RQ-170 ‘Beast of Kandahar’ Filmed Taxiing at Creech AFB in Rare Daylight Footage Weeks After Venezuela Mission

New video footage shows the RQ-170 Sentinel, one of America’s most secretive stealth drones, taxiing in broad daylight at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada. The footage, captured by aviation observer Uncanny Expeditions and shared on X by @thenewarea51 on January 30, 2026, gives the public one of the clearest looks at the classified drone to date. It also comes less than four weeks after Lockheed Martin confirmed the RQ-170 played an active role in Operation Absolute Resolve, the U.S. military operation that captured Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro on January 3, 2026.

Here is what you need to know about the sighting and why it matters.

• The development: The RQ-170 Sentinel, a stealth reconnaissance drone built by Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works, was filmed taxiing at Creech AFB in Nevada on or around January 30, 2026.
• Why it matters: The drone almost never appears in daylight. Previous sightings were grainy, distant, or taken from satellite imagery. This footage shows the aircraft clearly, with ground vehicles nearby for scale.
• The timing: Lockheed Martin CEO Jim Taiclet confirmed the RQ-170’s role in the Venezuela operation during a January 29 earnings call, just one day before this footage surfaced.

The footage reveals the drone’s surprisingly compact size

The RQ-170 Sentinel is a flying-wing stealth drone designed for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance in contested airspace. It has an estimated wingspan of about 65 feet (20 meters) and a length of roughly 15 feet (4.5 meters), according to Air & Space Forces Magazine. It sits very low to the ground, roughly six feet (1.8 meters) tall.

But those numbers don’t prepare you for how the aircraft actually looks next to everyday objects. In the Uncanny Expeditions footage, the RQ-170 taxis past pickup trucks, forklifts, and support vehicles near hangars at Creech AFB. The drone looks compact. Almost small.

Aviation spotter Steven Fortson (@zaphod58) captured the reaction in a reply on X: “You don’t realize how small they are until you see something like that with vehicles around. We saw one at Creech getting fueled and were blown away at how small they really are.”

That sense of surprise is part of what makes this footage significant. Flying wings often look large in isolation, especially in the well-known overhead image of the crashed RQ-170 in Iran. Seeing one taxi past a row of trucks resets that assumption entirely.

Uncanny Expeditions has a track record of capturing classified aircraft

Uncanny Expeditions is run by Anders Otteson, a videographer and content creator who hikes into remote desert areas near military installations like Area 51, the Tonopah Test Range, and Creech AFB to film flight activity that the public almost never sees. His channel has built a following among aviation enthusiasts and defense analysts for producing footage that is both rare and credible.

Earlier in January 2026, Otteson captured thermal imagery of a triangular, “Dorito-shaped” aircraft operating at night in restricted airspace near Groom Lake (Area 51), according to The Aviationist. That footage generated widespread attention in the defense community. The RQ-170 footage adds another significant clip to his catalog.

The @thenewarea51 account on X reposted the Creech AFB footage with the caption: “The ‘Beast of Kandahar’ aka RQ-170.” That post had already accumulated 324,000 views and 2,000 likes within hours of being shared.

The ‘Beast of Kandahar’ earned its name from a 2007 Afghan airfield sighting

The RQ-170 Sentinel is a stealth unmanned aerial vehicle developed by Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works division for the U.S. Air Force. The Air Force uses the drone primarily for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) in denied or contested airspace. The “RQ” designation means it is unarmed. Unlike the MQ-9 Reaper, it carries no weapons.

Aviation journalist Bill Sweetman first coined the nickname “Beast of Kandahar” after grainy photos of the previously unknown drone appeared from Kandahar Airfield in Afghanistan in late 2007. The Air Force did not officially acknowledge the aircraft’s existence until December 2009.

The drone also goes by a second nickname, “Wraith,” according to a 2010 internal memorandum from the 432nd Wing at Creech AFB. That memo barred base personnel from photographing or discussing the aircraft, even internally.

Two units are publicly known to fly the RQ-170: the 30th Reconnaissance Squadron and the 44th Reconnaissance Squadron, both assigned to the 432nd Wing at Creech. The USAF inventory is believed to contain between 20 and 30 RQ-170 airframes.

From bin Laden to Maduro, the RQ-170 is the Pentagon’s go-to for high-stakes ISR

The RQ-170’s operational history reads like a timeline of the most significant U.S. intelligence operations of the past two decades. In May 2011, the Sentinel provided real-time overhead surveillance of Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, during Operation Neptune Spear. President Obama reportedly watched the live feed from the Situation Room as Navy SEALs carried out the raid.

Seven months later, in December 2011, an RQ-170 crashed in Iran. Tehran claimed its electronic warfare unit had jammed the drone’s control link and brought it down nearly intact. The U.S. government first attributed the loss to ISAF before acknowledging it was a CIA asset. Iran paraded the captured airframe on state television and later produced two reverse-engineered variants: the Shahed-171 Simorgh and the Saegheh. That technology transfer eventually contributed to the broader ecosystem of Iranian drone programs that DroneXL has tracked extensively.

