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Heat-Seeking Missile-Armed MQ-9 Reaper Shot Down Target Drone During Exercise
The late 2017 drill was another step toward giving the unmanned aircraft their own air-to-air capabilities.
SEPTEMBER 19, 2018
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zo...reaper-shot-down-target-drone-during-exercise
A U.S. Air Force officer has disclosed that an MQ-9 Reaper drone scored its first ever air-to-air kill in an exercise nearly a year ago. This comes months after the service announced that it was looking to give at least some of these unmanned aircraft the ability to take on aerial threats.
Military.com got the details in a September 2018 interview with U.S. Air Force Colonel Julian Cheater, head of the 432nd Wing, the service’s premier drone unit, which is situated at Creech Air Force Base, Nevada. The War Zone's own Tyler Rogoway outlined this exact capability back in March 2018, after the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio had said it would give General Atomics, which builds the MQ-9, a sole-source contract to support the first step of what it referred to as the Reaper Air-to-Air Missile (RAAM) program.
“Something that's unclassified but not well known, we recently in November [2017] … launched an air-to-air missile against a maneuvering target that scored a direct hit,” Cheater told Military.com. “It was an MQ-9 versus a drone with a heat-seeking air-to-air missile, and it was direct hit … during a test.”
Cheater did not name the exercise, the type of target, or the weapon the Reaper used to shoot it down. It is very likely that the “heat-seeking air-to-air missile” was an AIM-9X Sidewinder. At present, the MQ-9's typical loadout can consist of precision-guided air-to-ground missiles and bombs, fuel tanks, and sensor pods.
In November 2016, U.S. Navy Captain James Stoneman, in charge of the Air-to-Air Missiles Program Office at Naval Air Systems Command, released a picture... of an MQ-9 carrying an AIM-9X in a briefing at the Gulf Coast chapter of the National Defense Industry Association’s annual Air Armament Symposium.
