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More Air Force Drones Are Crashing Than Ever As Mysterious New Problems Emerge (washingtonpost.com)
schwit1 points out that a record number of Air Force drones crashed in major accidents last year. Leading the accident count is the Reaper which has seen a number of sudden electrical failures. The Washington Post reports: "A record number of Air Force drones crashed in major accidents last year, documents show, straining the U.S. military's fleet of robotic aircraft when it is in more demand than ever for counterterrorism missions in an expanding array of war zones. Driving the increase was a mysterious surge in mishaps involving the Air Force's newest and most advanced 'hunter-killer' drone, the Reaper, which has become the Pentagon's favored weapon for conducting surveillance and airstrikes against the Islamic State, al-Qaeda and other militant groups. The Reaper has been bedeviled by a rash of sudden electrical failures that have caused the 21/2-ton drone to lose power and drop from the sky, according to accident-investigation documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. Investigators have traced the problem to a faulty starter-generator,but have been unable to pinpoint why it goes haywire or devise a permanent fix.
Twice is coincidence. Three times, it's enemy action.
What is "21/2-ton" supposed to mean? 10.5 tons? 2.5 tons? And what "ton" are we talking about, 1000 kg or some other bullshit definition based on pounds?
Business schools teach that employees are fungible assets, i.e. interchangeable parts, so the only things that matter are things that can be tracked on spreadsheets -- like process. The fact that people matter is quickly becoming forgotten in the quest for maximizing quarterly return on investment.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Sadly, business schools are full of morons with no real fucking understanding of the businesses they claim to know how to run.
An MBA used to be an engineer who went back to school to learn to be a manager.
Someone who get a business degree and then an MBA? They're a useless idiot, with no real world understanding, and the mistaken belief they know how to run things.
I've met a few of those ... and they definitely fall into the category of if you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
How people got hoodwinked into believing these idiots on anything defies any rational explanation.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
The enemies in this case are those fleecing the US taxpayers to fill our armed forces with halfassed shoddy crap.
Sure, there might be a thin veneer of deniability, a "we couldn't possibly have known, it was a rogue engineer" of Volkswagen proportions, but all these things are vetted from the very top, and tested and retested endlessly. So long as the percentage of 'duds' doesn't break certain limits beyond which the complicity would become too obvious, there will continue to be tragic little whoopsies.
When you've got the market cornered and employees in charge of awarding you contracts, every crash is just another new sale anyways.
Actually looking at the graphs in TFA, the total losses have been pretty steady for the last five years, just proportionally more in the Air Force in 2015, as opposed to the other services.
Defense contractors focus on process rather than getting good people, and over time, the good people leave.
This is all of government, and it has to be that way because you are spending public money. You can always say, but hey Bill Gates or Steve Jobs didn't care about process and look what they achieved. But then neither did Kenny Lay, Bernard Ebbers, Dick Fuld, Bernie Madoff etc etc. and when it comes to the integrity of your nation, it's better to plod along at moderate pace and survive, than to fly and possibly crash and burn.