How Air Force Drone Pilots "Fly" The $32 Million MQ-9 Reaper | Boot Camp | Insider Business

This is an MQ-9 Reaper

drone

that is easily distinguished from other aircraft by its opaque canopy because the pilot sits here even as this Reaper flies over the high plains of New Mexico. This portable container is called a ground control station or GCS, which may be on top. At 1,600 miles away from the Drone, which is roughly the distance between New York City and Puerto Rico over the past two decades, the Reaper has completely changed the state of Modern Warfare. The value the MQ-9 offers is truly unmatched by modern aircraft in 2020. The Reapers strike killed Iranian General Qasim Soleimani, but the Reapers perceived that its effectiveness on the battlefield may have been overshadowed by the controversy surrounding has caused the most concern over civilian casualties, while the US military today acknowledged that a

drone

strike in Kabul they initially said killed an Isis suicide bomber. in fact, it only killed civilians in 2021 as US troops withdrew from Afghanistan.

A Reaper was involved in an attack in Kabul that killed 10 civilians, including seven children. There seemed to be a threat. There was a white car traveling. It looked like it was someone who maybe belonged to Isis maybe he had explosive weapons in the trunk so they shot it turns out he was a humanitarian worker he actually worked for a company that received funding from the United States to help the Afghan people through humanitarian aid and there were also civilians killed Air Force personnel we spoke to We were told that drone warfare keeps

pilots

safe by keeping them out of combat zones, but there are concerns about the decisions made by the

pilots

who operate the plane from hundreds miles away and some critics blame this distance for mistakes that have involved the Reaper in the past.

Emotional investment is not the same as if you are in a meeting on a fixed wing aircraft, you are the pilot of an aircraft and you are looking at that particular place, you may not have the cultural sensitivity, you may not be integrated into that community, but in the Air Force. It says that the process is intended to prevent mistakes from happening, there is absolutely a process and really that immersion and that study of an objective area to ensure that we are both pursuing the right objective and that we are both taking into account any collateral concerns that there may be. be in a target area when there is a possibility of employing munitions on a specific target, so what does it take to remotely fly the MQ-9 Reaper and how are new pilots trained to avoid harming innocents and civilians?

Military leaders began to answer that question. Months after the Kabul incident and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin directed the Pentagon to develop a plan addressing civilian casualties in drone warfare by January 2022, the Civilian Damage Mitigation and Response Action Plan was finalized. in August 2022 and, among other things, describes where the drones are located. Pilot training needs to be updated. An expert visited Cannon Air Force Base in Clovis, New Mexico, to see how pilots are trained to fly this unmanned aircraft. The Air Force has been operating remotely piloted aircraft for a couple of decades and a couple of different versions originally built for reconnaissance operations.

The MQ-1 Predator was modified to fire missiles in 2001 and after 9/11 was deployed to US air bases near Afghanistan. The MQ-9 Reaper was really the successor to the Predator with advanced capabilities, greater endurance in every way, just a more capable aircraft. that enables that persistent ISR that battlefield commanders so desperately need to increase their situational awareness and give them options to execute various mission sets. These missions include: Gather intelligence, surveillance, combat, search and rescue, provide close air support and precision strikes, welcome. Everyone uh to report East 39 today at zero five thirty the 12th Special Operations Squadron begins its training mission with a pre-flight briefing.

We have four Echo Logs in there for 309 pounds of weight and then three 3514 pound gasoline ones, no ER needs that. Oh boy it's going to cost us around £9,600 so we'll be ready to take off today but there's no contact and it goes on but the Reaper missions are split into two elements or teams first the launch and recovery element the dawn of the day is at 6.22 so that we can have birds and a thermal crossing as factory takeoff time, the pilot and sensor operator are responsible for working with the ground personnel so that the harvester is safely in the air and head towards the desired area.

