Definitions: “Drones” are non-piloted autonomous aircraft; “remotely piloted aircraft” (RPA) have a pilot and a sensor operator at controls that mimic aircraft controls but are located in a stationary location while the aircraft could be half a world away from start to finish of a mission.
Drew’s agenda for today’s talk
- Who am I?
- What did I do?
- How does it work?
- What do you think?
Everything in the slide show is accessible online and NOT classified information.
Who is Drew?
- Was a Rotary Youth Exchange student in Chantilly, France, and has long been involved in Rotary.
- Is now a member of Hanover Rotary.
- Was born Salem, Ohio.
- Was an AFROTC (Air Force Reserve Officers’ Training Corps) cadet at Kent State University.
- Was commissioned into the Air Force; worked on his master’s degree while on tour in Afghanistan.
- When he decided he needed additional work to apply for medical school, he attended the University of Florida and the University of Las Vegas while still in the AF.
- He was accepted and is now a medical doctor candidate at Dartmouth’s Geisel Medical School.
Drew showed us several photo collages of his life:
- As a young student: musical theater, opera, fencing in France.
- Pre-commission training photos.
- Kandahar Airfield photo of Mq-9 Reaper drone.
- Kuwait photos: Went there in Jan. 2020; two weeks in, the pandemic hit and Drew enjoyed an extended six-month tour while studying remotely for his Masters.
- Photos after commission: Drew transitioned to teaching others how to use RPAs. Candidates are trained first for the mission, then later trained to do takeoffs and landings.
- Photos of Geisel classmates.
- Drew’s wife, Melissa, was with him through all deployments; she’s a nurse at D-H; they live in Enfield with their two-year-old son, Dino, Pug dog Arnold, and a Himalayan cat.
What did Drew do?
- On active duty starting Feb 2016, Drew gained increasing knowledge leading to increasing levels of responsibility: Flight training, instrument qualification training, mission qualification training, mission control elements, RPA liaison officer, launch and recovery training, launch and recovery elements.
- Deployment to Kandahar, Afghanistan in 2019 as launch and recovery instructor upgrade.
- Deployment to Ali al-Salem, Kuwait, in 2020.
- He experienced difficult emotions while driving to and from work thinking about his job of dropping weapons on human beings.
- In Germany as a 2nd lieutenant, he was liaison officer for all RPA operations in Africa, which weren’t all about weapons. He made sure each effort was legal to fly and had flight plans filed; he worked with different countries and their militaries. He coordinated actual people flying and observing and ground parties for the missions. He was also part of high level strategic planning, primarily for the then-Department of Defense, but also flying NATO missions and sometimes for “three-letter organizations” (like CIA & NSA), though the RPA’S spy equipment was not often engaged.
- He left the service in 2023 without a flying license since his experience was not considered to be real “instrument flying.”
How do RPA’s work?
- RPAs need all the control aspects you would find inside aircraft.
- Crew: one pilot, one sensor operator
- Drew flew the General Atomics MQ-9A Reaper Drone—900 shaft horsepower max, carrying 4 hellfire missiles, 2 GBUs (“Guided Bomb Units are precision-guided, “smart” munitions used by the U.S. military to destroy high-value targets with high accuracy, reducing collateral damage.” Wikipedia). Additional weapons may be subbed in for an external fuel tank.
- Altitude—25,000 feet; endurance—up to 27 hours (but in practice, much less); Range—1000 nautical miles (“A nautical mile is a unit of distance used for maritime and aviation navigation, officially defined as 1.852 kilometers or roughly 1.15 statute miles, equaling one “minute,” of latitude along any meridian, allowing for easy calculations on nautical charts.” (Wiki).
- Base cost without weapons is ~$16 million; fully loaded, ~30 million each. A loaded and piloted F-35A goes for ~$135 million.
- Reaper statistics:
◌ 36’ long, 65’ wingspan, 12’6” high, weighing (empty) 4,901 lbs.; fuel capacity, 4,000 lbs.
◌ Missions: Close air support, intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, combat search-and-rescue.
How did Drew do his work?
- He was responsible for LRE (launch and recovery element) = takeoff and landing.
◌ LRE needs a signal to a line-of-sight antenna on the drone.
◌ Once the drone is settled airborne and approaching a loss of line of sight, mission control takes over using satellites to communicate with the weapon; there’s about a two-second delay in those communications.
◌ From Afghanistan, we sent info of takeoff to mission control back in the States. We monitor the flight after mission control takes over to make sure it’s flying properly, then we cut off. On the return, at a certain attitude for landing, they hand control back to us for landing in Afghanistan.
◌ A Reaper protected the recently downed crew member by striking Iranian “military-aged males” believed to be a threat who got within three kilometers of the pilot’s location.
Pros about using RPAs:
- Less expensive than manned aircraft.
- Deployable to hostile areas with minimal risk to operators.
- Long on-station mission time means good continuity of effort.
Cons:
- Slow-moving, poor evasiveness.
- Long crew hours—maximum flight time 16 hours, though usually don’t go over 8. Drew mentioned lots of time flying over Libya seeing nothing but sand.
- Datalinks are very fragile, unreliable.
- No feel/haptics—We have a control stick, rudder pedals, etc., all the regular equipment of any aircraft; but not physically feeling anything on the landing makes it harder.
- Ethical debate about the use of unmanned weapons—there are regular protests outside the base
- Psychological impact on operators—replaying dropping a weapon on humans.
The Big Question: Where does war go from here? What will our enemies do with this tech?
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