to use that type, Air Force Chief of Staff General Norton Schwartz said.
He did not, however, say whether it is still being flown over Iran.
Schwartz, in an interview with Reuters last week, said the RQ-170 drones are still providing intelligence to military commanders.
He remained tight-lipped about what caused the crash-landing..
US officials told Reuters last month that they were investigating 
a combination of pilot error and technical malfunction as possible causes.
Schwartz declined to make any comment on the outcome of the investigation, but said the Air Force now understood what caused the crash and was continuing to use the rest of the service’s RQ-170 spy planes to provide data.
“The key thing is that it’s an ISR [intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance] system that we use to provide capabilities to the combatant commanders, and we’ll continue to do so,” Schwartz said.
The plane lost in Iran was on a mission for the CIA, but the Air Force also uses the planes for other surveillance missions over Afghanistan, officials have said.
Iran announced December 4 it had downed the spy plane in the eastern part of the country, near Afghanistan.
It subsequently showed an image of the apparently intact plane on television and said it was close to cracking its technological secrets.
The loss of the plane sparked some concerns that sophisticated technology could fall into the hands of China or other countries that are actively developing their own unmanned planes.
Reuters said the main concern about technology Iran could extract from the drone centers on the special coatings on the craft’s surface, coatings that part of its ability to evade radar.
The computers onboard the drone are believed to have been heavily encrypted and its sensors were not the most sophisticated tools in the US arsenal Reuters said.
