HAMPTON, Va. (AP) — An Air Force report says a Predator drone was intentionally flown into the side of a mountain in Afghanistan in April after it experienced irreversible engine failure.
Details of the accident appear in a report released by Air Combat Command at Joint Base Langley-Eustis in Virginia.
The report says the drone’s crew at Springfield Air National Guard Base, Ohio, was told to crash the drone if it couldn’t safely return to Jalalabad Airbase. The report says the drone was largely still intact after the crash, but soon after an Army recovery team destroyed it and its guided missile.
The Air Force values the loss of at about $3.8 million.
The report points to the failure of a data and power cable as the root cause of the engine failure.
