At the same time, under orders from Congress, the Federal Aviation Administration is preparing rules that will allow civilian drone flights across much of the country. The agency predicts that as many as 7,500 small commercial drones could take to the skies by 2018.

Crashes around the world

The documents also reveal that some military personnel harbor an ingrained distrust of the flying robots.

After a Predator wrecked at Cannon Air Force Base in New Mexico on July 28, 2010, an unidentified instructor pilot told investigators that commanders had been queasy about having remotely controlled aircraft on the base, fearful that they might crash into buildings.

“The problem is that nobody is comfortable with Predator. Nobody,” the pilot said, according to an interview transcript. He called the malfunction-prone drone “the most back-assedward aircraft I ever flown.”

Scattered opposition to drones has built across the country in the form of protests and campaigns to stop drone strikes overseas or prohibit surveillance by government aircraft.

As crashes gradually pile up, however, some anti-drone groups are recognizing that the planes could also pose a lethal threat at home through accidents.

On Nov. 12, an advanced Reaper drone operated from Hancock Field, an Air National Guard base near Syracuse, N.Y., crashed into Lake Ontario. A few parts washed up on shore, but the Air Force never found the aircraft, which has a 66-foot wingspan, and has not explained what happened.

Ed Kinane, a peace activist from Syracuse and member of a group called Upstate Drone Action, called the crash “a wake-up call.” The Air Force has permission from the FAA to fly Reapers over Syracuse, as well as large stretches of airspace north of the New York State Thruway. “To me, it’s appalling that they’re flying them over urban areas,” Kinane said. “The Pentagon has been so eager to get their hands on drones, and more drones, that they’re not as good as they should be.”

The manufacturer of the Reaper and the Predator is General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, the leading producer of large U.S. military drones. Frank W. Pace, the company’s president for aircraft systems, said the Reaper “certainly is” safe to fly in the United States. He was more cautious about the Predator, an older aircraft that the firm stopped making in 2011.

The Predator was a pioneer on the battlefield. It was designed to be cheap and lightweight, he said, with reliability and longevity as lesser priorities. Over the years, General Atomics has upgraded parts of the aircraft to make it safer. But Pace said he would not recommend flying the Predator over towns or cities in the United States.

“You really want to be flying it over areas that aren’t highly populated,” he said. “As a citizen, I wouldn’t want it to happen.”

The Air Force has 150 Predators, many based overseas. In the United States, Air Force officials said, Predators are generally flown only in military airspace. Still, demand is building to move them around for other purposes.

Last August, for instance, the California Air National Guard sent a Predator on a 300-mile journey across the state to provide surveillance to firefighters battling blazes near Yosemite National Park.

‘An eye to the sky’

The airfield at Fort Indiantown Gap is about two miles from Lickdale Elementary School. Few residents of Lebanon County, Pa. — just east of the capital, Harrisburg — knew the Army National Guard had been flying Shadow drones from the Army post.

The year before, state Sen. Mike Folmer (R), who lives five miles away, had introduced a bill that would prohibit state and local agencies from using drones for surveillance. But he had no idea that the catapult-launched drones were flying over his community.

“I’ll be honest with you. I didn’t know what was going on there,” he said of the operations at Fort Indiantown Gap.

Don Bell, superintendent of the Northern Lebanon School District, declined to criticize the Army, noting that many school parents work at the base. He acknowledged, however, that the accident made him uncomfortable.

“It’s definitely a concern,” he said. “We always keep an eye to the sky.”

The Pennsylvania Army National Guard trains with a dozen Shadows. It has authorization from the FAA to fly just outside Fort Indiantown Gap’s restricted airspace, said Harvey Browne, an unmanned-aircraft systems analyst at the Army National Guard Bureau in Arlington, Va.

The Shadows often fly over Lickdale Elementary as they descend to land, Browne said. The drone that crashed did not stray off-course and was “flying exactly where it was supposed to” when it malfunctioned, he added.

