War Is Boring

Beast of Kandahar. Aviation Week photo.

by DAVID AXE

Since 2007 there had been rumors of a secretive flying-wing airplane operating from the NATO airfield at Kandahar, in southern Afghanistan. Grainy photos circulated. Journalist Bill Sweetman dubbed it the “Beast of Kandahar.”

The Beast design bore a passing resemblance to Lockheed Martin’s Polecat drone demonstrator, which crashed in 2006. It seemed like it might also be connected to the so-called “Desert Prowler,” another apparent drone whose existence — c. 2005 — had been betrayed by certain uniform patches whose images were all over the Internet.

In December 2009, the U.S. Air Force confirmed it was using an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, designed by Lockheed Martin and designated “RQ-170 Sentinel,” for intelligence and surveillance missions over Afghanistan.

Mystery solved: the Beast is actually the RQ-170 and the RQ-170 is the Desert Prowler. The drone is a close cousin of the Polecat. Everything’s related. Nice and tidy, right?

Not so fast, says Jamie Hunter, writing in Combat Aircraft. Hunter has reason to believe that these might be two, and maybe even three, separate aircraft. As Hunter points out, the Air Force never explicitly connected the RQ-170 to the Beast photos. The connection was only implicit.

Hunter adds that the Air Force’s statement regarding the RQ-170 stressed that the plane is “stealthy” and still in development. The aircraft in the Kandahar pictures is actually minimally stealthy, by Hunter’s assessment, considering its non-serrated landing-gear doors and old-style, F-117-like wingtips. Polecat, with its B-2-like shape, was possibly more stealthy.

Furthermore, Desert Prowler seems to predate the RQ-170. Hunter proposes that Desert Prowler and Polecat could be close relatives, but separate from the less-stealthy Beast — and also separate from the RQ-170. As far as stealthy, secretive drones go, “it is likely the [RQ-170] Sentinel is just the tip of the iceberg,” Hunter writes.

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