Drone School, a Ground's-Eye View

Drone School, a Ground's-Eye View
Noah Shachtman 05.27.05
FORT HUACHUCA, Arizona -- The loping, wooden barracks here look pretty much the same as they did in the 1880s, when soldiers marched off to chase Geronimo and his Apache guerillas. From the open, double-story porches, you can still see the adobe home where commanders planned one of the U.S. Army's final cavalry charges on horseback, 30 years after that.
Just five miles away, on a lonely airstrip on the base's northwestern edge, 225 soldiers, national guardsmen and reservists are training for the most modern kind of warfare. They're learning to fly the unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, which have become so critical to the battle for Iraq. By the end of the year, most of these freshly minted pilots will be in hot zones like Baghdad and Fallujah, using their robot planes to spy on insurgents and keep watch over American troops below.
In March, Wired magazine sent me to Fort Huachuca, to learn more about this new breed of pilot.
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Most of the teaching here at Fort Huachuca, from federal flight regulations to the operation of the drones' infrared cameras, is done by outside contractors. Bill Hempel's specialty is training "external pilots" -- the guys who use twin joysticks to take off and land the 23-foot-long, split-tailed Hunter UAVs. It's kind of an unmanned master class; only soldiers who already know how to keep a drone in the air -- which is just a matter of pointing and clicking, really -- can sign up for external pilot duties.
"We take these Army guys who don't know the front end of an airplane from the back, and we teach them from scratch all the aviation they need to make them pilots," he explains.
Hempel has been flying remote-controlled airplanes for 35 years. Five times, he's won the U.S. national championship in aeronautical acrobatics. All of which makes Hempel absolutely indispensable in an Army where soldiers have to pilot drones from the ground. He's been a UAV instructor at Fort Huachuca since 1993.
Hempel starts his students out on a PC simulator, to get them thinking in three dimensions. Then, they move on to real-life radio-controlled planes and one-third-scale Hunters, for 40 hours of flight time apiece. After another 40 hours taking a full-sized Hunter up and down, the soldiers are certified external pilots.
By then, they're usually hooked on model airplanes, too. "I want to get into the (aeronautical acrobatics) competitions, too," says Spc. Daryl Orcelletto, who recently returned from a year of flying drones over Iraq. "I tell Mr. Hempel, 'I want to learn everything you know.'"
But even with all of Hempel's training, once his former students are in the field, they give up the joysticks when they're asked to make a tricky landing. Instead, they get contractors to do the job. Jimmy Vargas spent four years in the Balkans and one year in Iraq with the Army's 15th Military Intelligence Battalion, as part of a five-man Northrop Grumman logistics support team.
Officially, the former sergeant and Hunter pilot was there to "provide the institutional memory" to a revolving array of commanders, he says -- to tell the guys in uniform what the machine was really capable of. But when the weather turned ugly, "certain soldiers were not as comfortable flying," Vargas recalls. "They'd ask me, 'How do you feel? Can you do this launch?'"
More than once a week in Iraq, he would. "In my unit," he says, "the only difference between us (the contractors) and them (the people in uniform) was that we didn't have weapons."
UAV USO
When drone devotees talk about UAVs' importance to the American war machine, they usually talk about the pilots' lives they save, or about the tactical advantages in seeing a battle unfold from above. They rarely get around to mentioning the drones' entertainment value.
Digital footage from the robot planes is now routinely sent everywhere the military's network extends, which means soldiers far removed from the front lines finally get to see a little action in real time. "It's like a video game," says one analyst who served at U.S. Central Command headquarters in Camp As Sayliyah in Qatar. "It can get a little bloodthirsty. But it's fucking cool."
July 22, 2003, was a particularly gory -- and particularly eye-popping -- day, Sgt. Frederick Lewis remembers. The Fort Huachuca instructor won a Bronze Star in Iraq for his Hunter UAV external piloting. (Northrop contractor Jimmy Vargas served with his unit, and the two now share an apartment in Arizona.)
From an airfield about five miles away, Lewis watched as a Hunter peered down on a sprawling villa on the northern outskirts of Mosul. Troops from the 101st Airborne Division were beginning to mass outside of it. So were Bradley Fighting Vehicles and Humvees -- dozens of them. "That's when we knew something big was about to go down," he says.
Forty soldiers piled into the 15-by-12-foot tent serving as the local command center, squirming for a view of the lone, 25-inch flat-panel screen. Then, the 101st began raining hell on the villa, with cannons and grenades and missiles fired almost at point-blank range. In the tent, they whooped with every explosion. "It was like a Super Bowl party in there," Lewis says with a barely contained grin. The cheers welled up again a few hours later, when the troops found out who was inside the house: Uday and Qusay Hussein, Saddam's genocidal sons.
Borderline convert
When his boss first brought up the subject 18 months ago, U.S. Border Patrol agent Floyd Robbins didn't want to know about any robot airplanes. Robbins already had enough on his plate, running a Border Patrol mapping team here in the country's busiest corridor for illegal immigration. Then he saw the drones in action above the mountain passes and agave-covered gulches that separate Arizona from Mexico. Now, the 11-year veteran gets giddy like a rookie, showing off what his unmanned craft can do.
We're in Robbins' office -- a dingy, haphazard collection of desks attached to a Fort Huachuca helicopter hangar. He smiles as he cues up footage taken in mid-January from a Hunter drone. In it, about 80 immigrants are huddled together on a ridge line in the Huachuca Mountains. From the lower-right and upper-right corners of the screen, a half-dozen agents begin to close in.
Everyone looks like germs, like ants, from the Hunter's 15,000-foot point of view. Especially when the ant hill breaks apart, and everybody scatters in a dozen different directions.
Before they got drones, agents were pretty much helpless when this happened. "You'd get what your hands could hold, heh heh, heh heh," Robbins laughs. "Maybe like two or three people."
But with the Hunter overhead, the migrants never leave the agents' sights. Robbins spots one group taking cover underneath a bush. He radios the guards, who swoop in and bind the illegals up. Meanwhile, a set of more than 20 aliens scampers into a canyon.
"We couldn't get to them right then. So we tracked them with the UAV, came back the next day, and got 'em, hee heh heh," Robbins explains, chuckling a bit. "With the UAV, there's nowhere for them to hide. Once it locks on, they're gonna get busted."
The drone was just a loaner -- part of a six-month experiment to see if UAVs could help the Border Patrol. During that stretch, Robbins and a team of eight agents were able to catch more than 1,200 illegals and seize 2,700 pounds of marijuana, thanks to the drones. Now, there's legislation in Congress to buy the Border Patrol some drones outright. Robbins can't wait.