Military commanders at one point considered shooting the helicopter down as it was heading towards the U.S. Other American drones have flown off-course in the past, including the Fire Scout robotic helicopter, which engineers lost contact with during a flight in Maryland in 2010. officials have expressed skepticism that Iran has the technological capacity to have brought the plane down through hacking and that it was more likely the drone suffered a malfunction. Tehran initially said it shot down the drone but later claimed the Iranian military managed to hack into the plane’s flight controls. Iran has vowed to reverse engineer the drone but has given contradictory accounts of how the aircraft went down on December 4. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.

The episode has handed Iran a propaganda coup and Iranian state television has shown images of a robotic aircraft that experts say resembles the Sentinel. officials, speaking anonymously, have said previously. The bat-winged RQ-170 Sentinel, designed to evade radar for surveillance flights, was on a CIA mission when it went missing, U.S. “Given Iran’s behavior to date, we do not expect them to comply,” Clinton told reporters at a press conference with British Foreign Secretary William Hague, with whom she discussed Iran. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the United States had made a “formal request” to Tehran to return the drone but expressed doubt it would be returned. “With respect to the drone inside of Iran, I’m not going to comment on intelligence matters that are classified,” he said. Obama, however, shed no further light on the plane’s mission or why it failed to return to a base in Afghanistan. His statement came as Iran vowed to reverse engineer the drone and mass produce it after claiming agents had hacked the aircraft’s operating system. Manage Print Subscription / Tax Receipt.

A lonely ruin stands sentinel iran