By Steve Hynd
The Predator series of UAV's has now flown over one million miles, according to General Atomics, the manufacturer.
The milestone encompasses just under 80,000 missions, over 85 per cent of which have been flown in combat.
...Predator-series flight hours have increased in recent years from 80,000 hours in 2006 to 130,000 hours in 2007, 235,000 hours in 2008 and 295,000 hours in 2009. The one million flight hours milestone comes less than a month after the USAF announced that it had surpassed 700,000 flight hours for the MQ-1B Predator.
So 70% plus of that landmark mileage has been made by missile-armed drones bringing tele-operated death to militants and innocent civilians alike, although usually more of the latter. I don't think that's a good thing, given the "hearts and minds" epic fail those million miles represent:
one good way to stoke a sense of injustice is to fire missiles into cars, homes and offices in hopes of killing terrorists, while in fact killing no few innocent civilians. Estimates of the ratio of civilians to militants killed are all over the map � 50-to-1 or 10-to-1 or 1-to-2 or 1-to-10 � but the estimate of the Pakistani people, which is all that matters, tends toward the higher end. And the notion that these strikes are a kind of national humiliation long ago entered Pakistani culture. A popular song from a couple of years ago says Americans �kill people like insects.�
but your mileage may vary.
Um, it's 1 million flight hours, not miles
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