PLA releases footage of drones tracking down 'hostile warship'

The People's Liberation Army has, for the first time, recently published footage of its unmanned reconnaissance planes' hunt for foreign warships, highlighting collaboration between drone operators and intelligence officers.

Video clips included in Gong Jian, or Forging Ahead, the Chinese military's latest documentary, showed a WZ-7 and a WZ-10 take off from an air base owned by a PLA Air Force drone brigade to undergo regular training.

The WZ-7 and WZ-10 are high-altitude, long-endurance unmanned aerial vehicles designed and built by the Aviation Industry Corp of China for the PLA's reconnaissance missions.

Shortly after the drones took off, the clip showed the brigade troops receive a call from a higher authority ordering the unit to deploy its drones to search for a "hostile warship" in a designated area because a Chinese reconnaissance satellite was having trouble continuously tracking the vessel.

Immediately upon receiving the order, the WZ-10 transmitted the data and images it collected back to the brigade's intelligence center for sorting and analysis by an automatic identification system, which soon informed officers there that an object photographed by the drone was likely to be the foreign ship.

Intelligence officers then asked ground controllers to send the WZ-7 to comb the waters and crosscheck the target.

After a detailed search, the robotic scout spotted two suspicious objects and obtained their geographical coordinates before sending the information back to ground control.

After a short while, the drone received an order to conduct closer reconnaissance over the suspected targets, and it then collected specific data.

As a result of real time information gathered and a highly intelligent target identification system, intelligence officers concluded that one object was the foreign warship they were ordered to locate and track, and they soon reported the ship to an interservice intelligence platform.

In the last scene in this "drone hunt" portion of the video, a CJ-10A cruise missile launch vehicle opened the cover of one of its firing tubes, and a PLA Rocket Force operator can be heard saying that the "target's coordinates have been uploaded; missile is ready for launch".

According to the documentary, the drone brigade has often flown its aircraft over the western Pacific Ocean to improve battlefield reconnaissance and intelligence analysis capabilities.

It is not common for the PLA to publish scenes of actual operations by its drones, especially the highly sensitive WZ-7, which is probably the best reconnaissance drone the Chinese military has ever used.

Previously called Xianglong, or Soaring Dragon, before it was commissioned into the military, the WZ-7 is an unusually shaped drone and is regarded as China's answer to the United States' Northrop Grumman RQ-4 Global Hawk, a high-altitude, long-endurance craft with surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities.

Featuring an innovative "joined tandem wing" design, the WZ-7's aerodynamic configuration is different from all other Chinese manned and unmanned planes. It has a main conventional swept wing joined with a smaller forward swept wing, which makes it look like a traditional Chinese kite.

The drone is 14 meters long, 3.9 meters tall and has a long wingspan of 22.8 meters, according to designers.

Equipped with infrared and optical imagers and advanced radar, the WZ-7 is tasked with providing imagery intelligence to the PLA for both strategic and tactical reconnaissance, AVIC has said, noting it is only the second unmanned aircraft in the world that is able to "freely fly across all airways used by passenger airliners".

Fu Qianshao, a retired equipment researcher with the PLA Air Force, said WZ-7 is one of the largest unmanned reconnaissance drones in the world and can fly higher and faster than the US' RQ-4 Global Hawk.

Wu Peixin, a defense industry observer, said that considering the WZ-10 is mainly responsible for electronic reconnaissance, it is an ideal partner to the WZ-7 because the pair can scan a large area and then conduct close-in photography and identification of suspected targets.

"Publishing the scenes (of the drones' operations) means that such tasks have become regular in the military, and that we now have a powerful, reliable combination of strategic and tactical reconnaissance tools including satellites, drones and long-range radars. Our adversaries must think twice about trying to avoid our detection the next time they want to send ships to sneak into our waters and airspace," he said.