Last year this time, I posted a story about the two most recent Reaper drone crashes.
One came within a quarter mile of destroying a residential/commercial zone in Syracuse, NY.
Not long after I posted that story, another Reaper went down, at an undisclosed location, somewhere in the “CENTCOM AOR”. The Central Command’s Area of Responsibility covers pretty much the entire Middle East, but I suspect this drone crashed and burned at a US base in western Iraq. Read the accident report here.
What makes this crash interesting is that it happened on autopilot. In the middle of takeoff, going 50 mph, the pilot lost the satellite link controlling the drone. In that scenario, where it’s going too fast to slow to a halt on the runway, the autopilot is programmed to take over and complete the takeoff and go into a holding pattern until communication is restored.
Unfortunately, it appears that no one thought to tell the autopilot that the MQ-9 Reaper has a “Left Turn Bias” on takeoff. This means that the pilot has to continually nudge the drone to the right in order to keep it in the center of the runway. In this case, when the autopilot took over and accelerated to 100 mph for takeoff, it didn’t make any of those corrections. It just slowly went off the left side of the runway until it crashed and burned. One $18 million aircraft down the drain, luckily no one injured or killed. The report states that the left turn bias is a “common handling characteristic of the MQ9”, suggesting that this knowledge SHOULD have been incorporated into the automated takeoff system.
Why is this important to anyone but military aviation buffs? The ability to take off and land automatically is one of the key requirements that the FAA has for large drones before they can be allowed to operate freely in US domestic airspace. General Atomics has spent years and millions of dollars trying to perfect this vital safety system.
Here’s hoping the FAA is reading these reports, too. It’s bad enough that very soon, they’re going to be spying on us 24/7/365. Please don’t drop them on our heads, too.