Our fear of UAVs may be well founded:



On Tue, 08 Aug 2006 08:53:32 -0400, "Skylune"
wrote in
outaviation.com:


http://www.azcentral.com/news/articl...s-Side-ON.html

Crash stirs debate on drone safety

Alan Levin
USA Today
Aug. 7, 2006 08:30 AM


The explosion nearly jolted Barbara Trent out of bed. At first she
thought someone had bombed the high-desert scrubland where she lives
in southern Arizona.

When daylight arrived a few hours later April 25, Trent and her
neighbors realized that what they heard wasn't a bomb at all. Instead,
an unmanned drone the government uses to monitor the nearby Mexican
border had slammed into a hillside near several homes.

The Predator B, which weighs as much as 10,500 pounds and has a
wingspan of 66 feet, had been crippled when its operator accidentally
switched off its engine. It glided as close as 100 feet above two
homes before striking the ground, says Tom Duggin, the owner of one of
the houses. advertisement

"I was very, very concerned," says Trent, whose house is about 1,000
feet from the crash site. "If it had hit my house, I'd be dead."

Flight issues

The crash of the Customs and Border Protection plane has been a
catalyst heating up the debate over whether it is safe to operate
unmanned aircraft in the nation's airways.

Thousands of unmanned aerial vehicles regularly ply the skies above
the war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan. As pressure grows to put the
UAVs to use in the United States, federal officials and aviation
industry representatives are conducting highly technical discussions
on how unmanned aircraft should be regulated.

The debate also addresses the philosophy of what it means to fly. In a
sense, UAVs are the first example of robot-like devices being allowed
to roam the earth, says Massachusetts Institute of Technology aviation
professor John Hansman.

The questions they raise are profound. Can a machine replace the
skills of a veteran pilot? If there are no people aboard, should the
safety standards developed over the past 100 years for aircraft be
eased? Should a human controlling a drone from a desktop computer be
subject to the same standards as a traditional pilot?

"The increased use of unmanned aircraft by (the military) is certainly
challenging some of the long-held beliefs of organizations that have
worked aviation safety for a long time," says Dyke Weatherington, who
oversees UAV procurement at the Pentagon.

Safety precautions

In hearings before the House Aviation Subcommittee in March, Michael
Kostelnik, a retired general who heads Customs and Border Protection's
Air and Marine office, assured lawmakers that the agency's Predator
had robust backup systems to ensure safety.

"This redundant system works on all levels, from sensors to the flight
computer, and provides a triple-check system to protect the vehicle
and others in the airspace," said Kostelnik's written testimony.
....