An unmanned MQ-9 Reaper aircraft crashed at Kandahar airfield in southern Afghanistan less than three months after an identical drone went down in November, a US Air Force spokesman said on Sunday according to Reuters.
There were no injuries or civilian damage in the crash of the $14-million remotely piloted aircraft (RPA) late on Saturday night, Captain Bryan Bouchard of the 455th Air Expeditionary Wing said in a statement.
"The crash was contained on Kandahar airfield," he added. "US Air Force authorities will investigate the cause of the crash but hostile fire was not a factor."
In November, another Reaper operating out of Kandahar and armed with missiles was totally destroyed when it went down more than 483 km (300 miles) to the northeast of the base in a mountainous area.
The cause of that crash was not made public but the military also ruled out ground fire as a suspected factor.
According to the Washington Post, the Reaper has been plagued by a spate of sudden electrical failures that have caused the RPA to lose power and crash, according to accident-investigation documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. Investigators have traced the problem to a faulty starter-generator, but have been unable to pinpoint why the problem occurs or devise a permanent fix.
The RPA carries an emergency battery backup supply but this has a life of only one hour and if the flight time to the nearest airbase exceeds that limit, then there is nothing that can be done to save the aircraft.
“Once the battery’s gone, the airplane goes stupid and you lose it,” said Colonel Brandon Baker, chief of the Air Force’s remotely piloted aircraft capabilities division. “Quite frankly, we don’t have the root cause ironed out just yet.”
The manufacturer of the starter generator is Skurka Aerospace but so far the company has declined requests for comment fielded by The Washington Post.
Ten Reapers were badly damaged or destroyed in 2015, at least twice as many as in any previous year, according to USAF safety data.
Of the 237 major US military drone crashes since 2001, 66 per cent involved either Predator (the slightly smaller predecessor of the Reaper) or Reaper RPAs flown by the USAF.
Reapers were the US Air Force's first specifically designed "hunter-killer" unmanned aircraft, and are larger and more powerful than the older MQ-1 Predator drones. The Reaper is manufactured by General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, and in addition to the USAF, other customers include the Department of Homeland security, NASA, the British, French, Italian and Spanish armed forces and the CIA.
Australia is considering the purchase of 8 MQ-9 Reapers, a move that will no doubt be clarified in the forthcoming Defence White Paper due for release this Friday. ADF operators have already commenced training operations from two bases in the US.