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From Bagram Airfield to my inbox.
An Air Force MQ-1 Predator crashed at approximately 11:20 a.m. in southern Afghanistan, November 2.
The aircraft is a medium-altitude, long-endurance, remotely piloted aircraft. The MQ-1’s primary mission is conducting armed reconnaissance.
A safety investigation board will be convened to investigate the incident.
That’s the press release in full. As you can see, if the military knows what the cause of the crash is, it isn’t saying yet. The obvious question is whether insurgents brought the Predator down. "Armed reconnaissance" is another way of saying the drone has a Hellfire missile attached to it in case it spies an irresistable target. If you were an insurgent, you’d want to down one of these things very badly.
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If it crashes, could the missile survive the impact intact?
In other words, do our enemies now have an operational Hellfire missile?
Probably depends on the circumstances of the crash — how it was downed, from how high an altitude, what it hit on the way down, etc.
One wonders how they downed it as well. Aren’t they supposed to operate at high altitude(In this case meaning higher than say 500 feet)?
Hellfire’s a tube unless you can launch it from a weapons platform that they don’t have.