The AAI Shadow is an American unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) used for reconnaissance, surveillance, target acquisition and battle damage assessment. Launched from a trailer-mounted pneumatic catapult, it is recovered with the aid of arresting gear similar to jets on an aircraft carrier. Its gimbal-mounted, digitally stabilized, liquid nitrogen-cooled electro-optical/infrared (EO/IR) camera relays video in real time via a C-band line-of-sight data link to the ground control station (GCS).
 
The RQ-7A was the initial version of the Shadow 200 UAS developed by AAI. The first low-rate initial-production systems were delivered to the US Army in 2002 with the first full-scale production systems being delivered in September 2003. Production of Shadow aircraft shifted to a generally improved RQ-7B variant in the summer of 2004.