This just in from the Teheran Bureau: Iran's Navy has taken delivery of a squadron's worth of new flying boats. Designed and built in Iran, the aquatic aircraft, called the Bavar-2, will be operated by the happy folks from Iran's Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC).
According to Iran's official news agency:
The ceremony was attended by Iranian Defense Minister Brigadier General Ahmad Vahidi and Commander of IRGC Naval Forces Ali Fadavi, during which Vahidi elaborated on the features of the new home-made flying boats.
"Bavar 2… is a surface-moving flying boat and performs patrol and reconnaissance missions on the sea," Vahidi said, adding that the vessels are equipped with machine gun, night goggles, and reconnaissance equipment to record and send the desired images and data.
Too bad they look like something sold in kit form from an advertisement in an old issue of Popular Mechanics.
I doubt that airframe could withstand repeated blows by a small rubber mallet, never mind the battering an integral machine gun would entail, so I think they mean "in the pilot's hands". You know, to use after he lands. They could also say it carried multiple independently-targetable lasers if the pilot had a shirt pocket big enough for three or four of those pointer dealies.
I'm reminded of an old National Lampoon chart of countries called "World Aggression" that detailed what made each mad and how they would retaliate. Under Iran, it said, "Hook an F-16 to a Dodge Four-by-Four, tow it to the Arabian Sea, and attempt to fire one of its air-to-air missiles at your nuclear aircraft carrier eighteen miles offshore."
Posted by: Mike Harney | 01 October 2010 at 09:45 AM