Most recently, the RQ-170 played a confirmed role in Operation Absolute Resolve on January 3, 2026. As we reported at DroneXL, the Sentinel fleet likely spent weeks or months watching Maduro’s movements, mapping guard rotations, vehicle patterns, and the moments when his protection thinned. Video footage showed at least one RQ-170 returning to the former Naval Station Roosevelt Roads in Puerto Rico within hours of the operation’s conclusion.

On January 29, 2026, Lockheed Martin CEO Jim Taiclet made it official. During a quarterly earnings call, he stated: “The recent Operation Absolute Resolve included F-35 and F-22 fighter jets, RQ-170 Sentinel stealth drones, and Sikorsky Black Hawk helicopters.”

That public confirmation by a defense contractor CEO was itself extraordinary. The RQ-170 program has historically operated under a near-total information blackout.

The Sentinel sits between the Reaper and its secretive successor, the RQ-180

The RQ-170 occupies a specific niche in the U.S. drone fleet. The MQ-9 Reaper is larger, armed, and capable of long endurance, but it is not stealthy. The Reaper works well in permissive airspace where adversary air defenses are minimal or nonexistent. The RQ-170, by contrast, was designed for the exact opposite environment: airspace where radar systems are actively searching for intruders.

The drone’s flying-wing shape, radar-absorbent materials, and single engine (believed to be either a General Electric TF34 or a Garrett TFE731 turbofan) allow it to penetrate defended airspace at high altitude while remaining difficult to detect. The “R” prefix confirms it carries only reconnaissance payloads, including electro-optical and infrared sensors, synthetic aperture radar, and signals intelligence equipment.

Despite being nearly 20 years old, the Sentinel has no public replacement in frontline service. Its classified successor, the Northrop Grumman RQ-180, sometimes referred to as the “Great White Bat,” is believed to be a much larger, more capable stealth ISR platform. But the RQ-180 remains firmly in the realm of speculation and satellite imagery. The RQ-170 continues to do the work.

The global stealth drone competition has intensified since the RQ-170 first flew

When the RQ-170 entered service in the mid-2000s, the U.S. had a near-monopoly on operational stealth drone technology. That gap has closed significantly.

China completed the first flight of its CH-7 stealth drone in late November 2025, confirming that Beijing’s flying-wing ISR ambitions are no longer theoretical. In September 2025, China paraded a full-sized unmanned stealth fighter through Tiananmen Square, signaling an even more aggressive push into autonomous combat aircraft.

Russia attempted its own stealth drone with the S-70 Okhotnik, which crashed in Ukraine in 2024 after losing control. The wreckage gave Ukrainian and NATO analysts an unprecedented look at Russian stealth technology, which many experts assessed as far less capable than Russia had claimed.

Iran’s reverse-engineering of the captured RQ-170 in 2011 helped launch an entire family of drone designs. The Shahed-171 was a direct copy attempt. That program eventually fed into Iran’s broader drone industry, which produced the Shahed-136 loitering munition that sparked a global military drone arms race. The irony is hard to miss: a captured American stealth reconnaissance drone indirectly contributed to the most widely copied attack drone design on the planet.

DroneXL’s Take

The timing of this footage is not random, even if the filming itself might be. Lockheed Martin confirmed the RQ-170’s role in Venezuela on January 29. This footage surfaced on January 30. The aircraft is suddenly more visible than it has been in its entire operational history, and that visibility is telling.

The RQ-170 has been flying for close to 20 years. For most of that time, we had a handful of grainy photos from Kandahar, one crashed airframe in Iran, a few satellite images, and occasional distant blobs filmed near Nevada test ranges. In the span of a single month, January 2026, we got confirmed operational deployment in a combat mission, a Lockheed CEO publicly naming the drone in an earnings call, and now clear video of it taxiing at its home base. That is more public exposure in 30 days than in the previous 15 years combined.

Part of this is circumstance. The Venezuela operation was too visible to deny, especially after RQ-170s were filmed returning to Puerto Rico. Lockheed saw a chance to highlight its hardware during a good-news earnings call and took it. But part of it may also be that the Air Force is less concerned about protecting the RQ-170’s secrecy than it used to be. If the RQ-180 is genuinely operational or nearing full deployment, the Sentinel becomes less of a crown jewel and more of a known quantity that can be acknowledged without strategic cost.

What strikes me most about this footage is the scale. I have been covering drones for over nine years, and even with that context, seeing the RQ-170 next to a row of pickup trucks and forklifts was jarring. The thing is small. A 65-foot wingspan sounds impressive on paper, but when you see it next to a Ford F-150, it looks like something you could almost fit in a large garage. That compactness is part of its design, of course. It needs to be disassembled and shipped in C-17 cargo crates to forward bases. But it still resets your mental image of what a “stealth drone” looks like.

Expect the RQ-170 to keep getting more public exposure in the months ahead. The Venezuela mission validated the platform, Lockheed is happy to talk about it, and the spotter community now knows where and when to look. I would not be surprised if we see additional footage from Creech or Tonopah Test Range before summer 2026. For the “Beast of Kandahar,” the era of total secrecy is over.

Editorial Note: This article was researched and drafted with the assistance of AI to ensure technical accuracy and archive retrieval. All insights, industry analysis, and perspectives were provided exclusively by Haye Kesteloo and our other DroneXL authors, editors, and YouTube partners to ensure the “Human-First” perspective our readers expect.