In December 2009, a blurry photograph emerged from a blog linked to the French newspaper Libération, showing a tailless, bat-winged aircraft over Kandahar, Afghanistan. Within days, the U.S. Air Force confirmed what aviation enthusiasts had suspected: the RQ-170 Sentinel, a stealth unmanned aircraft developed by Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works, had been flying since 2007. Nicknamed the "Beast of Kandahar," the Sentinel was a low-observable flying wing designed to penetrate contested airspace and provide intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance for joint forces. The Air Force acknowledged its existence on 4 December 2009, revealing that the 30th Reconnaissance Squadron at Tonopah Test Range, Nevada—the same desert home that once hid the F-117—operated the fleet. The RQ-170 entered service around 2007 and was first observed at Kandahar Airfield late that year; its maiden flight location is not publicly documented, and its flying-wing shape bore a familial resemblance to both the B-2 Spirit and Lockheed’s earlier DarkStar and Polecat demonstrators. The aircraft’s cloak of secrecy was partially torn in December 2011, when an RQ-170 was lost over Iran during a covert surveillance mission. Yet the Sentinel remains in service, a reminder that the most important aircraft are often the ones the public never sees until they are already old news.