BBC News - Drones: A rare glimpse at sophisticated US spy plane

 

BBC News - Drones: A rare glimpse at sophisticated US spy plane

 The unarmed face of intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance gathering

The Global Hawk is one of the US military's most sophisticated spy planes and the BBC was able to get a rare view of one at Grand Forks Airbase in North Dakota. 

It can travel half-way round the world on a single tank of fuel and can can track a man on the ground, even when the earth is covered by cloud, from a height of about 18,000m - that's close to 60,000ft.
That means it could in theory peer into Syria to track chemical weapons while still flying in international airspace. Or keep track of North Korea's nuclear programme flying from the Pacific island of Guam.