
More Air Force drones are crashing than ever as mysterious new problems emerge - r721
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2016/01/19/more-u-s-military-drones-are-crashing-than-ever-as-new-problems-emerge/
======
sk8ingdom
This is relatively old "news" and the problem has since been resolved. It had
to do with the coating used on one of the coils interfering with the software
--as the article mentions, there is no redundancy for this system. The part
was supplied by a subcontractor. General Atomics [1] is VERY vertically
integrated (even making servos) and uses few COTS parts. Engines (and
components), unfortunately, are pretty difficult to make--many of the engines
were initially purchased second hand.

Once the problem was diagnosed, fielding the solution is / was another
challenge. Some of these aircraft are in pretty remote areas.

These aircraft gained popularity and rapid adoption because they're
substantially less expensive and VASTLY quicker to manufacture than any other
option. Almost all customers prioritized cost and acquisition speed over long
term reliability, which of course comes with a certain amount of risk. Testing
and certifying an airframe to standards is expensive and time consuming [2]
but has the advantage of improving reliability.

Also, this is just hogwash journalism.

> Last year, the Army reported four major drone crashes, each involving the
> Gray Eagle — a model identical to the Predator.

Warrior / Gray Eagle / MQ-1C [3] is a 40% payload increase over Predator /
MQ-1 [4] and the airframe was almost completely redesigned. Hell, the engine
is even different. It's a different aircraft.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Atomics_Aeronautical_S...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Atomics_Aeronautical_Systems)
[2] [http://www.ga-asi.com/certifiable-predator-b](http://www.ga-
asi.com/certifiable-predator-b) [3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Atomics_MQ-1C_Gray_Eag...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Atomics_MQ-1C_Gray_Eagle)
[4]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Atomics_MQ-1_Predator](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Atomics_MQ-1_Predator)

~~~
irishcoffee
I can speak professionally about the Grey Eagle program if anyone is
interested. But yes, you are very correct about the redesign. Shoddy
journalism.

~~~
option_greek
Yes please. Looking forward for some blog post or a long comment :)

------
csours
> The Air Force also has contracted out more drone missions to private
> companies to meet what one general called “a virtually insatiable appetite”
> from military commanders for airborne surveillance.

It sounds like for now, contractors are only running surveillance missions.

What if contractors:

* Fly the drone and release ordnance that kills someone.

* Fly the drone but military personnel pushes the button that kills someone.

Does the contractor as a civilian bear liability differently than a member of
the armed forces? Could a foreign country try to extradite and prosecute them?
Could a foreign country arrest them if they left the USA?

~~~
finid
Your questions make it appear as if we have any compunction about killing
anybody or anything. We've become jaded to such things.

As long as the guys frame it in terms of protecting the homeland, national
security or some other vague excuse, we don't seem to care.

It's when the guys that we don't like do it that we raise hell.

It's sickening, but that's what we've become.

~~~
ethbro
_> It's sickening, but that's what we've become._

What we've _become_? You think if armed drones were in the inventory during
Iraq, Vietnam, Korea, or WWII they wouldn't have been used because of some
lost sense of nobility?

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chanandler_bong
In "Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War", America's warfighting is
crippled as the electronics that were manufactured in China contained
backdoors that allowed them to shutdown or destroy the various computer
systems.

Hmmm...

~~~
Wingman4l7
The US military is already wary of this attack vector. Likewise, Australia was
leery of letting the Chinese telco Huawei do any work on their National
Broadband Network infrastructure.

~~~
pc2g4d
Any idea how they mitigate it?

~~~
toomanybeersies
Is Australia's case, they're wanting to use American electronics, with
American backdoors.

~~~
sanoli
Well, in Australia's case, they probably consider American backdoors the
lesser of two evils.

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brbsix
So nice to be reminded these are still being used domestically.

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macintux
As we make these more lethal and harder to detect, I can't help but wonder:
when will the first drone attack on US soil take place? When will the first US
president be assassinated by drone?

~~~
rasz_pl
I like how you think it will be some foreign third party doing the killing,
and not CIA on the direct order signed by the president, you know, like they
do it now.

