The Indian Navy’s high-altitude, long-endurance MQ-9B Sea Guardian drone, leased from the United States, crash-landed in the Bay of Bengal off Chennai on Wednesday (September 18, 2024) after experiencing a technical malfunction. The Indian Navy said the drone was operating from the Naval Air Station INS Rajali at Arakkonam near Chennai.
In 2020, the Indian Navy leased two MQ-9B Sea Guardian drones from US defense giant General Atomics for a year to monitor the Indian Ocean. The lease was later extended.
“A high-altitude, long-range remotely piloted aircraft, leased by the Indian Navy and operating from INS Rajali, Arakkonam, experienced a technical failure around 2 pm while performing routine surveillance mission and could not be reset in flight,” the Indian Navy said in a statement.
“The aircraft was sailed to a safe location overseas and made a controlled emergency landing off the coast of Chennai,” it said.
The Navy has requested a detailed report from the OEM or original equipment manufacturer. A controlled crash landing is generally an emergency landing of an aircraft in water.
General Atomics has been operating and maintaining the drones under a lease agreement.
The company is expected to replace lost drones with other drones under the agreement.
The incident comes as India is procuring 31 MQ-9B Predator drones, which it plans to acquire at a cost of nearly $3 billion to bolster its military surveillance capabilities, primarily along its disputed border with China.
In June last year, the Department of Defense approved the procurement of US-made MQ-9B Predator armed drones under an intergovernmental cooperation framework.
The MQ-9B drone is a variant of the MQ-9 “Reaper” drone used to launch a modified version of the Hellfire missile that killed al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in central Kabul in July 2022.
Posted – 19 September 2024 6:51 AM IST
