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2 The crash and burn of drone
warfare By Nick Turse
American fighter
jets screamed over the Iraqi countryside heading
for the MQ-1 Predator drone, while its crew in
California stood by helplessly. What had begun as
an ordinary reconnaissance mission was now taking
a ruinous turn. In an instant, the jets attacked
and then it was all over. The Predator, one of the
US Air Force's workhorse hunter/killer robots, had
been obliterated.
An account of the
spectacular end of that nearly US$4 million drone
in November 2007 is contained in a collection of
air force accident investigation documents
recently examined by TomDispatch. They catalog
more than 70 catastrophic air force
drone mishaps since
2000, each resulting in the loss of an aircraft or
property damage of $2 million or more.
These official reports, some obtained by
TomDispatch through the Freedom of Information
Act, offer new insights into a largely covert, yet
highly touted war-fighting, assassination and spy
program involving armed robots that are
significantly less reliable than previously
acknowledged.
These planes, the latest
wonder weapons in the US military arsenal, are
tested, launched and piloted from a shadowy
network of more than 60 bases spread around the
globe, often in support of elite teams of special
operations forces. Collectively, the air force
documents offer a remarkable portrait of modern
drone warfare, one rarely found in a decade of
generally triumphalist or awestruck press accounts
that seldom mention the limitations of drones,
much less their mission failures.
The
aerial disasters described draw attention not only
to the technical limitations of drone warfare, but
to larger conceptual flaws inherent in such
operations.
Launched and landed by
aircrews close to battlefields in places like
Afghanistan, the drones are controlled during
missions by pilots and sensor operators - often
multiple teams over many hours - from bases in
places like Nevada and North Dakota. They are
sometimes also monitored by "screeners" from
private security contractors at stateside bases
like Hurlburt Field in Florida. (A recent
McClatchy report revealed that it takes nearly 170
people to keep a single Predator in the air for 24
hours.)
In other words, drone missions,
like the robots themselves, have many moving parts
and much, it turns out, can and does go wrong.
In that November 2007 Predator incident in
Iraq, for instance, an electronic failure caused
the robotic aircraft to engage its self-destruct
mechanism and crash, after which US jets destroyed
the wreckage to prevent it from falling into enemy
hands.
In other cases, drones - officially
known as remotely piloted aircraft, or RPAs -
broke down, escaped human control and oversight,
or self-destructed for reasons ranging from pilot
error and bad weather to mechanical failure in
Afghanistan, Djibouti, the Gulf of Aden, Iraq,
Kuwait and various other unspecified or classified
foreign locations, as well as in the United
States.
In 2001, air force Predator drones
flew 7,500 hours. By the close of last year, that
number topped 70,000. As the tempo of robotic air
operations has steadily increased, crashes have,
not surprisingly, become more frequent. In 2001,
just two drones were destroyed in accidents. In
2008, eight drones fell from the sky. Last year,
the number reached 13. (Accident rates are,
however, dropping according to an air force report
relying on figures from 2009.)
Keep in
mind that the 70-plus accidents recorded in those
air force documents represent only drone crashes
investigated by the air force under a rigid set of
rules. Many other drone mishaps have not been
included in the air force statistics.
Examples include a haywire MQ-9 Reaper
drone that had to be shot out of the Afghan skies
by a fighter jet in 2009, a remotely-operated navy
helicopter that went down in Libya last June, an
unmanned aerial vehicle whose camera was
reportedly taken by Afghan insurgents after a
crash in August 2011, an advanced RQ-170 Sentinel
lost during a spy mission in Iran last December,
and the recent crash of an MQ-9 Reaper in the
Seychelles Islands.
You don't need a
weatherman ... or do you? How missions are
carried out - and sometimes fail - is apparent
from the declassified reports, including one
provided to TomDispatch by the air force detailing
a June 2011 crash. Late that month, a Predator
drone took off from Jalalabad air base in
Afghanistan to carry out a surveillance mission in
support of ground forces.
Piloted by a
member of the 432nd Air Expeditionary Wing out of
Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri, the robotic
craft ran into rough weather, causing the pilot to
ask for permission to abandon the troops below.
His commander never had a chance to
respond. Lacking weather avoidance equipment found
on more sophisticated aircraft or on-board sensors
to clue the pilot in to rapidly deteriorating
weather conditions, and with a sandstorm
interfering with ground radar, "severe weather
effects" overtook the Predator.
In an
instant, the satellite link between pilot and
plane was severed. When it momentarily flickered
back to life, the crew could see that the drone
was in an extreme nosedive. They then lost the
datalink for a second and final time. A few
minutes later, troops on the ground radioed in to
say that the $4 million drone had crashed near
them.
A month earlier, a Predator drone
took off from the tiny African nation of Djibouti
in support of Operation Enduring Freedom, which
includes operations in Afghanistan as well as
Yemen, Djibouti and Somalia, among other nations.
According to documents obtained via the
Freedom of Information Act, about eight hours into
the flight, the mission crew noticed a slow oil
leak. Ten hours later, they handed the drone off
to a local aircrew whose assignment was to land it
at Djibouti's Ambouli Airport, a joint
civilian/military facility adjacent to Camp
Lemonier, a US base in the country.
That
mission crew - both the pilot and sensor operator
- had been deployed from Creech Air Force Base in
Nevada and had logged a combined 1,700 hours
flying Predators. They were considered
"experienced" by the air force. On this day,
however, the electronic sensors that measure their
drone's altitude were inaccurate, while low clouds
and high humidity affected its infrared sensors
and set the stage for disaster.
An
investigation eventually found that, had the crew
performed proper instrument cross-checks, they
would have noticed a 300-400 foot (100-135 meters)
discrepancy in their altitude. Instead, only when
the RPA broke through the clouds did the sensor
operator realize just how close to the ground it
was. Six seconds later, the drone crashed to
earth, destroying itself and one of its Hellfire
missiles.
Storms, clouds, humidity and
human error aren't the only natural dangers for
drones. In a November 2008 incident, a mission
crew at Kandahar Air Field launched a Predator on
a windy day. Just five minutes into the flight,
with the aircraft still above the sprawling
American mega-base, the pilot realized that the
plane had already deviated from its intended
course.
To get it back on track, he
initiated a turn that - due to the aggressive
nature of the maneuver, wind conditions, drone
design and the unbalanced weight of a missile on
just one wing - sent the plane into a roll.
Despite the pilot's best efforts, the craft
entered a tailspin, crashed on the base, and burst
into flames.
Going rogue On
occasion, RPAs have simply escaped from human
control. Over the course of eight hours on a late
February day in 2009, for example, five different
crews passed off the controls of a Predator drone,
one to the next, as it flew over
Iraq.
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