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

[Music] this is an mq9 Reaper drone easily distinguished from other aircraft by its opaque canopy that's 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 can be up to 1,600 M away from the Drone that's about the distance from New York City to Puerto Rico over the last two decades the reaper has completely changed the state of Modern Warfare the value that the mq9 provides is is really unmatched with modern aircraft in 2020 a Reaper strike

killed the Iranian General kasum solomani but the reaper perceived Effectiveness on the battlefield may have been overshadowed by the controversy it's caused the biggest concern civilian cas IES while the US military today acknowledged that a drone strike in Cobell they initially said killed an Isis suicide bomber in fact killed only civilians in 2021 as US troops withdrew from Afghanistan a Reaper was involved in a strike in cabul that killed 10 civilians including seven children there appeared to be a threat there was a white car that was traveling looked like it was somebody who maybe belonged

to Isis maybe had weapons explosives and and the trunk so they fired turns out that it was a humanitarian worker actually working for a company that received us funding to help the Afghan people through humanitarian Aid and there were also civilians killed Air Force personnel we spoke to told us drone Warfare keeps Pilots safe by keeping them out of combat zones but there are concerns about the decisions made by pilots operating the aircraft from hundreds of miles away and some critics blame this distance for mistakes that have involved the reaper in the past the emotional

investment is not the same as if you are in a fixed wi aircraft meaning you are the pilot in a plane and looking down on that particular place you might not have the cultural sensitivity you might not be embedded with that Community but the Air Force says processes intended to prevent mistakes do exist there's absolutely a process and really that soak and that study of an objective area to ensure that we're both going after the correct Target and that we're both accounting for any collateral concerns that there may be with an objective area when there's

the possibility of the employment of Munitions on a a specific Target so what does it take to remotely fly the mq9 reaper and how are new pilots being trained to avoid harming innocent civilians military leaders began answering that question months after the incident in kabell when Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin directed The Pentagon to come up with a plan addressing civilian casualties in drone Warfare in January 2022 the civilian harm mitigation and response action plan was finalized in August 2022 and among other things outlines where drone pilot training should be updated Insider visited Canon air

force base in Clovis New Mexico to see how Pilots are being trained to fly this demand aircraft the Air Force been operating remotely piloted aircraft for a couple decades now and a couple different versions originally built for reconnaissance operations the mq1 Predator was modified to fire missiles in 2001 and after September 11th it was deployed to US Air bases near Afghanistan the mq9 reaper was really the successor of the Predator with Advanced capabilities longer endurance all around just a a more capable aircraft that allows for that persistent ISR that the the battlefield commanders so desperately

needs in order to increase their situational awareness and provide them with options for executing various Mission sets these missions include Gathering intelligence surveillance combat search and rescue providing close air support and precision strikes uh welcome everybody uh to the a39 brief today at 0530 the 12th special operations Squadron begins its training Mission with a pre-flight briefing we have four echol Lo on there for 309 lb weight and then three 3514 lb of gas no ER take can't so uh the weight's going to put us about 9600 lb so we're going to be good to take

off they just no touch and goes yet Reaper missions are split into two elements or teams first the launch and Recovery element sunrise for the day is 622 so we could have uh birds and thermal crossover be a factor at take off time the pilot and sensor operator are responsible for working with the ground crew to get the reaper safely in the air and headed toward the desired area uh we're just doing a launch directly to uh directly to the departure we'll go to highkey for departure and then um we'll head off the range and

get to 16,000 ft once the craft is in the air controls are handed over via satellite control to a second crew known as the mission control element This Crew handles the specific aspects of a mission's objectives when the mission is complete the controls are handed back to the launch and Recovery element which is then responsible for landing the Drone safely all right cool brief complete the MP9 Reaper is is really known for its persistence and its ability to loiter for long periods of time an aircraft's loiter 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 about 20 hours at a time the mq9 ability to complete such long missions comes down to design it has a 66t wingspan nearly twice the length of its 36 ft body when empty the reaper weighs only 4900 lb which combined with its long Wings is key to helping it stay in the air longer the standard payload weight on a Reaper mission is 3,750 lb but with an extended range modification the aircraft can take off weighing up to 11,700 lb it's

