Micah Zenko at Foreign Policy has a link-filled post up titled 10 Things You Didn’t Know About Drones. (Actually if you read this earlier post which covered #3, you can make that 9 things.)
2. So far, drones tend to crash.
As of July 2010, the Air Force had identified 79 drone accidents costing at least $1 million each. The primary reasons for the crashes: bad weather, loss or disruption of communications links, and “human error factors,” according to the Air Force. As Lt. Gen. David Deptula, former Air Force deputy chief of staff for intelligence, has noted with refreshing honesty, “Some of the [drones] that we have today, you put in a high-threat environment, and they’ll start falling from the sky like rain.”
How charming to think that we’ll soon be having many more of them in our already-crowded domestic airspace.
Also recall that last year they discovered a virus in their control systems. I’m guessing it was a keylogger of sorts. A few months later, a drone shows up in Iran. Intact. This was not a crash, but a controlled landing. This demonstrates the ease with which these pilotless craft can be turned against us. To continue their military use is just plain stupid.
Or the military / government / contractors are addicted to war and don’t much care what happens.
Just wait until a drone gets in the way of a jumbo jet in our far more crowded skies.