Air Forces Central reports that an MQ-1 Predator unmanned aerial vehicle had crashed in eastern Afghanistan on May 14. The brief statement said, “The crash was not due to hostile fire.” This is at least the third Predator crash in Afghanistan so far this year. There was one in February and one earlier this month.
The Defense Innovation Unit is gearing up for the first flight of its commercially developed hypersonic testbed as soon as the end of February—part of a larger project to quickly increase the cadence of the Pentagon’s hypersonic flight testing and field advanced, high-speed systems and components at scale.