We're just doing a straight Lance to log the exit, a little bit of high key for the exit and then we'll go out of range and hit 16,000 feet once the ship is airborne. Controls are handed over via satellite control to a second known crew. as an element of mission control. This crew handles the specifics of emissions targets. When the mission is complete, controls are returned to the launch and recovery element, which is then responsible for landing the drone safely. Okay, complete freeze. The MK9 Reaper is really well known. for its persistence and its ability to loiter for long periods of time and the aircraft's loitering time is the amount of time it can stay in the air before needing to refuel and the

reaper

can stay in the air for approximately 20 hours in a row, the mq- 9's ability to complete such long missions comes down to design: It has a wingspan of 66 feet, nearly twice the length of its 36-foot body.

When empty, the Reaper weighs just 4,900 pounds, which combined with its long wings is key to helping it stay in the air. Longer, the standard payload weight on a re-open is 3,750 pounds, but with an extended range modification, the aircraft can take off weighing up to 11,700 pounds. It is powered by a single 900 horsepower turboprop engine. The mower can be equipped with up to eight laser-guided motors. Missiles, including air-to-surface Hellfires. The practice weapons seen here are only used during training without a pilot on board. All images are captured by a state-of-the-art sensor. The MQ-9 Reapers are equipped with a Raytheon multispectral system. targeting systems that enable long-range surveillance Target acquisition and tracking, and although the sensors are high-tech, questions remain about whether they can provide clear enough images that crews can rely on them to make life decisions or death, one of the problems that has been raised.

What was mentioned about the drone attack in Kabul is that there were blurry images. I don't know exactly what role he played in the deaths of 10 civilians. Technology will always improve, and I hope that technology improves in the service of not just lethality to the target. which of course is the interest of the US military, but it also minimizes harm to civilians, so this is our ground control station. We have two cabins inside this box, so it's a portable box that we can load onto whatever plane we need to load and take it out. anywhere in the world, so we maintained that agile capability that is required of us these days, you will see cables coming out the back that run along the ground to these towers, these are our ground data terminals, so when we fly the line of sight aircraft this is the actual tower that facilitates that line of sight data link the

reaper

has a range of approximately 1150 miles from the GCS and with an extended range modification it can reach 1611 miles so This is one of our cockpits.

We have one on this side and one on the other to maximize space, so traditionally with all Air Force aircraft the deck will be located on the left side and in our case the operator of the sensor or our co-pilot will be located on the right side. side and we have our head-up display, it's off right now because we're not flying, but this is where you'll actually see all of your INF or all of your feedback on what the airplane is doing, all of that, uh, the traditional physiological. Senses that you can't get on the MQ-9, you will see here and you will have to learn to interpret all that data with your eyes, so up here is our tracking map so we can load all the maps from everywhere. we're flying inside the world and then there's a lot of functions here, we can point and click on the uh anyway where we want the plane to apply, we can put a charger right there, click there and say like I want you to do it. orbit within five miles of this point and the plane's autopilot will do that.

We call it a pre-programmed mission, but we manage all the map functions on top of that tracker. Usually it's only a pound of sensor to find the plane, but if we need to get extra people into the cockpit for our mission next year, we can seat them here at any of these stations. The Air Force says one benefit of having a ground control station is the ability to bring in assistance that a traditional aviation mission can't have with other aircraft, they can put a lot of people on the plane, but when the plane takes off, whoever be there, if we're doing search and rescue, we could literally have a doctor come. and evaluate someone on the ground, we could have a survival expert there if it's a combat search and rescue scenario.

After the pre-flight briefing, the crew and their instructors headed to a large bay filled with portable racks that resemble those found inside the GCS today. We started, we had to do a basic launch to hand over mission control to the mission control element. We repaired our DCS. We started the plane. We verified that all our data links were working. We started the engine and then took off. We fly. around the pattern once on our way out of range to do the handover always up easy mode is on hey it's very clear for takeoff Runway 2-2 copy of the traffic flaps are set 10.4 I'm ready great everyone ready yeah everyone right for that rotate rotate climb one in undergraduate flight training when we're learning to fly it's a very physiological

force

, you learn to feel what the airplane is doing through the various sensory sensors, like you can smell things, if something is not right, you can feel it. uh the g

force

hits your butt if you're pulling G you can't do that on our plane because we're flying at zero G we call it that we learn to feel the plane with our eyes so we have everything on our head up display right there and the flame of our tractors gets engineering information underneath, but you learn to interpret all the data coming through your HUD to feel what your airplane is doing that you can't actually feel.

