After US President Donald Trump acknowledged that a US AH-64 Apache helicopter was downed by an Iranian Shahed drone, the attention is on the uncrewed surface vessel used by the US troops to rescue its crew. CENTCOM has confirmed that Saronic Corsair was the uncrewed surface vessel (USV) that rescued the crew.
The use of Saronic Corsair marks the first known instance of a drone boat being used to rescue personnel. “The surface drone that assisted in last night’s rescue of the Apache crew off the coast of Oman was a U.S. Navy Corsair unmanned surface vessel operated by U.S. 5th Fleet’s Task Force 59,” Capt. Tim Hawkins, a CENTCOM spokesman, told The War Zone. “The task force began fielding these drones in theatre in late March.”
“The Corsair picked them [the Apache crew] up and transported them to another location on the water where they were then hoisted up to a helicopter for further transport,” Capt. Hawkins added.
The Corsair is a 24-foot-long drone boat with a speedboat-like design first unveiled in 2024. It has a maximum range of 1,000 nautical miles and a top speed of 35 knots, and a 1,000-pound payload capacity.
The pilots reportedly spent two hours in the water before being recovered safely.
According to The War Zone, the USV says Corsair has a high degree of autonomy and has logged more than 100,000 nautical miles of total travel to date, including multi-day missions. The SUV is designed to be employed independently or in networked swarms, and human operators are also in the loop during these operations via datalink.
“When it comes to search and rescue, you utilise the best asset that is the closest and the quickest, and that was the case in this instance,” CENTCOM’s Hawkins also told The Wall Street Journal today. “We’ve practised this scenario in exercises, but not quite necessarily like this.”
Interestingly, the USV is developed by a Texas-based company called Saronic Technologies, whose co-founder is an Indian-American, Vibhav Altekar.
