I wrote back in April about a Reaper drone that crashed last summer at Syracuse International Airport, and how it took almost a year for it to be reported. The official statement from the base commander as to why they never told anybody about it at the time was that “It didn’t have any impact on our neighbors or the general public.” Well, it turns out there may have been a reason other than avoiding bad local PR for them to keep it a secret. The US Air Force had lost a Reaper somewhere in Africa, just the day before.
Why the Air Force Deliberately Crashed an MQ-9A Reaper Drone
Last summer, the Air Force purposely crashed a drone flying at an undisclosed location in Africa in order to destroy the plane, according to an unclassified accident report that the service released earlier this month.
According to the report, the Reaper took off from an undisclosed location somewhere in Africa (probably Niger). Twelve hours later, an alarm alerted the crew that fuel was running low, despite the fact that it should have had plenty of fuel left. They turned the video camera underneath the drone backwards, and saw fuel gushing out of the aircrafts midsection. Long story short, they couldn’t make it back to a friendly landing area, so they plowed it into the desert floor as hard as possible so as to make retrieval of sensitive equipment unlikely.
The report concludes that the fuel leak came from an issue that General Atomics and the USAF had known about for fifteen months. GA had been given a deadline to correct the problem, but blew past it. This was listed as a “Substantially Contributing Factor” to the crash, after the main problem with the fuel system itself.
The Syracuse Reaper crash the very next day happened (we’re told) because the pilot mistakenly shut off the fuel to the engine after takeoff. He couldn’t land it safely, so he deliberately crashed it just past the end of the runway, before it left the airfield and glided out over residential areas.
I was the one who forwarded the accident report to local Syracuse reporters. They were shocked that Hancock AFB didn’t tell them at the time that a Reaper had crashed practically in their back yards. The editorial board of the local paper did not mince words:
Military, Hancock were wrong to keep Reaper drone crash a secret
On the day that USAF officials were deciding whether to issue a press release about the crash in Syracuse, they were already deep into damage control for the crash in Africa the day before. Two days after the Africa crash, General Atomics released an alert bulletin on 26 June 2020 that directed all operators of the MQ-9 to bypass the component aboard the Reapers that caused the fuel leak. This alert bulletin stated: “CONSEQUENCE: Failure to comply with this Alert Bulletin may result in fuel leaks during operations and loss of aircraft”
Now they tell us. We can only assume that the Reaper flights over Syracuse BEFORE the crash, had the same possibility of catastrophic failure as the one in Africa.
BTW, General Atomics finally issued a corrective order to fix the fuel system issue:
“The parts and hardware required for the TCTO was estimated to cost approximately $37,000 for the entire USAF fleet of MQ-9s.”
One other thing. These two crashes came just weeks after a local San Diego paper had put General Atomics, the USAF, and the FAA on notice that they were suing to find out more about the attempt to fly the SkyGuardian, the Reaper’s bigger badder cousin, over the City.
We’re Suing to Learn More About the Drone Test Project Hitting San Diego Skies
Some months later…
Drone Test Flight Moved Out of San Diego Following Safety Concerns
Tuesday, Jun 22, 2021 · 1:51:26 AM +00:00
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theOtherBarry
I’ve been asked to clarify how these two stories might be related: the Reaper crash in Africa, and the Reaper crash in Syracuse the next day. When the Syracuse accident report came out this past April, I heard from more than one local news person real surprise that the base hadn’t notified them of the crash. For one thing, they had been very forthcoming about previous drone incidents, including the 2013 Reaper crash in Lake Ontario.
My original theory was that it had to do with ongoing attempts to sell the new SkyGuardian™ to various US allies. The bad PR that might come from a Reaper crash on US soil would only be amplified if it came on the same day that they warned ALL Reaper operators across the globe that there was a major fuel system problem with the entire fleet. And not just any problem, but one that had already led to one catastrophic failure during flight, IN ADDITION to the unrelated (?) crash in Syracuse. PR headache anyone?
Furthermore, both crashes resulted from issues that General Atomics and the USAF were well aware of. Confusion over the poorly-designed control panel had brought down more than one drone in the past. And they had eight warning events about the fuel leak over the past year, that they did nothing to fix until a $11,000,000 drone went down in the desert.
Elements in Congress, the DoD, USAF, General Atomics, and certain foreign actors have worked hard over the past 10 years to make the SkyGuardian™ the surveillance/attack drone of choice for all US allies. I believe stifling talk about these two consecutive crashes stem from the same need.