A spokeswoman for Textron Systems, the Shadow’s manufacturer, said the company was prohibited by its Army contract from publicly discussing operations.

Bill Irby, senior vice president and general manager with the company, said in a statement that the Shadow has recorded about 900,000 flight hours and “continues to perform with high availability and reliability rates for customers in some of the world’s most challenging environments.”

‘A sick airplane’

The military provides the FAA with data on its drone accidents. But the agency will not release the information, saying the Pentagon provides it on the condition that it not be made public. The Pentagon will not disclose the data, either, deferring requests to each branch of the armed forces.

In response to Freedom of Information Act filings and other public-records requests, the armed forces released records identifying 47 major drone crashes in the United States between 2001 and 2013.

Since then, at least two more accidents have occurred. In addition to the Shadow that wrecked in Pennsylvania on April 3, a QF-4 target drone from Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico crashed Feb. 7 on land that is part of White Sands National Monument.

The Post’s tally of 49 drone crashes since 2001 understates the scope of the problem. The armed forces would release records only about “Class A” accidents — crashes that, under current standards, inflicted at least $2 million in damage to the aircraft or other property. Locations, dates and circumstances of mishaps that resulted in less damage were withheld because officials said they did not require a public investigation.

The military also withholds details about dangerous incidents in which a crash is narrowly avoided.

On Aug. 2, 2010, the Navy lost control of a one-ton MQ-8 Fire Scout helicopter drone during a test flight from Naval Air Station Patuxent River, on the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland. The drone buzzed 23 miles to the northwest and entered highly restricted airspace surrounding Washington.

Commanders at the North American Aerospace Defense Command, set up to defend against Soviet attacks, prepared to scramble fighter jets to shoot down the runaway drone. But before the jets took off, controllers regained the satellite link with the Fire Scout and flew it safely back to base.

The Navy kept the incident quiet until three weeks later, when word leaked to reporters.

“It’s headed right for the heart of the National Capital Region,” then-Vice Adm. James Winnefeld, head of the U.S. Northern Command at the time, recounted to reporters. “Do you let it run out of gas and hopefully crash in a farmer’s field, or do you actually take action to shoot it down? You certainly don’t want to shoot it down over a populated area if you can avoid it.”

Navy officials said the drone came no closer than 40 miles to the Capitol. Jamie Cosgrove, a Navy spokeswoman, said a software anomaly prevented the drone from flying its preprogrammed route in the event of a lost satellite link. The Navy denied a request from The Post for its investigative report on the incident.

How drones are controlled

The Patuxent naval air station has been involved in two other serious incidents. A Fire Scout helicopter drone crashed on Oct. 24 during a “hard landing” on the runway; officials declined to give other details, citing a pending investigation.

The worst mishap occurred June 10, 2012, when a drone with a wingspan as big as a Boeing 757?s spun out of control over Southern Maryland.

Two minutes after takeoff, the RQ-4 Global Hawk maritime surveillance drone made an uncommanded, hard turn to the right. A mechanism that controlled steering and elevation was failing, according to warnings the drone broadcast to the ground-control station at Patuxent.

All members of the flight crew were contractors from Northrop Grumman, the drone’s manufacturer. The planned route was over the city of St. Mary’s. But the pilot changed its course.

“I didn’t want to take a sick airplane over populated areas,” the unidentified pilot said in a statement, according to the Navy’s 383-page accident report.

Moments later, the drone pitched over and the pilot lost control. It zigzagged over the Chesapeake and Maryland’s Eastern Shore before crashing in a wildlife refuge and igniting a fire that burned for hours.

The Navy acknowledged the crash after locals saw the smoke and a television news helicopter arrived. An unidentified Navy captain at Patuxent sent an e-mail to several commanders, warning that the incident might stir public concern about runaway drones.

The handling of the investigation “will be watched,” the captain wrote.

