Iran’s army unveiled a highly mobile propellant-powered reconnaissance drone on Saturday, based on local media.
The drone, named “Yasseer,” can fly for eight hours with more than a few 200 kilometers (124 miles) and reach an altitude of four,500 meters (15,000 feet), the reports said.
It resembles the yankee ScanEagle, an unmanned short-range aerial surveillance vehicle that Iran claimed to have captured in late 2012. However, Iranian officials didn’t mention the U.S. drone on Saturday.
“Yasseer is able to identifying targets… with its very powerful camera, and reporting them back to the bottom,” the manager of army ground forces General Ahmad Reza Pourdastan was quoted as saying on the unveiling ceremony.
According to photos provided to Iranian media, the drone is launched from a wedge catapult, enhancing its mobility. The reports didn’t provide further details.
Pourdastan also said another newly produced kamikaze drone — called Ra’ad 85 — which he said was in a position to identifying targets and attacking them.
He failed to provide further information about the drone, and no pictures were released to the media.
Iran in recent times has boasted of capturing US drones it says have penetrated its airspace, vowing to reverse engineer them to make its own.
In December 2011 Iran claimed to have captured a giant and complicated CIA stealth drone, a bat-winged RQ-170 Sentinel. Tehran rejected a US request for its return.
On Friday, Iran put into service an extended-range drone called Shahed 129, with a number of 1,700 kilometers (or 1,050 miles). The drone is able to flying for as much as 24 hours and carrying eight missiles.
The Shahed 129 was unveiled in September 2012.
Iran says it operates a massive drone production programme, that’s a source of shock for regional arch-foe Israel and Western nations at odds with Tehran over its nuclear ambitions.
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