Iran Claims To Have Downed Another US Drone

AmiMoJo writes "The Iranian military says it has captured an unmanned U.S. drone aircraft in its airspace over Gulf waters. The Revolutionary Guards said they had brought down a ScanEagle — one of the smaller, less sophisticated drones employed by the Americans. The U.S. said it was looking into the reports." (The U.S. response so far, also reported by Reuters and others, seems to be "We're not missing any drones.")

Re:Drones?

[Bios_Hakr]

Combined Air Operations Center. They'll know. One agency monitoring everything including, but not limited to, commercial airliners, military flights, private planes, U(C)AVs, and even (in some cases) model airplanes and rockets.

Now, as to if the CAOC would tell Reuters anything other than the time of day, that's anyone's guess.

US Not the Only ScanEagle Operator in Region

[Koreantoast]

Just to politely point out that the United States is not the only ScanEagle operator in the region. Several coalition nations including Canada, Poland, Australia and the Netherlands operate ScanEagle platforms and could very well be using them in theater to support operations in Afghanistan. Also, this particular type of drone is not as big of a deal; considering it was originally designed to help fishermen find schools of fish, this isn't exactly the pinnacle of drone technology.

Re:But But But "Argo" Taught Me ...

[cold fjord]

It is well known that the audiences of the Daily Show and Colbert Report entertainment shows on the Comedy channel do very well on polls of public knowledge. What is less appreciated is that those two shows have some unexpected competition.

Pew Research Center - Key News Audiences Now Blend Online and Traditional Sources
Data from table: Education, Age, and Knowledge [people-press.org] (Near bottom of page.)

High
Knowledge / Source

44% - NPR
43% - Hardball
42% - Hannity & Colmes
36% - Rush Limbaugh
34% - BBC
34% - Colbert Report
33% - NewsHour
30% - Daily Show
22% - Daily newspaper
21% - NBC News
19% - CNN
19% - ABC news
19% - Fox News
18% - National Average
17% - Local TV news
10% - CBS News

I have to admit to a bit of surprise that the Colbert Report audience outscored the Daily Show audience, but there it is.

(Queue down mods by the "open minded" for this bit of sacrilege.)