Investigators concluded the faulty steering mechanism was to blame. A Navy commander also had harsh words for the pilot.

“Failure to adhere to emergency protocols did not produce disastrous results in this particular event; however, future breaches of established procedures could produce a different result,” the commander wrote. He recommended the pilot’s contract “be thoroughly reviewed.”

Cyndi Wegerbauer, a Northrop Grumman spokeswoman, declined to comment.

Up in smoke

In the distance, heavy smoke rises from Tyndall Air Force Base, where a 63-foot-long QF-4 target drone exploded into a fireball on July 17. The crash in Florida forced authorities to close a highway. (Dylan Dunaway/Associated Press)

As of April 16, the Defense Department held 161 certificates to operate drones in shared airspace — almost double the number from two years earlier. It soon expects to fly more drones in shared airspace than in military-only areas, said Dyke Weatherington, director of unmanned warfare for the Pentagon.

Weatherington said the armed forces need more room for training. He characterized the military’s safety record as good and said it has increasingly won the trust of the FAA.

“Every year we continue to make improvements,” Weatherington said. “And I can say unequivocally that [the Defense Department] will continue to drive down the accident rate.”

Although the FAA requires the military to take extra precautions, they do not always work.

On Aug. 31, 2010, in Palmdale, Calif., the Air Force assigned a chase plane — a Cessna 210 — with two men aboard to follow a new $10.3 million Reaper on a test flight. The Reaper, with a cruising speed of 230 mph, was designed to be a bigger, faster and more reliable version of the Predator.

About two hours after takeoff from the Gray Butte airfield in Los Angeles County, the chase pilot watched as the Reaper suddenly slowed and went into a spin.

“Hey, are you okay?” Curtis Hamilton, the civilian chase pilot, shouted by radio to the drone crew in the ground-control station, according to a voice-recorder transcript. “Pull up! Pull up!”

The drone pitched over and corkscrewed toward the ground. When crew members heard it had crashed onto private property, they feared the worst.

To their relief, word arrived that the area was an empty field: “Okay, we didn’t kill anybody or we didn’t hurt anybody,” Staff Sgt. Juan Abado, the camera operator, recalled during an interview with investigators.

Investigators blamed the accident on pilot error. They concluded the drone pilot allowed the aircraft to slow down too much and was too narrowly focused to notice that it was about to stall.

The pilot, Maj. Jonathan L. Shill, testified that things spiraled out of control so quickly that he did not have time to save the aircraft.

“This is me speculating, I guess, but I think anybody would say I couldn’t, just couldn’t get there in time, not mentally,” he said. “I had a few more seconds and it was over.”

Extra precautions

A few months earlier, at Cannon Air Force Base in New Mexico, commanders ordered extra safety measures for a new fleet of Predators. Worried that the drones might crash into base housing if they lost their wireless links, they required that a backup ground-control station be in place for test flights.

Drone crews thought the backup station was overkill. But commanders at Cannon were “very uncomfortable” with drones in general, an unidentified instructor pilot told investigators. “It’s very hard to explain it to people,” he said. “They think of ‘Terminator’ or something like that.”

Instructors’ nerves were also frazzled. Under pressure to deliver more drone crews for missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, they rushed through training. Some predicted a mishap was inevitable.

“They felt we were running so fast that sooner or later we were bound to stumble,” an unnamed Air Force major told investigators.

On the morning of July 28, members of the 3rd Special Operations Squadron was preparing for test flights. An unexpected fog rolled in.

As soon as it lifted, a crew commanded a Predator to taxi toward the runway. Right away, things went awry.

The control links sputtered, and video screens in the ground-control station went fuzzy. The Predator zoomed off, even though the pilot had not touched the throttle. He pressed a button to slam on the brakes, but the drone did not slow down.

It barreled off the runway and smashed into a fence, winding up in a cornfield. “It could have been a lot worse,” the instructor pilot recalled. If the plane had been assigned to a different runway, he said, it “would have been heading right towards the hangar where there are people, other aircraft.”

