No. 5 Flight RAAF
military unit

No. 5 Flight was a Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) aircraft flight which was equipped with IAI Heron unmanned aerial vehicles. It was established in 2010 to operate Herons in Afghanistan. Following the withdrawal of the Heron detachment from that country in 2014, conducted training missions in Australia to maintain the RAAF's expertise in operating unmanned aerial vehicles until more advanced types are delivered. The Herons were retired in June 2017, and the flight was disbanded by the end of that year.
History
No. 5 Flight was raised on 18 January 2010 at RAAF Base Amberley as part of No. 82 Wing. The flight's initial role was to operate the RAAF's small fleet of IAI Heron remotely piloted aircraft which were based at Kandahar in Afghanistan.
On 13 April 2013 the responsibility for Heron RPA transferred to the Royal Australian Air Force's Surveillance and Response Group.
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This entry incorporates text from “No. 5 Flight RAAF” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.