Air Force Has No Mercy On Wayward Drones
Writing by Evan Ackerman on Tuesday, 15 of September , 2009 at 1:17 am
It’s always been pretty incredible that drones in Afghanistan can be flown remotely from a trailer in Nevada, and it shouldn’t be much of surprise that things go wrong with the communication link from time to time. Apparently, it happens often enough that drone pilots program a continually updating safety pattern into their flight plans, so that if communications are lost, the drone will fly in circles until things get straightened out. Really, the drones are supposed to be smart enough to do this on their own, and also smart enough to autonomously return to base should something go not-quite-catastrophically wron. They don’t always manage it, however, and while it’s sometimes rather charming, a malfunctioning military asset with live weapons is a somewhat more serious matter.
Drones aren’t currently equipped with auto-destruct mechanisms or anything like that, so if all communications are lost and the drone doesn’t look like it’s coming back anytime soon, the accepted tactic is to scramble an attack aircraft (with a human in it) and shoot the drone down someplace where it’s not going kill anyone or be salvageable by anyone else. This is what happened on Sunday in Afghanistan, when a manned aircraft took “proactive measures” (use your imagination, they’re not elaborating) to cause an unresponsive MQ-9 Reaper to crash into the side of a mountain.
More, after the jump.
Although drones are now being piloted in combat by non-pilots (or pilots with significantly less training), this should not be taken to imply that the job is easy. Popular Science this month has a cover story (which you can read here) on Air Force drones, which discusses some of the reasons that the robots fail:
The education required for a pilot to fly unmanned aircraft is comparable to that of earning a master’s degree, and even the best-trained pilots struggle with the learning curve. More than a third of the 200 Predators delivered to date have crashed catastrophically, due to both aircraft malfunction and human error. One pilot executed a hard left at high speed, perfectly doable in a manned combat craft but not a maneuver the Predator, powered by a snowmobile engine, can handle; it flipped over and spiraled out of control. Several other operators accidentally switched off the engine mid-flight. One inadvertently erased the onboard RAM, and with it any hope of controlling the aircraft. “That this was even possible to do during a flight is notable in itself and suggests the relatively ad hoc software development process occurring for these systems,” wrote human-error specialist Kevin Williams of the Federal Aviation Administration in a 2004 analysis of UAV crashes. As Colonel John Montgomery put it to a group of reporters at Creech last March, “We’re on the ragged edge.”
This makes it seems like failures are predominantly human error, which may or may not be true… It may simply be that it’s easier to trace human errors. In any case, as the article says, the software is really not up to where it should be. Ideally, you shouldn’t be able to switch off the engine mid-flight or ask the aircraft to perform maneuvers that it is physically incapable of.
Despite all of the potential flaws and pitfalls of the armed drone program, it’s important not to forget that for each one of these things flying (or crashing), there’s a pilot who remains safely on the ground.
[ Aviation Weekly ] VIA [ Gizmodo ]
Comments (1)
Category: Military
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Comment by Duncan
Made Tuesday, 15 of September , 2009 at 7:38 am
Amazing that one guy managed to erase the RAM mid flight! hahahah. What was he doing?!