[Vo]:Navy Drone Violated Washington Airspace

[Jed Rothwell]

This was not piloted by me. I may crash RC 
airplanes but I do not violate DC airspace with them.

See:
<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/26/us/26drone.html?scp=1&sq=navy%20drone%20fire%20scout&st=cse>http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/26/us/26drone.html?scp=1&sq=navy%20drone%20fire%20scout&st=cse 


This is a fairly hilarious description in the deadpan N. Y. Times style.

QUOTES with snide comments by me in square brackets:

Navy Drone Violated Washington Airspace

By ELISABETH BUMILLER

WASHINGTON ­ The skies over the nation’s capital 
are crowded with presidential aircraft, military 
flyovers and the Delta shuttle, but this month a 
strange new bird was briefly among them: a United 
States Navy drone that wandered into the 
restricted airspace around Washington before operators could stop it.

Navy spokesmen could not say Wednesday if anyone 
on the ground was alarmed by the drone ­ 
officially an MQ-8B Fire Scout Vertical Takeoff 
and Landing unmanned aerial vehicle ­ which looks 
like a small windowless helicopter and was flying 
at 2,000 feet. The Navy did say that the drone 
got within 40 miles of Washington before 
operators were able to re-establish communication 
and guide it back to its base in southern Maryland.

Still, the Aug. 2 incident resulted in the 
grounding of all six of the Navy’s Fire Scouts as 
well as an inquiry into what went wrong. The Navy 
is calling the problem a “software issue” that foiled the drone’s operators.

Or, as Cmdr. Danny Hernandez, a Navy spokesman, 
put it: “When they lose contact with the Fire 
Scout, there’s a program that’s supposed to have 
it immediately return to the airfield to land 
safely. That did not happen as planned.” [I guess not!]

Navy spokesmen said the Fire Scout, made by 
Northrop Grumman, was a little more than an hour 
into a test flight operating out of Naval Air 
Station Patuxent River on the Chesapeake Bay when 
operators lost its control link. The drone then 
flew 23 miles on a north-by-northwest course to 
enter Washington’s restricted airspace. A 
half-hour later, Navy spokesmen said, operators 
re-established control and the drone landed safely back at Patuxent.

The Navy did not describe the scene inside the 
ground control station as operators sought to 
re-establish communication with the drone. . . . 
[Best left to the imagination, in any case.]

- Jed