

Drone crashes mount at civilian airports - stfu
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/drone-crashes-mount-at-civilian-airports-overseas/2012/11/30/e75a13e4-3a39-11e2-83f9-fb7ac9b29fad_story.html

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cstross
The most worrying angles seem to be human factors issues: the lack of
coordination between drone crews and airport ATC, and the apparent deficits in
training/qualification of pilots.

"Similar accident rate to F-16s at a similar time in their development"
doesn't fill me with joy either; combat aircraft can expect a crash or major
incident on the order of once per 10,000 flying hours, whereas for airliners
the equivalent rate is roughly one crash or major incident per 10^7 hours --
three orders of magnitude safer! It's like comparing over-powered motorbikes
in the hands of reckless teenagers with school buses.

The original justification for deploying drones over manned aircraft was that
the drones could be built cheaper -- no expensive aircrew to risk in event of
a crash, so less need for complex safety systems and multiple redundancy. Now
put this cheap, cheerful, and not terribly safe device in the hands of a
lowest-bidder contractor's hired help, who may or may not have been hired
because they were cheap rather than able to do the job ...

And now imagine the bikers in this metaphor are riding on a stretch of road
used by buses, are ignoring the traffic signs, and that a crash will kill
everyone involved (including the full bus), and you've got a grasp of the
picture we're looking at here.

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harryf
To me the most worrying part of this article is this part;

> In a Nov. 20 speech in Washington, Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta said
> the Pentagon would expand its use of the unmanned attack planes “outside
> declared combat zones” as it pursues al-Qaeda supporters in Africa and the
> Middle East.

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pstuart
The military has to keep engaged to justify its existence, and the blowback
from this will give it an unending stream of future "customers".

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ivany
A bit off-topic but per the NYU/Stanford "Living Under Drones" report[1], the
use of military drones for "fighting terrorism" has been frightening, to say
the least. It turns out that only about 2% of the people killed in Pakistan by
drones are high-level terrorists, and collateral damage including women and
children is a extremely common. Furthermore, "double-strike" standard
operating procedure specifically targets first responders by hitting a target
a second time minutes or hours after the first strike. The whole thing is
pretty sick and based on the accounts in the report, drone activities
terrorize the population as simply being near a terrorist (or someone profiled
as a terrorist based on their behavior) can get you killed.

[1] <http://livingunderdrones.org/>

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Evbn
This is exactly the sort of misbehavior that the IDF explicitly claims to
avoid, to minimize collateral damage.

IDF may not be following its own claimed standards either, but everyone
should.

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NelsonMinar
You won't see unmanned drones flying at US civilian airports. Nor, in most
cases, anywhere in US civilian airspace. Drones aren't allowed here because we
don't know how to safely integrate them into civilian airspace. There's a
controversial effort inside FAA to come up with rules for UAVs and it's going
very slowly and carefully. The arrogance of us flying drones in Djibouti and
Seychelles civilian airspace when we won't let them in our own airspace is
pretty amazing.

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SEJeff
The Shadow 200 TUAV has been flying in AZ near and all around Ft Huachuca, AZ
since before 2001, when I was flying them there. It has an "experimental" FAA
designation and we would frequently hold for civi aircraft. Look it up if you
don't believe me :)

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arjn
This is very strange. Why are military "contractors" flying these things ?
Should they be trained military personnel piloting the drones ?

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nnq
...contractors + buggy software + hackable systems that could even allow a
hacker to take control of the drone = 99% unaccountability

you can do everything with these things and get away with it ...and if you do
something really genocidally horrible you can always blame "terrorist hackers"
or "criminally incompetent" contractors ...bone chilling scary shit (oh, and I
can even start to imagine the international situations provoked by doing
stupid things with drones _outside_ the USA - "oh, no, it wasn't an act of war
against you country, we just had a software bug - now take please take this
money for the damages and don't mention anything to the press" :) )

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irishcoffee
I can assure you, the communication links between the ground and the drone was
not an afterthought. There is an extensive amount of
regulation/standardization surrounding this.

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pilsetnieks
The mention of software bugs seems worrying - I mean, isn't avionics supposed
to be second only to NASA in code quality and being bug-free? Or do they just
not care that much since there's not a pilot involved?

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Tyrant505
Obviously not a gamer..

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smoyer
But what about the shorts and tee-shirt? Everyone knows you can only fly a
drone properly if dressed in a complete flight-suit.

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tangue
I was thinking the same thing but then I asked myself if the guys killing
people at the other side of the world were dressed like that, and feel ill at
ease.

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techdmn
Is it the killing that bothers, or the casual dress?

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barrkel
It's the combination that's problematic. It suggests that the killing is done
lightly and carelessly, and it cheapens human lives.

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mythealias
And yet that is the fact. The worth of human life is decided but what's in the
pocket. The sooner you accept it the easier it will be.

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AYBABTME
"Please sign in to access this article and other exclusive content."

That's not very convenient.

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eli
Strange, I didn't get that message. Try this
[http://viewtext.org/article?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.washingtonp...](http://viewtext.org/article?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.washingtonpost.com%2Fworld%2Fnational-
security%2Fdrone-crashes-mount-at-civilian-airports-
overseas%2F2012%2F11%2F30%2Fe75a13e4-3a39-11e2-83f9-fb7ac9b29fad_story.html)

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Dronator
Where do drone OPERATORs get their pilots license...?

Radio shack.

lol

