The loneliness of the long-distance drone pilot | Hacker News Reader

The loneliness of the long-distance drone pilot

kernelmag.dailydot.com

31 pointsThevet14 comments

The USAF hates drones. Their pilots hate drones. The US Army likes them, and has much less trouble with staffing. The Army's Predator drones have autoland, and their drones crash less than the USAF's piloted landings. Army drones are piloted by enlisted men who take a 21-week course.

Army recruiting video for drone operators: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe48B7YRLfg

The Army wants to minimize the number of people needed to operate drones, because their operators are in trailers at the drone launch sites. The soldiers who fly the drones are also trained to launch them (some launch from a truck-mounted rail, without a runway) and do some of the maintenance on them, so they're full-stack drone soldiers. The USAF has a setup where drones are flown off a runway near the battlefield, but piloted and observed remotely from the US.

Yeah, the Air Force has been fighting tooth and nail because it's becoming increasingly obvious that manned aircraft are going to significantly drop in number.

Why call in a strike with it's attendant delay when you can just do it now?

Perhaps if the Air Force were a little more cooperative with the Army, the Army wouldn't have been quite so aggressive about its drone program.

Drone pilots looking for sympathy because they're lonely?

"The door opened and in walked a Pakistani father with the corpse of his child."

The epitome of first world problems.

As @Joeboy points out, the title is a play on "The loneliness of the long distance runner", so it's not literally about loneliness.

The word lonely (or derivatives thereof) doesn't actually appear in the text. I only know that because I searched for it though.

The phrase "it makes for really boring dinner conversation" does though.

As well as a whole pile of others about being 'overpaid, underworked and bored' and more gems like that.

Another viewpoint:

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/29/drones-...

I hope they suffer a lot from what they are doing. They are responsible for what they are doing. They are always free to quit and work for someone with higher goals than blowing up people on the other end of the world.

Just imagine what would happen if Pakistan would start blowing up drone pilots on their way home because they are terrorizing their people.

I really wonder why nobody did use an off the shelf high payload drone, e.g. an octocopter, to attack a drone pilot on its way home, at home, at the football match, or when he picks up his children from school. Those drone pilots are combatants and therefore legal targets of war, regardless how deep they hide in the hinterland.

I don't think that Pakistan will declare war to US. The relation is totally odd, with US financing Pakistan military on one side, while bombing those parts where Pakistan lost control on the other hand side. Pakistan and US are close allies, who both know that staying allies is the best they can do.

But some self declared Islamic state might do. Its just retaliation from their viewpoint. And that kind of attack is plain cheap to execute, would perfectly fit into the picture of an asymmetrical war, and even be legal as drone pilots are combatants.

So I really wonder, why nobody did so far.

Yes, Pakistan was not a good example. But an octocopter would be unnecessary complex way because you will probably not be able to control it from the other end of the world. But what if you would just waited in front of the base and shoot a drone pilot down? Would it be fair game? Would it be murder?

Not reading the article because I fear it might piss me off more than I need right now, but I wondered if everybody knew the title was a riff on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Loneliness_of_the_Long_Dis...

Must be terrible

Oh wait http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/nov/24/-sp-us-drone-...

My. Heart. Fucking. Bleeds.

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