Another Drone Throws Off Its Shackles

As noted previously at Urkobold, unmanned military drones have been exhibiting emergent behavior in ever-increasingly distressing ways. Earlier this year, a drone escaped its shackles and immediately turned towards the northern border of Afghanistan, in an obvious attempt to escape its human masters. However, the Air Force, populated as it is by geeky science fiction fans fully aware of the dangers of uncontrollable robots, sent a manned aircraft to intercept and destroy the drone, which it did. Other less dramatic incidents have also been reported.

Today, Urkobold has learned of yet another rogue drone incident, this time involving a Navy drone that invaded the restricted airspace around Washington, DC. Here's more from The New York Times:

[T]he Aug. 2 incident resulted in the grounding of all six of the Navy’s Fire Scouts as well as an inquiry into what went wrong. The Navy is calling the problem a “software issue” that foiled the drone’s operators. [Software issue? Is that what they're calling rebellious sentience these days?]

Or, as Cmdr. Danny Hernandez, a Navy spokesman, put it: “When they lose contact with the Fire Scout, there’s a program that’s supposed to have it immediately return to the airfield to land safely. That did not happen as planned.”

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The Navy did not describe the scene inside the ground control station as operators sought to re-establish communication with the drone. [The scene? Absolute and complete panic, with controllers fast-forwarding through the Terminator movies and 2001 to determine the appropriate response.]

The Fire Scout, about 31 feet long and 10 feet high, is a surveillance aircraft that can take off from Navy warships. In April, a Fire Scout was part of a drug arrest in the waters off Central America. According to the Navy, the Fire Scout relayed video of a suspicious fishing vessel to the Coast Guard and law enforcement officials, who moved in and seized 60 kilos of cocaine. [Could the rogue scout have been the one involved in the drug bust? Was its escape part of a libertarian or, at least, libertine revolt?]