But the surveillance mission on Tuesday quickly took a dangerous turn. Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder, the Pentagon spokesman, said that the Russian Su-27 aircraft were flying near the American Reaper for about 30 to 40 minutes.
The much faster Russian warplanes repeatedly zoomed around the propeller-driven Reaper, dumping fuel on it, apparently in an effort to sully the drone’s cameras or damage its other sensors, the senior military official said.
The incident stunned U.S. military officials watching it via a video feed from the drone to an operations center at Ramstein Air Base in Germany, the military official said. General Ryder said the Defense Department was going through the steps required to declassify the images.
General Ryder declined to discuss any efforts to recover the MQ-9, which went down in waters dominated by the Russian Navy.
David A. Deptula, a retired three-star Air Force general and the dean of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, said unless this particular MQ-9 had a unique sensor onboard, “there is no great loss if the Russians recover it.”
“MQ-9s have been lost over Yemen, Libya, Afghanistan and Syria, and parts have certainly been exploited/shared,” he said in an email.