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Drones are the big thing in warfare at the moment, and they’re already in use by the British military across both Afghanistan and Iraq — eyes, ears, and killers in the sky. Unfortunately they keep getting busted, shot down, or just plain lost, and we’ve apparently gone through around 450 of the things in just five years.
The complete list apparently includes: One Reaper drone (worth £10m), which carries Hellfire missiles; eleven Hermes 450s (£1m each); 25 Black Hornet and Tarantula Hawk UAVs, and a colossal 412 Desert Hawk 3s, which are small hand-launched things.
I know these things are meant to be more disposable, keeping people safe from harm, but it’s rather staggering that we’ve managed to destroy so many of the things. In fact, according to a note to the House of Commons, there are only 335 drones currently in service now, meaning they’ve crashed more than are currently still flying. The Ministry of Defence has admitted that is has to “to increase airmanship standards in a number of areas” or in other words, train our UAV pilots better.
I’m all for drones being put in situations where people could get killed if you used them instead, but perhaps it’d be better if we tried to not break so many of the things. Especially considering the tiny ones still cost £125,000 a pop. Ouch. [Guardian, House of Commons (PDF)]
Image credit: Reaper from MoD
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The Desert Hawks were $300,000 for an operational kit containing 6, so I’d guess the aircraft are around $20-30k each.
Still orders of magnitude cheaper than losing a single Typhoon or Tornado though.
In fact, even if the Desert Hawks are £30,000 each:
10+(11×1)+(25×0.125)+(412×0.03) = £36.485 million.
1x Typhoon = ~£70 million.
To the best of my knowledge, Desert Hawks are about $300,000 each; that puts the total loss at £118 million, according to my back-of-the-calculator-app number crunching!
Granted this was posted 7 years ago…
http://www.defense-update.com/products/d/deserthawk.htm
Each Desert Hawk system, which consists of six aircraft, a ground station, and spare parts, costs $300,000.
Even if they’re £100k each, and notwithstanding the fact that the Black Hornet ‘toy’ helicopters aren’t going to be £125k per unit if you only count the production cost (I’d guess 1/10 of that), you’ve still not made the cost of a single Typhoon.
That’s DH1 I think; we’re now onto DH3
While I know it’s defence tech, I still can’t believe they’d have hiked the price that much. Even if they are £300k an aircraft, the cost and flexibility afforded still pales into insignificance when compared to a manned asset.
The fuck? Why does it cost so much?
The materials and final assembly cost generally won’t be that much, it’s the assembly, the production of the parts, the design, and everything else that goes in to supporting them when in use.
So for the mini Black Hornets at £125k a piece, the materials and assembly will probably be £10k or less, it’s all the R&D needed to make the craft that small, with a range greater than anything else, carrying a usable camera.
That’s just the hardware itself, then you need to design and produce the base stations, any secure comms equipment, control software, etc…
Oh I knew I forgot about something. The comms must cost a fortune just by itself, and they need to recuperate the R&D cost as welln since they are not mass manufacturing the stuff for public sale. Damn.
[insert obligatory Apple Maps joke here]
Followed by [we don't really know all of the ingredients in a Findus Bolognese]
Followed by [really bad horse pun]
Too soon to suggest a South African athlete might have shot them down thinking they were burglars?
While that is A LOT of equipment to burn through. All of that doesn’t equal the value of the life of a single pilot or crew member of any aircraft that would have been in danger had a drone not been used.
pictures received from that reaper could have saves dozens of lives with intel though…
And then what would the price of a plain be if that got shot down instead of the reaper? about 50m?
The price of a human life =/= the price of some metal and plastic.
Oh for sure, totally with you on that. Just, maybe we should train our UAV pilots a little better.
OUR Pilots are quite well trained, the majority of H450 crashes have been the result of EPs not following flight rules because they assume that their pay scale = their flying ability through cloud.
(Despite being told more than once to put the UAS into it’s usual holding pattern then proceeding to ignore this and fly into an occupied building)
Well the international standard value of life for a average person is around $50k, now a pilots will be a bit more then that as they are more intelligent than most, but the scale only goes up to $120K, so lets say $100K for his life.
Then add training costs and insurance and it will probably be below the cost of the drone.
Its the planes that are expensive and that is why they are switching to drones, not because they care for human life.
Yeahhh you’re definitely talking about a different kind of currency.
