So Much for Drones

Given that one of the arguments of the 9/11 deniers is that it would have been more difficult for licensed pilot Hani Hanjour to crash a plane into the Pentagon, then to fly a drone into it, I found this article in the Wall Street Journal rather interesting:

Unmanned planes have proved invaluable in military operations, but their accident rate has added to domestic air-safety concerns. Predators, 27-foot-long propeller-driven planes which are among the biggest and best known drones in the Air Force, are used daily in Iraq and Afghanistan to track enemy targets with high-powered cameras and infrared sensors. Predators feed images to pilots on the ground or troops and are also equipped with missiles for their own attack missions. A recent report by the Congressional Research Service said their accident rate is 100 times that of manned aircraft, and noted that of 135 Predator unmanned surveillance-and-attack planes delivered and used in military operations, 50 have been lost and 34 more have had serious accidents.

To be sure, combat is different from commercial flight, but Air Force officials say that all of the crashes so far were the result of malfunctions or errors by pilots who are often as far away as Nevada and lack the sensation of being in the cockpit.