The day the Fire Scout went rogue
August 25th, 2010 | Aviation Washington | Posted by Phil Ewing
"Y'know what? No, I am not going to zoom in on the fantail of that unidentified fishing vessel. I want to go see the Washington Monument!" // Navy
It must get really tiresome being a Fire Scout unmanned helicopter. Your human operators are always making you take off, fly your stupid old waypoints, look at boring objects through your Forward-Looking Infrared sensors, and then go back to base (or the ship). Sometimes you want to just… break free, y’know? Well, after more than 1,000 hours in the air for the Navy’s various test models, one Fire Scout finally did:
Navy operators lost control of an unmanned aircraft earlier this month and were unable to regain control before the aircraft entered restricted airspace around the U.S. capital. According to a Navy statement, the incident took place Aug. 2 when, about 75 minutes into a routine test flight, an MQ-8B Fire Scout unmanned helicopter operating out of the Patuxent River test facilities in southern Maryland lost its control link with ground operators. The aircraft then flew about 23 miles on a north-by-northwest course and entered the National Capital Region restricted airspace, part of the Air Defense Identification Zone surrounding Washington, D.C.
Yes! If you had the chance for an exclusive aerial tour of landmark-rich Washington, D.C., wouldn’t you take it? No harm done — Navy controllers reacquired the mischievous bird and, as our senior colleague Christopher P. Cavas wrote, “commanded” it to land, which it did, with no damage, injuries or problems. The Navy blamed a software glitch.
Yeah, right — a software glitch called “ennui.”
Comments
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A.J. Heredia Says:
August 26th, 2010 at 9:43 amWith millions of lines of code and interactions between hardware and software that no single person can trace end-to-end, it’s no wonder this doesn’t happen more often. I’m not sure if this is a good or bad development given that another FireScout detachment is current on COMBAT OPEVAL in SWA. Would we have preferred that a unit go rogue over enemy territory and potentially compromising a mission or classified tech? Or that it go rogue in this case and potentially cause damage and injuries to the capitol. Choices, choices….
One thing’s for sure – Terminator it ain’t.