Oops!
Posted on 11/30/2012 11:02:45 PM PST by Seizethecarp
The U.S. Air Force drone, on a classified spy mission over the Indian Ocean, was destined for disaster from the start.
An inexperienced military contractor in shorts and a T-shirt, flying by remote control from a trailer at Seychelles International Airport, committed blunder after blunder in six minutes on April 4.
He sent the unarmed MQ-9 Reaper drone off without permission from the control tower. A minute later, he yanked the wrong lever at his console, killing the engine without realizing why.
As he tried to make an emergency landing, he forgot to put down the wheels. The $8.9 million aircraft belly-flopped on the runway, bounced and plunged into the tropical waters at the airport’s edge, according to a previously undisclosed Air Force accident investigation report.
The drone crashed at a civilian airport that serves a half-million passengers a year, most of them sun-seeking tourists. No one was hurt, but it was the second Reaper accident in five months — under eerily similar circumstances.
“I will be blunt here. I said, ‘I can’t believe this is happening again,’ ” an Air Force official at the scene told investigators afterward. He added: “You go, ‘How stupid are you?’ ”
The April wreck was the latest in a rash of U.S. military drone crashes at overseas civilian airports in the past two years. The accidents reinforce concerns about the risks of flying the robot aircraft outside war zones, including in the United States.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Checkleest? I don’need no steekin’ checkleest!
Sounds like Obi has his candidate for second term FAA administrator.
Bingo. This sounds like the real-life version of an episode of "Big Bang Theory" where Wolowitz takes the Mars Rover on an unauthorized excursion to impress his date and ends up driving it into a ditch.
At one time the USAAF had NCO pilots. IIRC at some time between the world wars, the decision was made to make them all warrant or commisioned officers to place them in a higher Geneva convention code category given the likelihood of being shot down behind enemy lines.
DO they, like, drug test the ummmmm...like, pilots, mannnn?
Oops!
Maybe not, but at least a 'real pilot' knows a stall, to check the landing gear, etc. because they've had a lot more riding on it than crashing a model.
Make dumb mistakes as a real pilot and they might be your last mistakes, ever.
Are there statistics comparing the number of crashes with a pilot at the controls as opposed to when a non-pilot is doing the flying? If there are and they show an overwhelming majority of the crashes happen with non-pilots at the controls, I wonder if the difference could be attributed to the lack of flight-science training for the non-pilots, not to mention the lack of understanding of what is really happening with a machine when it is in the air. Flying is a science and it occurs to me that the mentality that you describe is a scientific mind at work.
My impression is that most NCO drone pilots have outstanding control and gamesmanship skills, but if I am coordinating sorties for close air support or even holding patterns with larger aircraft in the vicinity, which might not be able to observe them by VFR, I’d prefer a seasoned pilot at their controls.
They are still "investigating" and cannot comment.
The *REAL* problem here is that nobody cares because a crashed drone does not come out of THEIR paycheck, unlike an R/C owner or private pilot.
At least actual civil service folks would be trained...
A real pilot knows what GUMP means, and NEVER initiates an approach to land without it. Gamers, nope.
This sounds a little like BS to me. Reapers have fixed landing gear like all predators. You can’t forget to put the gear down ‘cause you can’t raise them in the first place. Of course it could be just the standard stupid journalist ignorance of their subjects.
Knowing how the military operates, it probably is a throwback to MS Flightsim 95, if not SubLOGIC FS-II for the Commodore 64.
12 year old gamers could do better than some contractor “Pile It’s” Precedent Erkel Mugabe has forced the military to hire....
Just damn...
Now that’s just plain funny!
My son, a rocket scientist, has met several astronauts. They’re obsessive, but in a very controlled way — obsessively obsessive....CUBED. They make most pilots look like reckless children.
Gear up
Gear down
The MQ-9 that was crashed in the article had retractable landing gear, unlike the MQ-1 that you are probably thinking of.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Atomics_MQ-9_Reaper
“The MQ-9 is the first hunter-killer UAV designed for long-endurance, high-altitude surveillance.[5]
“The MQ-9 is a larger, heavier, and more capable aircraft than the earlier MQ-1 Predator; it can be controlled by the same ground systems used to control MQ-1s. The Reaper has a 950-shaft-horsepower (712 kW) turboprop engine, far more powerful than the Predator’s 115 hp (86 kW) piston engine. The power increase allows the Reaper to carry 15 times more ordnance payload and cruise at almost three times the speed of the MQ-1.[5] Although the MQ-9 can fly pre-programmed routes autonomously, the aircraft is monitored or controlled by aircrew in the Ground Control Station (GCS) and weapons employment is commanded by the flight crew.”
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