Air Mobility Command aircraft operating in the war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq were shot at 215 times in 2006, Gen. Duncan McNabb, AMC commander, told attendees at AFA’s Air Warfare Symposium Friday. That’s the bad news. The good news is that a combination of tactics, techniques, procedures, and defensive systems mean that the aircraft were only hit six times, with no US aircraft shot down. McNabb noted, however, that enemy fire did bring down an RAF C-130 in late 2005.
The United Kingdom’s Royal Air Force has unveiled a new electronic warfare drone designed to fly with fighter jets into contested airspace, including alongside its fleet of F-35s. RAF says it plans to develop models that draw on the U.S. Air Force’s approach of mating unmanned systems with crewed platforms.