Crashes mount as military flies more drones in US

The year before, state Sen. Mike Folmer (R), who lives five miles away, had introduced a bill that would prohibit state and local agencies from using drones for surveillance. But he had no idea that the catapult-launched drones were flying over his community.

“I’ll be honest with you. I didn’t know what was going on there,” he said of the operations at Fort Indiantown Gap.

Don Bell, superintendent of the Northern Lebanon School District, declined to criticize the Army, noting that many school parents work at the base. He acknowledged, however, that the accident made him uncomfortable.

“It’s definitely a concern,” he said. “We always keep an eye to the sky.”

The Pennsylvania Army National Guard trains with a dozen Shadows. It has authorization from the FAA to fly just outside Fort Indiantown Gap’s restricted airspace, said Harvey Browne, an unmanned-aircraft systems analyst at the Army National Guard Bureau in Arlington, Va.

The Shadows often fly over Lickdale Elementary as they descend to land, Browne said. The drone that crashed did not stray off-course and was “flying exactly where it was supposed to” when it malfunctioned, he added.

A spokeswoman for Textron Systems, the Shadow’s manufacturer, said the company was prohibited by its Army contract from publicly discussing operations.

Bill Irby, senior vice president and general manager with the company, said in a statement that the Shadow has recorded about 900,000 flight hours and “continues to perform with high availability and reliability rates for customers in some of the world’s most challenging environments.”

‘A sick airplane’

The military provides the FAA with data on its drone accidents. But the agency will not release the information, saying the Pentagon provides it on the condition that it not be made public. The Pentagon will not disclose the data, either, deferring requests to each branch of the armed forces.

In response to Freedom of Information Act filings and other public-records requests, the armed forces released records identifying 47 major drone crashes in the United States between 2001 and 2013.

Since then, at least two more accidents have occurred. In addition to the Shadow that wrecked in Pennsylvania on April 3, a QF-4 target drone from Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico crashed Feb. 7 on land that is part of White Sands National Monument.

The Post’s tally of 49 drone crashes since 2001 understates the scope of the problem. The armed forces would release records only about “Class A” accidents — crashes that, under current standards, inflicted at least $2 million in damage to the aircraft or other property. Locations, dates and circumstances of mishaps that resulted in less damage were withheld because officials said they did not require a public investigation.

The military also withholds details about dangerous incidents in which a crash is narrowly avoided.

On Aug. 2, 2010, the Navy lost control of a one-ton MQ-8 Fire Scout helicopter drone during a test flight from Naval Air Station Patuxent River, on the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland. The drone buzzed 23 miles to the northwest and entered highly restricted airspace surrounding Washington.

Commanders at the North American Aerospace Defense Command, set up to defend against Soviet attacks, prepared to scramble fighter jets to shoot down the runaway drone. But before the jets took off, controllers regained the satellite link with the Fire Scout and flew it safely back to base.

The Navy kept the incident quiet until three weeks later, when word leaked to reporters.

“It’s headed right for the heart of the National Capital Region,” then-Vice Adm. James Winnefeld, head of the U.S. Northern Command at the time, recounted to reporters. “Do you let it run out of gas and hopefully crash in a farmer’s field, or do you actually take action to shoot it down? You certainly don’t want to shoot it down over a populated area if you can avoid it.”

Navy officials said the drone came no closer than 40 miles to the Capitol. Jamie Cosgrove, a Navy spokeswoman, said a software anomaly prevented the drone from flying its preprogrammed route in the event of a lost satellite link. The Navy denied a request from The Post for its investigative report on the incident.

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