propelled by a single 900 shaft horsepower turbo prop engine the reaper can be outfitted with up to eight laser guided missiles including air to ground hellfires the practice weapons seen here are only used during training with no pilot on board all of the visual are captured by a state-of-the-art sensor mq9 reapers are equipped with Ron's multi-spectral targeting systems which allow long range surveillance Target acquisition and tracking and while the sensors are high-tech questions remain about whether they can provide imagery that's clear enough for the crews to rely on to make life or death decisions one

of the issues that has been brought up about the Cobble drone strike is that there was Fuzzy footage I don't know exactly what part that played in killing 10 civilians technology will always improve and I'm hoping that that technology will improve in service of not just lethality for the Target which of course is the US military's interest but also minimizing harm to civilians so this is our Ground Control station we have two cockpits within this box so it's a portable box we can load up on whatever plane we need to load onto and get it

get anywhere in the world so we maintain the agile capability that's required of us these days you'll see cables coming out the back uh that run along the ground to these towers these are our ground data terminals so when we're flying the aircraft in line of sight this is the actual tower that facilitates that data link in the line of sight the reaper has a range of about 1,150 mi from the GCS and with an extended range modification can reach 1,611 MI all right so this is one of our cockpits we got one on this

side and one on the other side to maximize space so traditionally with all Air Force aircraft the Pilot's going to sit on the left side and in our case the sensor operator or our our co-pilot sits on the right side and we've got our heads up display uh it's off right now cuz we're not flying but this is where uh you're actually going to see all your in all your feedback for what the plane's doing so all that uh the traditional physiological senses that you can't get in the MP9 you're going to see that here

and you have to learn how to inter interpret all that data with your eyes so up here is our tracker map so we can load all the maps of everywhere we're flying uh within the world and then there's a lot of functionality on here we can actually point and click at the uh any way where we want the plane to fly we can actually put a loader right there click there and say like I want you to orbit within 5 miles of this of this point and the plane's autopilot will go do that we call

it a pre-program mission but we manage all the functionality of the map on top on that tracker it's usually just a p and sensor finding the plane but if we need to get any extra folks into the into the cockpit uh for to execute our mission we can sit them here at any of these stations the Air Force says that one benefit of having a ground control station is the ability to bring in assistance that they can't have on a traditional Aviation Mission with other planes they can put a lot of people on the plane

but when the plane takes off whoever's on there is on there if we're doing search and rescue we could literally have a doctor come in and assess uh someone on the ground we could have uh survival expert in there if it's a combat search and rescue scenario after the pre-flight briefing the crew and their instructors stepped to a large Bay full of portable racks that resemble those inside the GCS so today we start off we had to do a basic uh launch to a uh to hand over to the Miss control element got our GCS

repaired got the aircraft turned on check to make sure all our data links were working got the engine turned on and then uh then we took off flew around the pattern once uh on our way out to the out of the range to go do the Handover going to throw the speed lever up taxi MoDOT is on h38 clear for takeoff Runway 22 copy traffic flaps are set 10.4 I'm ready cool everyone ready yep all right breaks out throttle full forward F eight rolling rotate rotate one in undergraduate flying training when we're learning how to

fly it's a very physiological Force you learn to feel what the plane's doing um through the various sensor sensor like you can smell stuff if it's if something's not right you can feel uh the gForce hitting your hting your rear end if you're if you're pulling G's you can't do that in our plane cuz we're flying at zgs we call it so we learn how to feel the plane with our eyes so we have everything in our heads up display right there and our tracker display and uh get some engineering information down below but you

