Maryland Drone Crashes: The Other Shoe Drops

At the inception of the No Drones Maryland website, we raised the alarm about the report of a drone crash in the Chesapeake.

On June 22, 2014, the Washington Post published the results of a far-reaching investigation into crashes that have occurred in the U.S. drone program.

Shockingly, of the 194 major ("Class A") crashes that the Washington Post was able to document, 47  occurred within the United States.

Below is full information on the Maryland crash we originally described, plus a second Maryland crash we've now learned about from the Washington Post report.

(See the full online database of crashes on the Washington Post website for full details of these and other drone crashes.)

Elliott Island Road area and nearby wildlife refuge

Date: June 11, 2012
Location:  near Elliott Island Road, Dorchester County, Md., 22 miles east of Naval Air Station Patuxent River
Estimated damage:  N/A
Details: "A Navy surveillance drone crashed into a wildlife refuge on Maryland's Eastern Shore after a malfunction with the navigation system. The RQ-4A aircraft was a Broad Area Maritime Surveillance Demonstrator -- the Navy's version of the Air Force Global Hawk. The pilot and crew were civilian contractors from the manufacturer Northrop Grumman. Navy investigators blamed a failure of the right inboard ruddervator actuator but also criticized the pilot for not following emergency guidelines."

Date: October 24, 2013
Location:  Naval Air Station Patuxent
Estimated damage:  N/A
Details: "A [A Fire Scout (MQ-8B)] helicopter drone sustained damage during a hard landing after a test flight. A Navy investigation is pending."

Related posts

Ten (10) drone crashes occurred in the state of California alone between the years 2004 and 2011.

(See California: Is the Sky Falling? )

Maryland Drone Experience A Harbinger for U.S.A.?

Just this past June, people around the country and around the world were startled to hear that an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), or drone, had crashed in Maryland. "The RQ-4A Global Hawk drone crashed during a routine training flight from Naval Air Station Patuxent River," reported CNN.

People shouldn't have been surprised. According to the Department of Defense Report to Congress on Future Unmanned Aircraft Systems Training, Operations, and Sustainability (April 2012), Maryland has two locations that have been designated as potential basing locations for unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) [i.e. drones] (p. 8 ff.).

And it is becoming more and more clear that drones pose an even greater crash hazard than other forms of military aircraft. (See "FAA Documents Raise Questions About Safety of Drones in U.S. Airspace" in WIRED magazine online.)

The table below gives information on the types of drones that are proposed for basing at each location.

BASE	Predator/Reaper type	Shadow/Raven type	Other
NAS Patuxent	MQ8	RQ4-Blk40, RQ-7B, RQ4A-BAMS, RQ4C-BAMS	UCAS-D, UCLASS
Webster Outlying Field	MQ8	RQ-7B

The DoD report on drone basing in the United States lists one hundred different bases that are set to fly drones, including locations in nearly every U.S. state. How long will it be before U.S. skies are full of drones, and reports of drone crashes are a regular occurrence?

And the threat of drones in domestic airspace is just the beginning: killer drones have become the principal tool of U.S. foreign policy, and the military industrial complex is never far away. In Maryland, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory has a contract to do drone research. Read about how the Baltimore Nonviolence Center and the National Campaign for Nonviolent Resistance [NCNR] are working to get Johns Hopkins to stop participating in killer drone research.

To get involved in the resistance movement to stop drones -- in Maryland and everywhere -- contact Max Obuszewski: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net.