The Dept. of Defense is eager to have the ability to routinely deploy large military surveillance drones over US cities. Peruse my earlier entries on the topic here. The attempt to have General Atomics newest, biggest drone, the SkyGuardian, fly freely over a US city (San Diego) was key to that effort. The Voice of San Diego, led by Associate Editor Jesse Marx, has delivered yet another important part of the story.
Check out Jesse’s previous installments at VOSD here, here, and here.
One key passage towards the end of this most recent article shows that the FAA’s denial of GA’s proposal was well grounded. During the consolation-prize demo flight over the desert last year, the SkyGuardian’s crucial ‘Detect-And-Avoid’ technology failed repeatedly:
The report itself suggests that regulators’ concerns weren’t baseless. Specifically, they were worried that the drone might lose connection in a busy air corridor or that the technology capable of detecting and avoiding another object might fail.
General Atomics acknowledged that during the nine-and-a-half-hour flight that took place in April 2020, “there were a few, brief instances” when the display for the detect-and-avoid software cut out for 30 to 40 seconds, “indicating temporary loss of traffic data.” But it also claimed that the pilot did not lose command or control of the aircraft and that the technical issue had since been corrected.
What would have happened if this failure had occurred, say, in the busy airspace over San Diego? This is the time to voice your concerns.
BTW, this is the exact same experimental drone that is currently traipsing about over the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, in a summer-long sales demonstration to NATO allies.
And finally, a shameless plug: Jesse was kind enough to quote the opinion of this author.
Barry Summers, an activist and researcher who lives in North Carolina, warned last year in an opinion piece for the Washington Examiner that many of the top-ranking people at the FAA overseeing the integration of military-grade drones are ex-military officers. He told me that the agency’s long-term plans are being laid without any public debate.
“As the San Diego fiasco shows, they are just doing it — safety and civil liberties be damned,” he wrote in an email. “Worse still, we are exporting this to allied countries — the ability to treat your own citizens as the enemy.”