The U.S. Air Force flew a Global Hawk unmanned aerial vehicle in Japanese airspace last month, government sources said Saturday.
Washington may have wanted to demonstrate the Global Hawk's performance to the government, which plans to introduce the remote-controlled, high-endurance spy plane in fiscal 2007 to improve Japan's intelligence-gathering capabilities, some sources said.
After it took off from Australia, the drone flew over Japan's Nansei Islands, south of Kyushu, for about an hour, the sources said.
The U.S. submitted the flight plan to Japan beforehand, and the plane did not have any weapons on board, they said.
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