Unmanned aircraft crash. In fact, they crash a lot—though there’s no recent specific data, the Congressional Research Service reported last year that despite improvements, “the accident rate for unmanned aircraft is still far above that of manned aircraft.” And while many of those accidents can be attributed to being exposed to hostile fire or operating in conditions when aircraft normally wouldn’t, a significant percentage of drone crashes is caused by human error. A December 2004 FAA study of Defense Department drone crashes found human factors to be a causal factor in about a third of the cases they examined.
But as four human factors engineering researchers have found, sometimes the accidents are by design. That is, the design of the systems that operators use to fly them are so bad that they invite accidents.
via Ars Technica
Image: US Marine Corps
