An unmanned helicopter has crashed during a Police test flight near Houston. The Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office, north of Houston, became one of the first police departments in the USA to begin flying Unmanned Aircraft for police missions in October 2011.
County officials and the maker of that aircraft confirmed on Friday that a recent police-only photo mission went terribly wrong. As the Sheriff’s SWAT team suited up with lots of firepower and their armoured vehicle known as the “Bearcat,” a prototype from Vanguard Defense Industries took off to take pictures of all the police action.
Vanguard CEO Michael Buscher said that his company’s prototype was flying about 18-feet off the ground when it lost contact with the controller’s console on the ground. It’s designed to go into an auto shutdown mode, according to Buscher, but when it was coming down the drone crashed into the SWAT team’s armoured vehicle.
The damage was not severe, according to Buscher, who described only some ‘blade strikes’ on the prototype aircraft that was being shown off to the Montgomery County Sheriff’s team. No word on what caused the aircraft to lose contact with the ground console.
Before this Montgomery County crash, the only crash of an unmanned law enforcement aircraft was recorded in 2006 in Nogales, Arizona. The Customs & Border Protection flight crashed in the desert due to the same “lost link” scenario that sent the Montgomery County unit crashing into its SWAT team tank.
When the link between the aircraft and the control console on the ground is lost, all unmanned aircraft are designed to steady up and glide to a landing. In some cases, they already have a location programmed in for landing in the event of a problem.
Buscher said his prototype aircraft veered to the right when it lost communication with the ground unit, and he said it merely overshot its landing area a bit when the auto shutdown procedure kicked in.
The aircraft that actually belongs to the Montgomery County Sheriff, which was unveiled in October 2011, was sitting nearby and was not damaged in the crash.
Buscher said that the aircraft that crashed was a different model from the ShadowHawk that was purchased for Montgomery County Sheriff’s use in law enforcement. That unit cost $300,000 and the sheriff said Department of Homeland Security grant money was used.
Source: Houston Page One Examiner