Drone Crashes

Drone Crashes Mount at Civilian Airports

I was looking at my stats page and noticed people were looking at this above article button "Drone Crashes mount------" that quoted something about drone crashes at civilian airports around the world. I started thinking about the 5 crashes they mentioned at one airport and about someone who flipped the wrong switch on the ground and accidentally turned off the engine to the drone that made it crash.

If you were a pilot actually on board an airplane and you accidentally turned off the engine this would be pretty obvious. But imagine if you are on the ground and maybe busy doing about 5 other things than flying a drone and your sleave caught in the kill switch for your engine. Because you are not actually in the drone flying it, there might be nothing that would make it obvious that you did that until it was in such flat stall that maybe 30 seconds before it crashed into the ground and likely that would be too late to restart the engine and to recover before it crashed. Another crash was caused by forgetting to put down the landing gear. All these kinds of errors make sense in the context of the fact that you are not on board the plane(drone) so your life is not at stake and this is one of the serious problems of flying something as big as a Predator or a Reaper drone. Your life isn't at stake and so every time you make a mistake there goes several million dollars in hardware.

Now after you read this article imagine Predators and Reaper drones crashing a lot at U.S. Civilian Airports for the same reasons. How many people or planes will be damaged here as well?

However, it is possible that leaving the drone to fly itself autonomously might be safer for both airports and the drone itself. Possibly letting it take off and land by itself might be safer. But, if someone messes with the programming directly or indirectly this Predator or reaper or other drone basically becomes a flying missile not unlike the planes that flew into the twin towers. So, this is a problem too. All someone would have to do is to mess with it's GPS positioning to make it fly anywhere and into anything. This is a potential problem for domestic predators and Reapers and others while flying out of civilian airports in the U.S.

But then, we come to the same place as with driverless cars. Yes. You can and we do have driverless cars and pilotless planes. But, would you trust a human or a computer program more with your life?