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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.
Defense contractors focus on process rather than getting good people, and over time, the good people leave. The Raytheon et al don't care, they just put more restrictive processes in place.
It won't help, if you don't have good people, you won't have good products, no matter how good your processes are.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Twice is coincidence. Three times, it's enemy action.
Colorado legalizes Marijuana,
Drones crash.
Doah!
Every time you ramp production of tech way up, quality control suffers, as you have to bring in new, inexperienced technicians to meet production deadlines. It's no secret that Obama has greatly increased the use of drones over his predecessor, so obviously production demands have gone way up, to the point where the Air Force doesn't have enough pilots and the few pilots they have are working 80 hour weeks.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
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?
Theft is much easier than deliberately introducing flaws. Any changes would have to be made via carefully controlled ECRs (Engineering Change Requests). Flaws are much more likely the result of quality going down in an attempt to meet overoptimistic production schedules, rather than as the result of deliberate sabotage.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Lack of awake pilots for the distances and hours? Lack of classic jet designs ready for the role of 24/7 leadership decapitation? AI drones not ready yet?
Contractors sold the US a complex prototype drone system that got more and more upgraded but what was offered was still not ready for the role.
Years later the basic issues cant be hidden from the press. The electrical failures would point to having to find savings and a lack of good long term design.
Ready for the sale pitch and fly by, long term its going to be replaced soon was seen as mission ready. US policy stretched that time line out too far and now the issues creep in.
Or wait for the new cover story other nations can spoof the connections and GPS globally and are gliding the drones down at will. The very mysterious talking points.
The drones need an expensive new encryption upgrade and will be just fine again.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Sounds like they're manufactured in China.
It does sound surprising like the DJI Phantom's propensity to fall out of the sky. I thought the military stuff would be better than Chinese toys but perhaps not.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Thisi is what happens when you plunder alien technology from their crashed vehicles without understanding the underlying theories and principles before grafting it onto our own.
I deny that I have not avoided attaining the opposite of that which I do not want.
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.
The issue is that we're on generation 3 and 4 of these air crafts. From what I hear a lot of the original systems have been re-engineered to be lighter, more power efficient, and easier to source parts for. But in the process the design, especially main controller, has cut corners. They now have thinner leads on the boards that can't take extreme temperatures or electrical interference caused by extreme loads on straining motors. Also they're taking these units on longer mission in more extreme conditions putting more stress on the machines.
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
2 1/2 ton is old army lingo from deuce and half trucks, the first trucks we sent lend lease to Russia when the Germans attacked them during WW II and our lines were about to collapse.
So, people like to use it for things.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
If this is confined to newer drones, I'd bet that a bean counter somewhere decided they could cut costs by putting in a 90 amp alternator instead of a 130 amp alternator.