Air-To-Air Kill Confirmed in a Historic First for the MQ-9 Reaper Drone

Dario Leone

Security, Middle East

Nice.

The MQ-9 Reaper is larger and more powerful than the MQ-1 Predator, and is designed to execute time-sensitive targets with persistence and precision, and destroy or disable those targets.

The MQ-9 has made its first air-to-air killby shooting down another drone using a heat-seeking missile in a test.

The test was carried out in November 2017, Col. Julian Cheater, commander of the 432nd Wing at Creech Air Force Base, Nevada, told Military.com.

“Something that’s unclassified but not well known, we recently in November … launched an air-to-air missile against a maneuvering target that scored a direct hit. It was an MQ-9 versus a drone with a heat-seeking air-to-air missile, and it was direct hit … during a test,” he said.

“We develop those tactics, techniques and procedures to make us survivable in those types of environments and, if we do this correctly, we can survive against some serious threats against normal air players out there,” Cheater pointed out. “We will go participate in ‘Red Flag’ exercises, and we will drop weapons in testing environments to make sure that we can fight against those type of adversaries.”