Tuesday, April 28, 2009

No one dies in unmanned UAV crash.

Unmanned Predator crashes on BLM land

By KEITH ROGERS
LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL
An unmanned MQ-1B Predator spy plane crashed today on public land 1 and one-half miles west of Creech Air Force Base during a routine training mission, a spokeswoman for the 432nd Wing at the base said.

No injuries or private property damage were reported.

Base personnel responded to the crash site to work with local officials to secure the wreckage of the $4 million aircraft.

The crash occurred 8 a.m. about 47 miles northwest of Las Vegas in a remote desert area managed by the Bureau of Land Management.

No military personnel or civilians were in the area at the time of the impact, said Capt. Brooke Brander, a spokeswoman for the 432nd Wing.

“We’re still securing the site and picking up the pieces,” she said, adding that investigators will determine what caused the aircraft to go down and the amount of damage it sustained.

Editor's note: Although no humans died in the crash, three computers onboard were destroyed. They are survived by two IBM PCs (running hacked copies of Vista) and a Commodore 64.

The aircraft was being controlled remotely from a ground station at Creech and was not armed with Hellfire missiles, Brander said.

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