Physiologically with the rest of your body, turbulence is difficult because all you can see is the plane rocking up and down relative to the horizon of what you see in front of you on the camera, so you have to monitor the airplane speed. and what it actually looks like when moving after successfully getting the Reaper off the ground, the launch and recovery element has time to perform a high risk training mission in the field, we simulate having a Hellfire on the wing of the plane and find a The goal of interacting with the same feedback constraints ready for output is strange, since we had the opportunity to fix some problems today, we had a missile that was not working properly and I probably had the opportunity to experiment, something that cannot be done .

Doing it every day isn't great, but it's good training for our monster recovery pilots. I don't want to go set up the failure check, so you will go to us in this role, we have to be ready to land a plane that is completely broken. in different ways and we have to be as prepared as we can to do that or four works on the top of the middle of the building, we have Colin with a rifle and the flight time plan here is to do it only from the wheel. and for the shift it's for the j-tech and clearance on Final, okay, we're looking at eight kilometers away right now, flight time is 32 seconds, okay, ready, set, here we go, trigger Consent Before firing the missile, the pilot must obtain consent. crew coordination occurs and there is that consent between the aircraft operators and the aircraft tactical controllers that what we are acting on is, in fact, the appropriate and precise target, first and foremost, as if there were no hot body in the cabin.

So whenever we need to go to a high threat mission area, then we can send our aircraft there without risk of losing ourbodies. So we have no risk of losing the pilot, which helps the decision makers a lot. You are a military commander, you don't love your men and women. In Harm's Way drones can be very precise, very accurate, they can hit the target if you have the right information about that target, and sometimes they can minimize harm to civilians, but under international law. and the Geneva conventions, civilian casualties can be illegal, it has to be proportional to the military objective, we must distinguish between civilians and combatants and no harm can be caused to civilians, whether we want to or not, furthermore, it is not necessary to recognize harm to civilians. that you cause you don't have to apologize you don't have to say here's why that happened these are things that the US military has learned over time to do and that's what we hope to see in the future and although these things are not required by international law the Pentagon's 2022 civilian harm response and mitigation action plan includes official recognition of harm cases for civil compensation and preventative measures to stop future mistakes, we consider it our moral imperative ensure that we are providing the highest level of training to ensure that aircrew members who find themselves in heightened situations are equipped with the tools, resources and training to ensure that we are mitigating any civilian casualties to the maximum extent possible. possible and removing Drone pilots from conflict zones can limit physical harm to airmen.

These pilots still deal with the impacts of war, such as post-traumatic stress disorder. They are not robots. It's very emotional to be a pilot and come back from Afghanistan and you go to dinner with your family and your kids and they decide whether to shoot or not, and that carries an incredible burden, an incredible emotional burden on the Endeavor. With every military mission, there is a moral imperative to ensure that you are the best you can be at your job, we are proud of our ability to perform the full mission here, as launch recovery pilots, but also maintaining competencies and currencies For weapons, as well as its complicated past, it remains a key army.

An asset, yes, as we move away from some of our previous conflict scenarios, United continues to bring that persistence to various theaters and to various parts of the world, and also allows us to contribute to the mission of integrated deterrence for any potential adversaries or competitors. and the various spaces around the world where there are competing and conflicting resources and priorities for security objectives, the Reaper continues to make headlines in July 2023, a US-operated Reaper killed Islamic State group leader Usama al-mu hajir and four months earlier, a Russian fighter jet collided with a Reaper over Syria, causing the drone to crash overseas.