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Military Drone Lost Over Lake Ontario
First time accepted submitter slipped_bit writes "An MQ-9 Reaper drone has gone down over Lake Ontario during a practice mission. The flight, being operated by the New York Air National Guard's 174th Attack Wing in Syracuse, NY, was going well for about three hours before contact with the aircraft was lost. A search was started but had to be postponed due to weather."
Is that what Brian Boitano would do? Or would he drink Canada Dry?
The interesting thing about using the drones domestically is that it will be harder to cover up these accidents the way they can overseas as classified information. Now we might see how reliable or not they are, and if they are really being used more than once before they wreck.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Honestly, who gives a shit. They were designed to be lost.
They're using their grammar skills there.
Exactly my thought. If an F-22 went down over Lake Ontario on a training mission, we would have a dead pilot, and lost $150 million aircraft, which can't be replaced. The F-22 loss might have been noted on CNN, but certainly wouldn't have been /. worthy. So, here we lost a $12.5 million aircraft, which can be replaced, and nobody dies. Somehow, I doubt that the submitter and the /. editors are pro-drone, but I see this story and think that, to the extent that I actually give a shit, it makes an excellent argument for drones.
Colored its cheeks, then crashed itself out of pure embarrassment?
Or working the streets, turning tricks to make money.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Honestly, who gives a shit. They were designed to be lost.
At $17M each, you'd think they'd be designed to *not* be lost. How many $17M "designed to be lost" drones can we afford to send on one-way missions?
Anyone who gives a shit about Lake Ontario. If the thing was lost after three hours of operation it still has most of its fuel load.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Quite a few compared to manned aircraft, and remember loss rates will go down as systems mature. The loss rate for prop jobs and early jet fighters was spectacular back in The Day.
When things with wings go down it's news, which is why you are reading it here. When tens of thousands of people die in motor vehicle accidents it's not even interesting.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
And that's a good reason why they don't actually do such things often these days.
1961 was in the middle of the Cold War. The armed B-52 was not in the air for practice - it was on an actual mission, waiting for the Soviets to strike first before it'd fly off to strike Soviet targets. Since there are no enemies today that have the Soviet's first-strike capability that we feared so much, there's no real need to keep live weapons in the air.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.