I do see what you’re saying though, but if we’re talking money then the bad PR for getting so many pilots killed when drones could and should have been used would likely result in backlashes, decreased funding, etc.
I think the $50K figure is used on a per year basis? (eg an insurance company deciding to fund lifesaving treatment)?
I think figures are otherwise in the $5-10m (eg when doing cost-benefit of changes to dnagerous intersections).
Agree that either way it’s still way below the cost of the aircraft (even once training etc is added) but there’s more to it than just the $ value, given the limited supply of highly trained pilots and the time it takes to train them (plus the reasons listed by CaptainLove).
Trained soldiers and airmen aren’t average people, they receive a lot of very expensive training. The cost of training a pilot is fairly high, generally you are looking at about 10% of the cost of the aircraft.
For a fast jet pilot the training costs can reach the millions. Training a soldier is a bit less but still very expensive, just the equipment a soldier carries into battle is closer to 100K.
£300 for the rifle, say the same for clothing, £30 for the helmet, I would expect £100 for webbing, Packs £70 and cheap shoddy boots as usual. Kit tends to be cheap and scarce because it is stolen, broken and lost – the H4855 Personal Role Radio is probably the most expensive item issued. Pay rates start at £14,000, so you could pay the squaddie for 5 years with rank advancement as well. Times being what they are the regiment would charge rent and board. Not everyone is equiped with body armour and radio sets.
You are a bit off on the rifle, try ten times that for a bog standard copy. I know for a fact since only last weekend I was speaking with the officer in charge of the development and testing of the second version of the SA80 that the ticket price on those things after manufacturing, testing and fitting of accessories is closer to a 100 times that.
The webbing is about £140 more for the new stuff. The body armour however can be up to tens of thousands per set including spare plates, the armour carrying rig less the armour which stolen versions are often flogged on ebay for a fraction of the cost is between £1000-2000 new.
The boots are usually pretty good, even the new issue boots for the UK are goretex. You are again off by about a factor of 10 for the helmet. Clothing is probably the closest but it can be a bit more.
Then add all the extra kit carried by a squad like the portable UAVs and IED detection equipment and the costs add up. When you average over a unit the price is pretty high.
The days of cheap kit aren’t gone but they aren’t as prevalent as they used to be. And the civvy prices for kit are often subsidised by the higher military prices. And keep in mind kit is issued in bulk a soldier gets issued with enough kit to last a deployment which can mean a lot of spares.
The charging of rent and board has nothing to do with the times but complaining servicemen. They whinged about having to pay messing weekly even if they go home at weekends, so now everyone has to put up with ISS and pay as you dine crap in the mess.
I want to see the MoD bloopers footage now — with 412 Desert Hawk crashes, there must be some awesome ones of someone throwing them into the ground or something.
There’s got to be one of it actually getting attacked by a desert hawk.
Or it hitting the operator in the face. Now that I would pay to see.
http://youtu.be/PldZ0dNPrSc
It’s not surprising that they keep breaking them. They don’t have any wheels for landing on!
It’s the ground they’re landing on
As it’s my mates who fly them; yes this happens, worryingly often. (Usually preceded by the words “watch this”)
If they sent the videos in to You’ve Been Framed they could recoup about £206k.
£10m sounds like a bit of a low estimate for the unit cost of a Reaper…
That’s the per-aircraft cost for the US, give or take.
Yep, I think you’re right. All the figures I’ve read before have included ancillaries.
*Commenter accepts he’s wrong*
*Internet explodes*
just took a screenshot of that
‘Tis true. We’re a stubborn, argumentative bunch.
If it makes you happier, next time I’ll throw in a few spurious ad hominem retorts before threatening to storm off to another site
.
The Ministry of Defence has admitted that is has to “to increase airmanship standards in a number of areas
The number in question being 3.
1. Takeoff,
2. Landing, and
3. Flying in directions that DON’T contain solid objects.
#2 isn’t really an issue unless you expect to be able to use it again afterwards…
Such a pity they can’t miniaturise HERTI so easily – no-one flying it to get things wrong!
I think you’ll find that there are more types of drones than the ones you are discussing here, including target drones that are expected to be shot down in practice!
How about bring all the drones back to save lives (both sides) and millions of pound! Wait, the oil and opium trade still out there in the Iraqistan..