The Predator crew was perplexed. It was as if someone had hijacked the drone’s remote controls.

Investigators determined that’s essentially what happened. As the drone started to move, a crew member in the backup ground-control station hit a switch and “hostilely” took control of the Predator without realizing it. The backup station was programmed to run the throttle at high speed, so the drone accelerated and crashed.

Coming home

With the Afghan war waning, Pentagon officials are planning where their drones will go next.

• In 15 cases over the past two years, drones flew dangerously close to airports or passenger aircraft, including the incidents in New York and Los Angeles, according to reports submitted to the FAA. On May 3, the pilot of a commercial airliner preparing to land in Atlanta reported a small drone with four legs and bright lights “in close proximity” to his plane, according to the FAA records. The agency recently disclosed that the pilot of a US Airways plane reported a near-collision with a drone or remotely controlled model aircraft over Tallahassee Regional Airport on March 22 in Florida.
• A different set of records suggests that risky midair encounters are even more common. A NASA database of confidential complaints filed by pilots and air-traffic controllers has recorded 50 other reports of close calls or improper flight operations involving drones over the past decade.
• Civilian drones flown with the FAA’s permission and under its scrutiny are also susceptible to crashes. Since November 2009, law enforcement agencies, universities and other registered drone users have reported 23 accidents and 236 unsafe incidents, according to FAA records.

Congress imposed dual mandates on the FAA that the agency has struggled to reconcile. Under the law, the agency must draft rules for drones as soon as possible so businesses can exploit their economic potential. The FAA must also ensure that safety standards are not compromised and passenger aircraft are not imperiled.

The FAA is facing pressure to move faster from drone manufacturers, the military, members of Congress and many companies that see remotely controlled airplanes as a breakthrough technology. The drone industry complains that it is losing $27 million in economic benefits a day while the FAA prepares regulations for certifying drones and licensing pilots.

The FAA says it is moving as quickly as it can.

“I completely understand that there is significant potential, there’s significant benefit, there’s great things that unmanned aircraft can do. We need to be convinced that they can do so safely,” Michael P. Huerta, the FAA’s administrator, said in an interview.

“Every day in America people are getting on airplanes. Every day people are seeing airplanes in the sky,” Huerta added. “But they’re not really worried a lot about whether it’s safe. It’s their expectation that these things, that unmanned aircraft flying around in our airspace, will meet that same level of safety. And we owe that to them.”

The longer the FAA takes to finalize its rules, the more rogue drones are taking to the skies.

Thanks to rapid advances in technology, small satellite-guided drones with powerful miniature cameras can be bought online for less than $500. Flying drones as a hobby is permitted as long as operators keep them below 400 feet, away from populated areas and at least three miles from an airport, according to the FAA. But those restrictions are being flouted and ignored.

On May 5, a quad-copter — a drone with four rotors — crashed into the 30th floor of St. Louis’s Metropolitan Square building, the city’s tallest. In March, the FAA fined a Brooklyn man $2,200 for striking two midtown Manhattan skyscrapers with his quad-copter before it nearly hit a pedestrian. In August, a small drone with multiple rotors crashed into the grandstand at Virginia Motorsports Park in Dinwiddie County, injuring three spectators.

Even drone advocates worry that the skies are becoming a free-for-all.

“We have to understand that the industry is at risk because of illegal drone usage,” Krista M. Ochs, a General Dynamics executive, said last month at a drone-industry conference in Orlando. “If we have a major catastrophe that involves some type of midair collision, it could set us back years.”

Overwhelmed regulators?

In 2012, Congress passed the FAA Modernization and Reform Act, legislation that ordered the federal government to “safely accelerate” the integration of civilian drones into the busiest airspace in the world.

