From a piece in today's New York Times on the push for more and better military microdrones:
There are some 4,800 Ravens in operation in the Army, although plenty get lost. One American service member in Germany recalled how five soldiers and officers spent six hours tramping through a dark Bavarian forest — and then sent a helicopter — on a fruitless search for a Raven that failed to return home from a training exercise. The next month a Raven went AWOL again, this time because of a programming error that sent it south. “The initial call I got was that the Raven was going to Africa,” said the service member, who asked for anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss drone glitches.
Comments
I know from first hand experience that Ravens are disaster prone. I was in the service and hopped around from patrol base to patrol base. Patrols were constantly going out looking for these things when they went out of control. We often joked that they should have named it the Albatross. This is one of the very reasons why I am now so active in building and flying with the APM. The military grade systems just can't compare with what you get in price and performance with the APM. At least with the APM if you crash you haven't lost $35-250K of the tax payers dollars, plus the additional monetary and human costs of sending assets out to find it.
From what I understand the DOD knows this is a problem and is making attempts at addressing this. They are very observant as to what is going on in this growing community, and others like it.
Yah, landing breakup is a great design flaw...er I mean feature, yes, feature!
From the vids I've seen, EVERY Raven landing is a crash!
Except, I don't have 240 million taxpayers to draw funds for new planes. :)
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