A U.S. drone reportedly crashed in Pakistan on Sunday. The Associated Press calls it "a rare mishap for a program Washington has increasingly relied on to kill Taliban and al-Qaida militants." But that's not quite right; American unmanned aircraft go down all the time. They've even gone down before in Pakistan.
According to U.S. Air Force statistics, Predator and Reapers drones have suffered at least 85 "class A mishaps" -- accidents which caused a million dollars' worth of damage or more. Typically, 14 of these accidents takes place for every 100,000 hours a Predator flies.
Drones are more glitch-prone than traditional planes. Communications with their remote pilots regularly cut out, forcing the robotic aircraft into automatic holding patterns. The unmanned planes don't handle rain, snow, heavy clouds, or high winds particularly well; the Air Force typically grounds as many drone flights as it can if there's bad weather. Landing the aircraft (especially under inclement conditions) is awfully tricky. That's when almost all of the Reaper accidents have taken place.
With the drone war over Pakistan escalating dramatically in 2010 -- 10 strikes in just the first three weeks of January, compared to four reported attacks in January 2009 -- more accidents are bound to happen.
It wouldn't be the first time a remotely-piloted plane has fallen out of the skies above Pakistan. Last March, the Taliban claimed to have shot down a drone there. In September of 2008, an American-made drone crashed in Pakistan; its parts were displayed on local television. America’s top military officer, Admiral Mike Mullen, asserted that the unmanned aircraft didn’t belong to the United States. But he offered no other explanation for how the drone -- manufactured by Predator-maker General Atomics -- had wound up on Pakistani soil.
[Photo: Noah Shachtman]
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