Creech AFB MQ-9 crash 12/11/2014

I'm not sure how I missed this one. ;-) The location sounds like it is on the range.

by Staff Reports 432nd Wing/432nd Air Expeditionary Wing Public Affairs 12/11/2014 - Creech Air Force Base, Nevada -- At approximately 8:45 a.m. PST on Dec. 11, 2014, an MQ-9 Reaper crashed during a routine training mission in an unpopulated area approximately 1 mi. east of Creech Air Force Base, Nevada. No one was injured. Base first responders have secured the crash site and all appropriate safety measures have been employed. More information will follow as it becomes available. The MQ-9 Reaper is a medium-to-high altitude, long endurance remotely piloted aircraft that is employed primarily as an intelligence-collection asset and secondarily against dynamic execution targets.

Interesting!

I wonder what altitude it was at before... Well before whatever caused it to crash happened.

a reply to: brace22

Eventually you can get a crash report via a FOIA.

At a mile from the base, they don't fly the UAVs very high. If you drive up the road to the town of Cold Creek, you can see them flying in small valleys east of the main base.

The UAVs at Creech probably are not under satellite control but rather ground stations. They have had the occasional LOS (Loss of Signal). They use a lot of C band in the comms. There was a report from Creech a few years ago about having to make sure nobody uses a 5GHz wifi on the base. The range also uses C band point to point microwave, so I can imaging the occasional glitch if they fly in the wrong area.

In that general area, they UAVs need to be under 9000ft AGL. The Janets are coming in around 14Kft AGL and decending, so you need some margin.

I put together a small "blob" of Groom Lake scanner audio for the Coast to Coast AM show on Nevada. You can hear UAV flight altitutes mentioned in it.

Groom lake scanner audio

I have hours of audio to go through. This file was just an interesting collection of what I had heard so far, and that doesn't even include what I recorded from Tikaboo.

originally posted by: gariac
a reply to: brace22

Eventually you can get a crash report via a FOIA.

At a mile from the base, they don't fly the UAVs very high. If you drive up the road to the town of Cold Creek, you can see them flying in small valleys east of the main base.

The UAVs at Creech probably are not under satellite control but rather ground stations. They have had the occasional LOS (Loss of Signal). They use a lot of C band in the comms. There was a report from Creech a few years ago about having to make sure nobody uses a 5GHz wifi on the base. The range also uses C band point to point microwave, so I can imaging the occasional glitch if they fly in the wrong area.

In that general area, they UAVs need to be under 9000ft AGL. The Janets are coming in around 14Kft AGL and decending, so you need some margin.

I put together a small "blob" of Groom Lake scanner audio for the Coast to Coast AM show on Nevada. You can hear UAV flight altitutes mentioned in it.

Groom lake scanner audio

I have hours of audio to go through. This file was just an interesting collection of what I had heard so far, and that doesn't even include what I recorded from Tikaboo.

I missed that gariac, were you a guest on C2C? Or they just played the audio? What was the broadcast date?

a reply to: FosterVS

I have nothing to plug, so I wasn't a guest on C2C. ;-) I think the audio was in Knapps News for this show:
Groom Lake Audio

I had sent George an email saying that FOD was foreign object debris and not being a person that listens to ATC, he thought it was really really foreign. Then came the fecal storm of emails from aviation gurus explaining FOD.

The previous week he Bob Lazar (ach ugh) on the show and put my Groom Lake panoramas in Knapp's News. A good thing my hosting company doesn't have a bandwidth charge. As you know, I keep my website advertisement free. Hosting is just so cheap these days, why annoying anyone with advertisements. Plus I don't have to worry about some third party sniffing who uses my website, because hey, that is my job! You can run your browser with noscript on any site I own. There is some java script on the site, but it is not essential.