~~~
bpodgursky
The president will sign an assassination order for... the president? I'm not
sure you even read the parent.

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ohitsdom
No doubt the data shows a problem exists, but the stats used by this article a
worded pretty dramatically. Saying "highest ever total" doesn't alarm me
because drone use is (relatively) new, and increasing at a large rate. I'd
expect damage costs to rise along with increased use (although ideally at a
slower rate as we gain experience and make improvements).

------
perlpimp
"Things have gotten so bad that the Air Force is offering retention bonuses of
up to $125,000 to its drone pilots, who have long complained of overwork."

There is a disconnect, flying by wire you don't feel turbulence and changing
conditions, rather you logically go about it, being overworked its not hard to
see where one can whoopsie daisy it.

------
carsonreinke
Why is someone in a space suit at the crash site?

~~~
Jtsummers
That's a hazmat suit. And given the nature of the jet fuel, the paints, and
metals involved in aircraft components, you'd probably want to wear something
similar when wading through the crash site until it was cleared.

------
_asdf_asdf
I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.

------
msandford
> Investigators have traced the problem to a faulty starter-generator, but
> have been unable to pinpoint why it goes haywire or devise a permanent fix.

I find it incredible that they know where the problem is, but not how to fix
it. Get 100-1000 of them and start stress testing them in a lab. This stuff
isn't rocket science.

~~~
UnoriginalGuy
I do love when people imply a "lab" is this mythical thing that can, through
no effort, reproduce any likely or unlikely condition that one could ever
expect to encounter.

They should just print out a sign that says "lab" put it on an empty room,
place the starter motor in the middle of it, and then suddenly they would know
why it was broken. It is in a lab after all! This isn't rocket science! Or if
one in an empty room fails put 100-1000 into the empty room, it has GOT to
work!!! It is too easy to fail! Being in a lab is all that it takes!

I'd suggest you watch this[0], this issue was literally costing human lives,
they knew there was a rudder issue, they placed it in a lab, testing it for
thousands of hours and ultimately found it by a little luck. It moved our
understanding of failure states forward.

There's no reason to assume that finding the issue with the starter motor is
easy or trivial. No amount of lab hand waving changes that, it will take just
brute effort.

[0]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36mg8BNwBT4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36mg8BNwBT4)

~~~
msandford
Yes, clearly it's not just "dump motors in room, get results", but rather that
it's usually very doable to generate failures. There are only so many reasons
that they can fail and it shouldn't be too difficult to generate the
circumstances that cause those failures.

Obviously figuring out _which_ circumstances are the ones that are actually
responsible for failures will be more difficult. But it's not too hard to do
some sensitivity analysis to get some clues.

If they're _highly_ sensitive to having too much current drawn then that might
make you suspect that somehow, somewhere the system's power demands are
overwhelming the generator and that's what is causing the failure.

The point behind "it's not rocket science" is that rockets are very, very
expensive to make and so you can't just test as many of them as you'd like,
for as long as you'd like, until you through trial and error reproduce the
conditions that caused the failure. You also don't get the rocket back when it
either succeeds or fails.

But in this case the starter/generators are cheap, and they are able to in
many cases sort through the debris of the crash. So that does make it
qualitatively and quantitatively different than rocket science.

~~~
TallGuyShort
Sounds exactly like why people tell me it shouldn't take so long to get bug-
free software.

~~~
msandford
You can't see software. You can't touch it. It can _spontaneously_ change
shape, form and function in dramatic ways if a single memory bit gets
corrupted.

That's very, very different than physical objects.

~~~
irishcoffee
Not when software controls hardware, which it does in this case.

~~~
msandford
Please point me to the software that controls the alternator/generator/starter
motor. I'm not talking about the _whole thing_ , just the part whose failure
is causing the larger failure.

When software controls hardware, yes things can get weirder. But the software
can't cause magical things to happen; the atoms don't rearrange themselves.

Bit flips tend to be much more like magic, if applied to the real world. A
wrench doesn't stop working because you swap out a single atom. But software
can, if you flip the wrong bit.

