L-Ne · Historical Source Library

News Source Record

# News Source Record

**L-Ne / Open-source news extract** — Original media coverage of unmanned aerial systems.

| Field | Value |
| --- | --- |
| Collection date | 13 November 2013 |
| Platform | Quiet Systems |
| Data label | Open-source news record // LRRK collection product |
| Handling | Public-source material. Image rights require separate verification before publication. |
| Scale | Local |
| Language | English |
| Terms matched | Reaper; unmanned aircraft; drones; MQ-9 Reaper |

## Bibliographic

| Field | Value |
| --- | --- |
| Outlet | The Post-Standard (Syracuse, New York) |
| Title | Unarmed Reaper crashes in Lake Ontario (174th suspends flights; Hancock takeoff bid) |
| Dateline | Syracuse, New York |
| First publisher | yes |
| Original URL | https://www.newspapers.com/image/1246449908/?terms=Reaper |
| Archive URL | — |
| Dedup key | 2013-11-13|post-standard|hancock-reaper-lake-ontario-crash |
| Source grade | A1 |

## Pictures

- page: 2013-11-13-post-standard-hancock-reaper-crash-page.jpg
- clips folder: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/12wYYuLheAkr2POrfp-By56Phe8bXQsKv

## Record

**Verified extract — [Fact — A1]** Tim Knauss (tknauss@syracuse.com) and Mark Weiner (mweiner@syracuse.com) of The Post-Standard reported that the 174th Attack Wing suspended all Reaper drone flights in Central New York Tuesday after one of the unmanned aircraft crashed into Lake Ontario about 12 miles from the eastern shore during a routine training flight. A Coast Guard helicopter and search vessel were unable to recover the $5 million drone, which crashed about 1 p.m. Tuesday, and were forced to call off the search late in the afternoon because of bad weather, said Col. Greg Semmel, commander of the 174th Attack Wing of the Air National Guard. Semmel said he did not know what caused the accident; a safety investigation board will investigate. The Reaper that crashed Tuesday was unarmed and had been in the air about three hours when it went down. It was one of two drones that took off from Fort Drum, outside Watertown, during a training exercise; the other returned safely. When the Reapers are unarmed, the 174th flies them across a wide swath of Upstate New York, from west of Rochester eastward to near Blue Mountain Lake, and from Syracuse north to the Massena area. A full squadron of MQ-9 Reapers has been assigned to the 174th at Hancock Field; pilots at Hancock operate most of the wing’s drones remotely over Afghanistan. The crash comes as the 174th has asked the Federal Aviation Administration for permission to fly Reapers out of Hancock Field north of Syracuse and to designate Hancock as one of six national test sites where drones can operate in civilian air space. The FAA is expected to choose the sites by the end of the year. Critics pointed to a 2012 Bloomberg News investigation that found the Air Force had 129 accidents over 15 years involving Reaper, MQ-1 Predator and RQ-4 Global Hawk drones; the biggest drones had a combined 9.31 accidents for every 100,000 hours of flying, compared to a fleet-wide average of 3.03. Ed Kinane, a Syracuse peace activist, called the accident rate “notorious” and said the military had rushed the aircraft into production. Hed locked on A1: unarmed Reaper took off from Fort Drum; critic points to high accident rate; timing is bad for the 174th’s request to take off from Hancock. The MQ-9 Reaper is a 36-foot-long drone with a 66-foot wingspan that can be armed with Hellfire missiles.

**Kinematic object.** MQ-9 Reaper (174th Attack Wing — Fort Drum takeoff, Lake Ontario crash; Hancock local-flight / FAA test-site bid).

**Coverage frame.** military / incident / airspace policy

## Source integrity

- Why this is treated as an original: Post-Standard staff (Knauss / Weiner) on the local 174th Reaper crash and Hancock takeoff bid.
- Wire reprint status: Staff-written. Adjacent A1 statin-guidelines block is AP (Marilyn Marchione); the Reaper package is Knauss/Weiner.
- OCR / image-page caveats: Tesseract on A1. Hed is banner-cut across the AP health story. Jump pages (Nov 14 A3 / Nov 21 A10) not extracted here.
- What was excluded: AP cholesterol-guidelines story; I-81 viaduct package; sports teasers.

## LRRK relevance

Watch / Passport. A Watch desk would have logged an unarmed MQ-9 lost in Lake Ontario on a Fort Drum training sortie and the immediate grounding of a CONUS Reaper wing still bidding Hancock as an FAA test site.

*LRRK — security assurance for systems that sense, move, and act.*

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