learn how to interpret all the data coming in through your HUD to feel what your planes doing that you can't actually feel physiologically with the rest of your body turbulence is a difficult one because all you can see is the plane rocking up and down in relation to the Horizon of what you see in front of you on the camera so you have to monitor the air speed of the aircraft and what it actually looks like when it's moving after successfully getting the reaper into the air the launch and Recovery element has time to perform

a high stakes training Mission at the range we simulated having a Hellfire on the wing of the aircraft and we found a Target to engage with building under your crosshairs 1 three Sierra box Trot Tango one 1 31 980 Your Mark Friendly's no Factor you grass back out the wheel for re attacks say ready remarks restrictions Hades ready sorry the fusing is strange with the echo1 that's what's going on here we got an opportunity to troubleshoot some stuff today uh we had a a missile that wasn't working properly that our pilot got a chance to

experience which was kind of something you don't get to do every day it's not awesome but it's it's good training for our launcher recovery Pilots uh you're going to want to go to uh status so I just said failed verification uh then you'll go to station status we in this role um we have to be ready to go land a plane uh that's broken all sorts of different ways and we have to be as best prepared as we can to go do that for Target it's the building under the Crosshair for aim Point uh top

of the middle of the building works for me we've got call in with rifle and time of flight plan here is to do it just from the wheel and for shift it's per the jte and clearance on Final and ESS will be to the wheel all right we're looking at 8 km out right now time of flight is 32 seconds all right you ready ready here we go consent trigger before firing the missile the pilot must get consent there's crew coordination that occurs and that there is that consent between the operators of the aircraft and

the Tactical controllers of the aircraft that what it is that we're actioning is in fact the the appropriate and accurate objective simulated Splash you see a big effect safe first and foremost like there's no warm body in the cockpit right so whenever uh we need to go into a high threat Mission area then we can send our plane in there without risk of losing our bodies right so we have we don't have any risk of losing the P which that helps the decision makers a lot if you're a military commander you don't want your men

and women In Harm's Way um drones can be very precise very ACC accurate they can hit the target if you have the right information about that Target and sometimes they can minimize civilian harm but under international law and the Geneva conventions civilian casualties can be legal it has to be proportionate to the military Target you have to distinguish between civilians and combatants and you can't just willy-nilly cause civilian harm in addition you don't have to recognize the civilian harm that you cause you don't have to make an apology you don't have to say here's why

that happened these are things that the US military has learned over time that it needs to do and that's what we're hoping to see in the future and though these things aren't required by international law the pentagon's 2022 civilian harm mitigation and response action plan includes official acknowledgement of harm cases for civilian compensation and preventative measures to stop future mistakes we we see it as our moral imperative to make sure that we're providing the absolute highest standard of training to ensure that air crew members who find themselves in situations of increased collateral are equipped with

the tools and resources and training to ensure that we're mitigating any civilian casualty to the maximum extent possible and though removing drone pilots from conflict zones can limit physical harm to Airmen these Pilots still deal with the impacts of War like post-traumatic stress disorder they're not robots it is a very emotional thing to be a pilot and get back from Afghanistan and go to dinner with your family and your kids and they're deciding whether to shoot or not shoot and that comes with an incredible burden an incredible emotional burden and once we're done tering now

you're going to reload the weapons for the Handover with every military Mission there's a moral imperative to make sure that you're the best you can be at your job we take pride in our ability to do uh the full mission over here as as launch recovery Pilots but also um maintaining the proficiencies and the currencies for the weapons as well despite its complicated past the mq9 reaper continues to be a key military asset yeah as we're moving away from some of our previous theaters of conflict Mite is still bringing that persistence to various theaters and

various parts of the the globe it's also allowing us to contribute to the the mission of integrated deterrence for any would be adversary or competitors in the various spaces around the world where where there are competing and conflicting resources and and uh and priorities for objectives security objectives the reaper continues to make headlines in July 2023 a US operated Reaper killed Islamic State group leader Usama al-muhajir and 4 months earlier a Russian fighter jet collided with a Reaper over Syria causing the Drone to crash [Music]