UAV shot down over Lattakia

 DAMASCUS, (ST)_Syrian air defense systems shoot down an unmanned aerial vehicle UAV over Lattakia .

The Syrian T.V and SANA said the authorities are carrying out investigations to verify the side which had scrambled the drone.

According to the US Air Forces Times,  MQ-1 Predator was lost Tuesday while flying over northwest Syria, according to a defense official.

Syria’s official news agency claimed the drone has shot down, but the defense official was unable to say exactly how the unmanned aircraft crashed.

 The Air Force is in the process of phasing out Predators in favor of the newer MQ-9 Reaper. The service’s proposed budget for fiscal 2016 would raise the number of Reaper combat air patrols from 55 to 60 within a 24-hour period while lowering the number of combat air patrols Predators fly from 10 to five per day.

Reapers can carry eight times the payload of Predators and armed with a mixture of Hellfire missiles and Joint Direct Attack Munitions, or smart bombs, said Benjamin Newell, a spokesman for Air Combat Command.

“MQ-9 is also equipped with Synthetic Aperture Radar,” Newell said in a Feb. 12 email to Air Force Times. “MQ-9 has one-and-a-half the range of an MQ-1, can cruise nearly three times as fast and carries six times more fuel.”

The Air Force hopes to retrain about 60 Predator pilots to fly Reapers next fiscal year, he said.

But Air Force officials have long warned that the current generation of remotely piloted aircraft cannot survive airspace that is defended by ‘enemy’ aircraft and ever-more sophisticated anti-aircraft systems.

A Predator armed with a Stinger reportedly got into a brief dogfight with an Iraqi plane in 2003 — and lost.

In 2013, a spokesman for U.S. Central Command said remotely piloted aircraft sometimes needed to be protected by fighter escorts. That September, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Welsh jokingly recounted one incident in which an F-22 pilot warned off two Iranian F-4s that were trying to intercept an unmanned aircraft over the Persian Gulf.

“After he rejoined on them, flew underneath their aircraft to check out their weapons load without them knowing he was there, and then pulled up on their left wing and then called them and said, ‘You really ought to go home,” Welsh said on Sept. 17, 2013, at the Air Force Association’s Air & Space Conference.

But Gen. Mike Hostage, then head of Air Combat Command, was much more serious when he told reporters at the same conference that Predators and Reapers are “useless” in contested airspace, Foreign Policy reported.

“Today … I couldn’t put [a Predator or Reaper] into the Strait of Hormuz without having to put airplanes there to protect it,” Foreign Policy quoted Hostage as saying on Sept. 19, 2013.

According to scores of media and military sources, the United States has been using UAV drones, especially in Afghanistan, Pakistan and in the Middle East for surveillance and targeted killings.

The downed UAV costs ,according to US and British media sources,  $13.77m (£9.33m)

M. Al-Ibrahim