - 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.
- It carries many more weapons that the Predator.
- The Reaper can carry 14 of the air-to-ground weapons - or four Hellfires and two 500-pound bombs.
How’s that for some awesome specs?
“The name Reaper captures the lethal nature of this new weapon system,” Gen. T. Michael Moseley, Air Force chief of staff, said in announcing the name last September.
The Reaper is expected to be flown as the Predator is - by a two-member team of pilot and sensor operator who work at computer control stations and video screens that display what the UAV “sees.” Teams at Balad, housed in a hangar beside the runways, perform the takeoffs and landings, and similar teams at Nevada’s Creech Air Force Base, linked to the aircraft via satellite, take over for the long hours of overflying the Iraqi landscape.
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 emerge.
“It’s going to bring us flexibility, range, speed and persistence,” said regional commander North, “such that I will be able to work lots of areas for a long, long time.”
The British also are impressed with the Reaper, and are buying three for deployment in Afghanistan later this year. The Royal Air Force version will stick to the “recon” mission, however - no weapons on board.
