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U.S. Border Patrol Drone Goes Down, Rest of Fleet Grounded

Posted by Soulskill on from the in-the-event-of-a-water-landing dept.

coondoggie writes "The U.S. Customs and Border Protection service said today it has grounded its nine remaining unmanned aircraft after one of them was forced to ditch in the Pacific Ocean. The unmanned aircraft had an unknown mechanical failure while on patrol off the southern California coast. The crew determined that it wouldn't make it back to Sierra Vista, Arizona, 'and put the aircraft down in the water.' The drone cost about $12 million. 'The Predator B, also known as the MQ-9 Reaper in the U.S. Air Force, can fly as many as 27 hours and reach an altitude of 50,000 feet (15,240 meters), according to the website of Poway, California-based General Atomics. It has a wingspan of 66 feet (20 meters) and can carry more than 3,000 pounds (1,361 kilograms) of cameras, weapons or other payload, according to the company.'"

29 of 138 comments (clear)

  1. Re:...and can carry more than 3,000 pounds by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    I just figured it was carrying your mother.

  2. Pacific, or Arizona ? by bob_super · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It's a shame that San Diego is now so huge that there isn't a single spot to land between the pacific and Arizona...

    1. Re:Pacific, or Arizona ? by BitZtream · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Yea, I call bullshit.

      No one puts down a 12 million dollar drone in the Pacific because it couldn't make it several hundred miles inland instead of just landing it somewhere ... like say any one of the many airports military or otherwise they had to choose from.

      Or you fly it over some unpopulated beach and land it on the beach, or okay, so the camera's went out, you put a spotter aircraft on it and follow it home using the spotter for visuals.

      They didn't make a 'choice' to put it down in the ocean, it fucking crashed.

      --
      Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
    2. Re:Pacific, or Arizona ? by flaming+error · · Score: 4, Informative

      I know, it reads like that for me too. But if your UAV is going down, you ditch it the nearest place where it's unlikely to hit people.

    3. Re:Pacific, or Arizona ? by turkeydance · · Score: 5, Insightful

      they put it 'down' to enhance their budget for next year. no individual in any agency in any government in the US is monetarily rewarded by coming in under budget.

    4. Re:Pacific, or Arizona ? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

      I live in San Diego. They should have crashed it into my bed so I can go back in time through a baby universe and converse with a big ugly rabbit named Frank.

    5. Re:Pacific, or Arizona ? by Charliemopps · · Score: 5, Funny

      Drone: Confirmation on armament of payload?
      Pilot: Cancel armament
      Drone: Armament confirmed. Target 48 miles and closing.
      Pilot: CANCEL TARGET
      Drone: Confirmed, Arming warhead.
      Pilot: Warhead?!? Cancel Target!!!
      Drone: Nuclear detonation will destroy drone, confirm?
      Pilot: Nuclear? What?!?! Putting her down!!!

      *giggles from outside control room*

      Pilots friends: Dude we totally got you!! You thought it was going to launch a nuke!!! Hahahaha! Did you piss yourself?!?! Hahahaha!
      Pilot: No, I put her down in the pacific.
      *Pilots ex-friends back slowly out of the room*

    6. Re:Pacific, or Arizona ? by JWSmythe · · Score: 2

      They didn't specify what the problem was. It could have been anything from typical aircraft problems, to specialty drone problems. Failed powerplant (i.e., engine broke). Failed aerodynamic surfaces. Failed airframe during high stress maneuver. Inadvertent intersection of flight path with birds.

      Or the drone specific problems. Computer failure(s). Uplink failure(s). Intersection of bird with the camera.

      Their options may have been very limited. An intentional crash into the water (full throttle, nose down) could mitigate some risk of recovery.

      I would think crashing it into empty desert would have been preferred for recovery of all the parts. Maybe making it to the desert may not have been practical.

      And, all in all, it's only a few million dollars. It's the gov't, they have plenty of money. {sigh}

      --
      Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
    7. Re:Pacific, or Arizona ? by sjames · · Score: 2

      Can you just imagine the shitstorm if a crippled drone crashed into a populated area? Or the embarrassment if it crashed in the middle of nowhere and a drug lord managed to get to it first?

    8. Re:Pacific, or Arizona ? by plover · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I was thinking ditching it may have been a deliberate choice to keep it out of the hands of the American public. Just imagine some hackers getting to the wreckage first and disassembling the electronics and optics to learn its true capabilities.

      If you're going to rely on a secret weapon to keep the bad guys guessing, you have to keep it secret.

      --
      John
    9. Re:Pacific, or Arizona ? by khallow · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Maybe they didn't have the choice to land it normally. If the drone will crash, it's better to crash it where there are no people rather than say, the middle of San Diego.

      This is not a hypothetical situation that has never happened before. For example, a passenger jet made an emergency landing in the Hudson River in New York City in 2009. That beat running the plane through a building or belly flopping on a crowded street.

    10. Re:Pacific, or Arizona ? by JWSmythe · · Score: 2

      Oops, I forgot to say that part. :) They don't want some civilian, or worse a foreign intelligence agency, getting a hold of one.

      Ditching in the desert, or ditching in the ocean, as long as it's a hard impact, would scatter pieces. In the ocean, it's much harder to find them and try to figure out how they went together. It's also harder to collect the pieces so others won't find them.

      On land, depending on where it hit and who was there, parts or all of it could be retrieved before gov't folks arrived. It would be worse, if it crashed somewhere populated (like downtown San Diego), or somewhere it wouldn't easily returned (like Mexico). The later risks an international incident.

