The Dhaka Times Desk At present, the military competition to build drones and fly in the sky is going on between all the powerful countries of the world, the United States is undoubtedly ahead in this competition, this time they have experimentally flown modern unmanned aircraft in the sky in great secrecy.
According to American media reports, the official production and induction of the unnamed drone into the US Army will take place around 2015. The magazine Aviation Week, citing unnamed military officials, said in its report that the development and flying of this highly powerful spy plane was done in the utmost secrecy. The name of this aircraft is RQ-180 and it will work for American intelligence agency intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR).
This RQ-180 spy plane will join the US intelligence fleet as a replacement for the Lockheed SR-71 “Blackbird”! The Lockheed SR-71 “Blackbird” was first produced in 1998 and has been in the US fleet since then.
The advanced RQ-180 reconnaissance aircraft was developed by Northrop Grumman, an American military aircraft manufacturer, and a huge amount of money was spent on its development by the US Department of Defense! It was first put into production in 2008, when the initial funding for the development and research of this aircraft was around 2 billion dollars!
Aviation Week magazine reported that the newly developed US aircraft has already completed a successful test flight, flown in top secrecy from Area 51, a secure US military base in Nevada.
Meanwhile, both the Pentagon and Northrop Grumman declined to comment when asked by reporters about the secret plane.
The newly developed spy plane will operate completely unmanned, combining speed, time and power. The RQ-180 is modeled after the RQ-4 currently serving in Iraq, but the RQ-4 will be retired from the U.S. military by the middle of next year. RQ-180 aircraft can fly in the sky for 24 hours! Whereas the previous highest flying aircraft is the RQ-170, it is capable of flying continuously for 6 hours. RQ-180 weighs 15 tons.
Source: The TechJournal
Special thanks to: RT
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