Taken by space tech company Maxar Technologies, the satellite photos were given to the Associated Press on Tuesday and show what looks like a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier sitting in the port of Bandar Abbas, Iran.
The “ship,” however, is just a fake, and substantially smaller than a real US super carrier. For example, the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, a Nimitz-class ship presently deployed off Iran’s southern coast in the Arabian Sea, is 1,092 feet long with a 252-foot beam. The faux carrier, however, is just 650 feet long and 160 feet wide.
Sitting on the painted-up flight deck are 16 fighter jet mockups completing the illusion, although the position of the command island is a little strange.
مقایسه ماکت ناوهواپیمابر ایرانی با ابعاد واقعی ناو. pic.twitter.com/14lPlobTT0
— Mat2000 (@Mat_20_00) May 31, 2020
Sputnik reported in January that the counterfeit carrier was being fixed up for more target practice. It was built in 2014 and claimed by Tehran at the time to be a movie prop for a film about the 1988 downing of Iran Air Flight 655, a passenger jet shot down by the USS Vincennes in the Persian Gulf, in which 290 people were killed.
Instead, in early 2015 the Iranian Navy blew the mockup sky high.
While a new attack drill is likely to feature some of the 112 new missile-armed speed boats the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps recently unveiled nearby, any such demonstration would be just as much a message about the Islamic Republic’s missile capabilities as well. In April, IRGC Navy commander Rear Adm. Alireza Tangsiri boasted of the force’s Zolfaghar anti-ship missile, a powerful weapon with a purported 434-mile range, as well as other weapons like the Noor and Hormoz 2 missiles.
