War zone drone crashes add up

War zone drone crashes add up

www.latimes.com

Reporting from Kandahar, Afghanistan — The U.S. military often portrays its drone aircraft as high-tech marvels that can be operated seamlessly from thousands of miles away. But Pentagon accident reports reveal that the pilotless aircraft suffer from frequent system failures, computer glitches and human error.

Design and system problems were never fully addressed in the haste to push the fragile plane into combat over Afghanistan shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks more than eight years ago.

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An unmanned Reaper aircraft is steered around the Kandahar air base in southern Afghanistan last year. “There has been exponential growth in … demand” for the craft, one researcher said.

Looks like drones are seen as less-then-appropriate substitutes for COIN aircraft, like the EMB-314 Super Tucano, AT-6B Texan II, and even the AT-802U Air Truck.







www.latimes.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

If you look at just the cost for the aircraft you may have something

but if you look at the cost of manned COIN aircraft.
and the loss of the aircraft and pilot.
The cost of training a replacement pilot at about $1,000,000.

drones with a pilot setting safely on the ground are a lot cheaper.

If you look at just the cost for the aircraft you may have something

but if you look at the cost of manned COIN aircraft.
and the loss of the aircraft and pilot.
The cost of training a replacement pilot at about $1,000,000.

drones with a pilot setting safely on the ground are a lot cheaper.

The drones are one of our more advanced terror weapons...
They can fly so high they cannot be heard or seen, and rain down hellfire out of a seemingly clear blue sky.
The weapon is nonselective and usually results in some "collateral damage"(more dead and maimed)as its blast radius is rather large for such a small missle...
This could be considered a war crime, when the act of shooting this thing leaves such a chance of killing innocents as well as no guarantees theyll get the bad guys with every strike launched.The total of civillian casuyalties from such drone strikes includes women and children too ya know.....
I can see where the wielding of such godlike powers of life and death on the whim of the gunners and the technoligical advances of our science,has led to an almost casual attitude towards killing our fellow humans.