The Air Force may have used a classified RQ-170 drone over Venezuela earlier this year, and now an even more secretive aircraft seems to have been spotted amid operations in Iran.
A local media outlet in Greece published photos of a stealthy, flying-wing aircraft spotted in the skies near Larissa Air Base, Greece. The outlet, OnLarissa, misidentified the image as showing a B-2 bomber, but experts believe it is actually the never-publicly acknowledged RQ-180 intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance drone.
RQ-180 isn’t even a publicly acknowledged designation. The number is based on the Air Force’s other stealthy ISR drone, the RQ-170 Sentinel, which was spotted at the tail end of Operation Absolute Resolve against Venezuela in a recording by an aviation enthusiast in Puerto Rico.
U.S. officials never officially confirmed the RQ-170’s involvement in the operation, but they have acknowledged its existence and its use in other cases. Experts told Air & Space Forces Magazine at the time that they were unsurprised that it popped up near the Venezuela operation.
With little known about the RQ-170, even less is understood about the capabilities of the RQ-180. Veteran aviation reporter and aerospace analyst Bill Sweetman has reported on the drone’s existence for Aviation Week, and it has been spotted just a few times in the open. The Air Force has never confirmed its existence.
There are clues, however, in the photographs published by OnLarissa that point to the RQ-180 or something like it, Sweetman told Air & Space Forces Magazine.
The rear of the aircraft comes to a single point, while the B-2’s rear is more “scalloped.” It has “no taper at all on the outer wings, they’re just cut off,” Sweetman noted, while the RQ-170’s wings come to more of a point. And while Israel has reportedly developed a secretive “RA-01” drone with a very similar design, Sweetman questioned why the Israelis would be flying their aircraft over Greece, the opposite direction of Iran.
Larissa Air Base has been a hub for U.S. drone operations since the Air Force moved MQ-9 Reapers there several years ago. USAF has invested tens of millions of dollars in facilities.
Taken together, those factors suggest the aircraft spotted over Greece is “more than likely” an RQ-180, Sweetman surmised.
“It’s Occam’s Razor,” Sweetman said, referring to the principle that the simplest explanation is often the correct one.
Some observers have noted that while the aircraft seen over Greece appears black, the few other glimpses the public has gotten of the RQ-180 have been of an aircraft painted white—earning it the nickname “Great White Bat.” But Sweetman argued the white paint job would actually be less effective for operations given that “when an aircraft is at very high altitude, the underside of the aircraft gets illuminated quite strongly from reflection from moisture and dust in the air, and it’s actually silhouetted against a very dark sky, so you want to make that aircraft black.”
If the aircraft seen over Greece is indeed an RQ-180, the reason for its presence would seem likely to involve Iran.
But U.S. military officials remain mum. U.S. Central Command has declined to answer questions about Operation Epic Fury and referred to its social media posts and fact sheets. On the list of assets used, those fact sheets have noted “special capabilities we can’t list here!”
Platforms like the RQ-170 and RQ-180 are used for penetrating ISR—entering contested airspace and collecting data while evading air defense systems. Venezuela had Russian-made S-300 systems that the U.S. was able to thwart during Absolute Resolve, and Iran is known to have had S-300s and other integrated air defense capabilities at the start of the war.
Those systems were primary targets in the early days of the war and the U.S. has claimed air superiority over much of Iran since the opening week or so. But that does not mean some Iranian capabilities cannot still operate. Ground-to-air threats may be less likely, but still exist, as in the case of an F-35A that had to make an emergency landing after taking fire late last week.
Penetrating ISR platforms play a key role in the early days of any operation by helping “knock the door down,” said retired Brig. Gen. Houston Cantwell, a senior fellow at AFA’s Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies and former drone unit commander.
“Absolutely, it would be a commander’s first choice, if I could choose something that is stealthy and unmanned when I’m going into a high-threat environment,” Cantwell said, describing stealthy ISR in general.
Nonstealthy drones like the MQ-9 have also played a key role in Epic Fury, their long dwell times and steady orbits enabling them to gather persistent intelligence and to destroy missile launchers when they reveal themselves. But the Reaper is a slow-moving aircraft and the Iranians have successfully targeted and shot down about a dozen of the aircraft, Air & Space Forces Magazine has confirmed.
Stealthy unmanned systems fill a gap between the armed MQ-9 and space-based ISR, Cantwell said. Because they can loiter high over contested airspace, capturing views from different angles and revisiting areas on unpredictable timelines, they can uncover things that satellites can’t see, and collect electronic intelligence much closer to the source than a satellite.