"Richard Riley" wrote in message oups.com...

"It wasn't the thing going berserk and going away. It had some sort of
massive technical, mechanical failure, who knows," he said.


Great to know those things are being used in civilian airspace.

I remember reading about one of the Global Hawk flights when they lost the datalink. The bird was headed out towards
Barstow or Bakersfield, and all they could see was the TV picture coming back. They pressed the shut down button (self
destruct, pop a chute or whatever it does) and it did not respond. Finally they were able to get some yaw control or
similar and they were able to spiral it down and in before it got over a congested area.