DRONES OVER FALLUJAH

Slate has a pointed, on-the-scene report from just outside Fallujah, where a team of Marines is keeping watch over the battle, through the infrared eyes of a Pioneer flying drone. Go read it. Now. Here's a taste:
"The raiding party wants us to scan across the river," Cpl. Robert Daniels said, reading a chat-room message that had popped up on his computer monitor. "Someone's firing."
"Take us east," Neumann said over his shoulder. "Shift from white-hot to black-hot."
Behind him, the pilot of the UAV adjusted the flight path as his partner tightened the zoom on the plane's camera. The images on the screen jumped slightly and focused on two black spots hopping from place to place behind an earthen berm.
“I con­firm weapons,” said Sg. Jenifer Forman, an imagery ana­lyst. “Watch their right arms when they run. They’re shoot­ing across the river.“
When the black spots bobbed together, the screen sud­denly bloomed white, then set­tled back into focus, show­ing a thick gray cloud and a scat­ter­ing of small black spots, like some­one in the cloud had thrown out a hand­ful of rocks.
“Tank gun got them,” Neumann said. “Picked them up on their ther­mals. They’re scratched. Scan up the street.”
This is good news — really good news — for the troops locked in the Fallujah fight. The big unmanned spy planes, like the Predator and the Global Hawk, have had a tough time peer­ing into cities. If the medium-​​sized, pneumatically-​​launched Pioneer is hav­ing bet­ter luck, that gives the marines there a huge edge.
THERE’S MORE: In recent months, the Pioneer oper­a­tors of VMU-​​1 (short, some­how, for “Marine Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Squadron 1, Marine Aircraft Control Group 38, 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing”) have been fly­ing their drones through­out Iraq’s trou­bled Al-​​Anbar region. And they have been work­ing, hard.
“Under nor­mal train­ing con­di­tions we sus­tain 200 to 250 flight hours per year,” 1st Lt. Jose A. Nicolas, a VMU-​​1 air­craft main­te­nance offi­cer told Marine Corps News, VMU-​​1 and native of Houston. “So far we have aver­aged between 460 to 500 hours per month out here, or 16 to 20 hours per day.“
“We observe (insur­gents) set­ting up ambushes, mov­ing weapons or help assess tar­gets before and after a strike,” intel­li­gence ana­lyst Lance Cpl. Robert Daniels added. “If the ground com­man­ders want us to direct or adjust artillery fire or close air sup­port we can do that. We can direct any pay­load to any target.”

November 10th, 2004 | Drones | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.