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.
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.
It's a bit unfair, I'd say, to compare a single military fighter jet incident rate to (all?, matured?) civilian aircraft incident rates, as such:
"It's like comparing over-powered motorbikes in the hands of reckless teenagers with school buses."
I'm not excusing the error rate, but civilian aircraft have a faily simple set of operations: fill aircraft with people and/or cargo, fly a pre-determined route at a relatively stable airspeed, and land. Also, what was the error rate of civilian aircraft during development (as the F-16 number reflects)?
Outside of the Concorde, I don't think they have to worry about supersonic speeds. Also, nor are they concerned high angles of attack, or reduced aerodynamics at low altitudes, or low/near surface flying, and a plethora of other uses and scenarios.
Unless I misinterpreted your statement, then disregard this reply.
Your parent isn't complaining about the incident rates of military aircraft. He's complaining about putting something with the that high of an incident rate in the same airspace with civilian traffic (not to mention housing). It drastically increases the risk of the civilian aircraft being involved in one of those much-more-numerous incidents, and, when an aircraft has an "incident", the passengers and crew (and people standing under said incident) tend to not come out of it well.
Convenient for the military aircraft causing the incidents in this hypothetical situation, they have no passengers or crew to worry about. And I absolutely believe that will increase the number of risks they (the Air Force or its shoddy contractors) will be willing to take, further increasing the risk to civilians around.
But that doesn't invalidate my reply, which was about the numbers being compared and the context of those numbers.
Are there many people living in the desert where the military trains? Or over open water? Many military bases don't have residential areas in the immediate vicinity, unlike most civilian airports. (Sure, there are exceptions to both, but as a whole - what's the norm?)
I realize there are incidents that have involved civilians, such as when I was in San Diego and an F-18 (?) crashed into a neighborhood near Miramar in San Diego. My questions: what is the total number of civilian casualties from military "incidents" and how does that compare to civilian incidents? And what other airspace can they fly in? Is there no way to compromise? Etc.
I'm not arguing for or against contractors or drones. I would think they should be launched from military bases, if at all. My goal is to look at it from the right perspective.
I don't think people have any issues with them being at military bases, its that they are starting to be more and more deployed at civilian airports all around the world.
In civilian airports equipped with ILS navigation support. Modern commercial aircraft can literally land themselves without human input. As long as runways are properly equipped with the right beacons, automatic landings of drones are not far fetched.
Former Shadow 200 TUAV from the US Army pilot here. Not only are fully automated landings feasible, they are happening in practice. The Shadow has a piece of equipment called the T.A.L.S. (Tactical Automated Landing System). Landing a shadow (I did this in Iraq as well mind you) involved aligning the AV in a small box on the screen which turned it green. Provided the airspeed was right and crosswinds were in tolerance, you click the "Land AV" button and the landing is 100% hands off. If at any point during the tals auto-landing something looks off, you push the abort button which powers the engines to full, gains altitude, and lets you circle around to try again. This tech is around and battle tested.
My thought on why the predator / reaper aren't is simply so an officer can go through flight school and get his cool flight wings in the USAF. There is no good technical reason as far as I know landings can't be fully automated with larger UAVs.
Did you all read some of the problems which arose? In one crash report, the drone took "off without permission from the control tower". In another, "an armed Predator suffered an electrical malfunction that sent it into a death spiral." A third was partially due to a "melted throttle part." A forth started when "[t]wo minutes after takeoff, the engine failed."
Another concern is that air control gives "priority to passenger planes and order[s] drone pilots to keep their aircraft circling overhead even when they are dangerously low on fuel."
Yes, some of the problems were human error. But from the statistics given, UI errors and improved navigation support give at most a 30% reduction in the crash rates. While what's needed is several orders of magnitude improvement to make it match the commercial crash rates.
I did read the article. I was responding to a post that highlighted the human factors in the conflict.
If the UI was simple, the landing scheduling would be handled automatically. If the plane had too little fuel, the planning failed. Keeping a schedule isn't difficult, human interaction and ill-defined schedules makes things difficult.
I am aware that a central african state isn't exactly the cornerstone of air tech, but good schedules can still be negotiated and kept.
It's like the air france crash where the pilot stalled the plane because of lack of feedback. UI/skill problem.
My argument is that improved UI doesn't appear to be the source for major improvements in reducing the number of drone crashes. While a simple UI might handle some engine failures, it can't handle all hardware failures.
The landing scheduling depends on the local air traffic controllers, which aren't under US direction and can't be solved with an improved UI. The planning problem might be that the local ATC doesn't care for the US military traffic in the area, and this is a form of passive protest. If so - and that is a pure hypothetical as the article doesn't go into those details - then the planning problem is at the high-level political level, and perhaps extending to how the world perception of how the US is dealing with the GWOT. That's extremely far from UI issues.
As minor points, neither Djibouti nor the Seychelles are a central African state. Also, the initial problem with AF 447 was inconsistent airspeed inputs from the pitots, causing the autopilot to disengage. I don't think it's useful to attribute the problem only to "lack of feedback." Yes, there's a "skill problem", but if you continue the analysis chain then there's a training problem, and if you go further then there was an incomplete understanding of the risk model.
It is insane to build a craft with powerful weapons and not reserve guaranteed capacity for landing spots, including backups at other times and locations from main flight plan.
Modern commercial airliners do not land themselves without human input. Someone needs to dial in a whole bunch of parameters then monitor the instruments carefully.
Autopilots aren't infallible; they're basically glorified cruise control with three axes of freedom rather than one.
(I will grant you that commercial aircraft with ILS can land in zero visibility conditions, but that's a very long way from being able to fly themselves to an arbitrary destination without human direction.)
Understandably, commercial airliners do not land via computer because human pilots are better than the autopilots in most commercial aircraft. To say that this will always be the case, especially in an entrepreneurial software forum, is ridiculous. Autopilots will get better and better, and drone pilots are not currently as good as commercial aircraft pilots.
Because... you just argued that people are required to enter parameters, and monitor sensors, and, well, people aren't very good at those things.
"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.