Officials called off searching for the MQ-9 Reaper remotely piloted aircraft that crashed last fall in Lake Ontario because currents since have spread the debris over too wide an area, reported Syracuse’s Post-Standard on Monday. The Reaper, assigned to the New York Air National Guard’s 174th Attack Wing in Syracuse, went down during a training sortie from Wheeler-Sack Army Airfield near Watertown on Nov. 12, 2013. Inclement weather forced the Coast Guard to suspend its initial search. Local agencies recovered some wreckage and a Navy dive team was able to map the debris field last December, but recovery efforts were pushed to spring. Unrecovered aircraft parts posed no environmental danger and were non-essential to the ongoing Air Force accident investigation, said a wing spokesman quoted in the newspaper’s May 12 report. RPA controllers at the wing’s Reaper schoolhouse at Hancock Field were permitted to resume Reaper flights shortly after the accident last year.
The Space Force should take bold, decisive steps—and soon—to develop the capabilities and architecture needed to support more flexible, dynamic operations in orbit and counter Chinese aggression and technological progress, according to a new report from AFA’s Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies.