      I suspect they opted for water instead of land because of the 2008 F/A-18 crash in San Diego, and others. People get all upset when an airplane crashes in their city.

      I'm surprised they don't have pyrotechnics on-board to remove any sensitive equipment. Looking at this report on another crash, they had to go to the crash site to collect the good bits. This one, regarding the same type aircraft says they don't have self-destruct mechanisms, but can wipe their storage if instructed to.

      I would have thought a way to make the aircraft a pile of worthless scrap before it hits the ground would have been one of the first things they put on when they decided these would be in a recon/combat role.

      --
      Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
  3. WTF? by samantha · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Why do we need such powerful military grade drones just to keep tabs on illegal aliens crossing our borders? A bunch of cheap quadcopters with infrared and other cameras could do the job.

    1. Re:WTF? by Darinbob · · Score: 2

      For $12 million each, I'd like those drones to stay aloft for a year before needing to come down for refueling and service, and remain in service for a decade or more.

    2. Re:WTF? by whois · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Having played with cheap quadcopters, I feel there is a valid answer to this.

      Their battery life is shit and turbulence ruins any chance of it being a stable platform for imaging. Even if you fix it so they hover okay you'll still have issues having it follow a vehicle. Granted I'm not sure how well the drones they're using cope with any of this either.

      Also you gotta remember they're not looking for people crossing the border, they're looking for drugs. Or any other high value target that gets them money or press. If they saw an individual crossing a border they would probably just phone the local PD to check it out. It sounds like they're tailing boats and cars with the drones.

    3. Re:WTF? by timeOday · · Score: 5, Informative

      Why do we need such powerful military grade drones just to keep tabs on illegal aliens crossing our borders?

      The fact that it ditched in the water while patrolling off the southern coast is a good indication that it was not patrolling for illegal immigrants, but rather for drug smugglers. They are very sophisticated, using not only fast boats, but also submarines. And the pacific ocean is way too big to patrol with toy quadrocopters.

  4. Re:...and can carry more than 3,000 pounds by turkeydance · · Score: 3, Funny

    mother-in-law

  5. Grounded, you say? by dohzer · · Score: 5, Funny

    Thanks for the heads up; see you on the other side.

  6. Oddly enough by rmdingler · · Score: 2
    It will likely take a crash into a heavily populated area before drones are regulated much.

    Has it occurred to the government how deadly effective these new toys could be in the wrong hands?

    It's Superbowl week, just saying...

    --
    Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

    Ernest Hemingway

    1. Re:Oddly enough by turkeydance · · Score: 2

      already been done: BlackSunday...http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075765/

  7. Re:...and can carry more than 3,000 pounds by The+Grim+Reefer · · Score: 3, Funny

    Anyone else read that as "of 1,361 kilos of cocaine, weapons or other payload"?

    FTFY

  8. Sabotage?.. by mi · · Score: 3, Interesting

    If sabotaging one border-patrolling drone grounds all the rest of them, what better way to help those poor aliens sneak into the US — illegally?

    --
    In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
  9. Forget not Hanlon's shaving gear by rmdingler · · Score: 3, Interesting
    The article (I know, right?) claims the cost of each Predator B is $18 Million.

    A Predator B belonging to Customs flew into a hillside near Nogales, AZ in 2006 after an operator inadvertently shut off the plane's engine trying to repair a radio-link failure.

    --
    Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

    Ernest Hemingway

    1. Re:Forget not Hanlon's shaving gear by PPH · · Score: 2

      But its just a PC with a joystick. Turning my PC off and then back on always fixes it.

      --
      Have gnu, will travel.
  10. Anti-drone drone by hawguy · · Score: 2

    How long until the Mexican drug cartels start contracting out for anti-drone drones?

    If $10,000 buys an anti-drone drone, it would be a cheap way to take out a $12M drone and rack up huge expenses on the American side.

    Amateurs have already built a 366mph jet powered UAV (faster than the MQ-9 drone) - I'm sure on the international black market, better quality drones are already available. And they get bonus PR points if they can get the drone to crash on a populated area (or truck the remains of the crashed drone to a populated area) showing what a menace they are.

    1. Re:Anti-drone drone by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 3, Funny

      Isn't an 'anti-drone drone' called a 'surface to air missile'?

  11. Cost by CohibaVancouver · · Score: 3, Insightful

    [commie]

    Wonder how many school lunches you could have served to poor kids for twelve million dollars.

    [/commie]

    1. Re:Cost by femtobyte · · Score: 4, Informative

      A large number of lives ruined by illicit drugs are ruined because the government spends a huge amount of money to ruin them. Stop spending money to throw people in jail over minor drug infractions, or money driving people away from getting help for their problems (for fear of jail), or money spent driving addicts to ever-more-harmful worst-case toxic concoctions, and those illicit drugs will ruin many fewer lives.

    2. Re:Cost by SacredNaCl · · Score: 4, Informative

      A large number of lives ruined by illicit drugs are ruined because the government spends a huge amount of money to ruin them. Stop spending money to throw people in jail over minor drug infractions, or money driving people away from getting help for their problems (for fear of jail), or money spent driving addicts to ever-more-harmful worst-case toxic concoctions, and those illicit drugs will ruin many fewer lives.

      Probably far more lives are ruined due to their illegality than if we simply had stopped at the pure food and drug act, and left it at that.

      --
      Freedom is merely privilege extended unless enjoyed by one and all.