At the time, the military had been flying drones overseas for more than a decade, revolutionizing warfare by keeping pilots on the ground and out of harm’s way. Defense contractors who invented the technology saw even bigger potential to sell drones to private businesses and other government agencies. Industry groups projected a market with $8 billion in annual revenue.

Until then, the FAA had been moving slowly and cautiously, issuing a handful of permits for the military, law enforcement agencies and universities to fly drones under restrictive conditions. The new law ordered the FAA to hurry it up. Lawmakers set a deadline of Sept. 30, 2015, for the FAA to develop a comprehensive plan and allow civilian drones to begin flying on a more regular basis.

The FAA has approved six sites across the country to test drones and produce data that will shape safety standards. Officials said they will first propose rules for drones weighing 55 pounds or less. Regulations for larger aircraft will take significantly longer. Both sets of rules could take years to finalize. In an interim step, FAA officials say they may grant permits to filmmakers, farmers, and the oil and gas industry to use small drones under limited circumstances.

Manufacturers of drones and businesses that want to buy them are losing patience. They warn that foreign companies will steal the market if the FAA does not act swiftly. “We have got to be able to understand what the standards must be, and we have got to start fielding this technology,” Michael Toscano, president and chief executive of the drone industry’s trade association, said in a May 30 speech to the Aero Club in Washington.

On March 25, 2012, a pilot was flying 11 miles northwest of Houston at 2,000 feet when he saw what he described as a drone just 100 feet below his plane. The mysterious aircraft disappeared in a blur before the pilot could get a better look. He notified the control tower, but it could not find the drone on radar.

The elusiveness of small drones and the absence of a registration or licensing system make it extremely difficult for the FAA to hold culprits accountable.

The agency has imposed fines against two drone operators. In addition to the Brooklyn man, in 2011 the FAA penalized a videographer $10,000 for using a drone to produce a promotional film about the University of Virginia Medical Center.

The FAA accused the videographer, Raphael Pirker, of flying a 56-inch-long foam drone recklessly, swooping close to people on the ground. In March, after Pirker challenged the fine and said he was operating in a safe manner, a federal administrative-law judge overturned the penalty, finding that the FAA had exceeded its regulatory authority.

The agency has appealed, but the ruling cast further doubt on the agency’s ability to police drone flights until it can finalize the new rules mandated by Congress. Last month, The Post and other news organizations filed a legal brief in support of Pirker, arguing that the FAA’s de facto ban on commercial drones was overly restrictive and threatened journalists’ First Amendment rights to use drones to gather the news.

The FAA has granted certificates to dozens of federal departments, law enforcement agencies and universities to fly civilian drones, subject to restrictions on where and when they can operate.

Civilian agencies have reported 236 unsafe or abnormal incidents to the FAA since 2009, the records show. The vast majority of incidents involved drones flown by Customs and Border Protection, which has accounted for more than three-quarters of all flight hours by FAA-certified drones.

After the loss of the aircraft that crashed in January, Customs and Border Protection now operates a fleet of nine unarmed Predator B’s from bases in Arizona, Texas, Florida and North Dakota. The agency’s drone surveillance program began in 2005 but got off to a ragged start. One drone crashed 100 yards from a house in Nogales, Ariz., in April 2006, prompting the National Transportation Safety Board to chide the agency for “providing a minimal amount of operational oversight.”

NTSB records show that three Predator B’s belonging to Customs and Border Protection have been involved in previously unpublicized hard landings that damaged the aircraft. A spokesman for the border agency declined to comment.

Hacking and spoofing

Civilian drones are vulnerable to another safety threat: hacking.

Drones rely on GPS signals to navigate and are controlled by pilots or operators on the ground via a two-way radio transmission link.

The military protects the communications and navigation links it uses to control drones with highly advanced encryption technology. Civilian drones, however, generally rely on unencrypted satellite links and radio transmissions that can be hacked, jammed or spoofed.

In June 2012, a University of Texas at Austin aerospace engineering professor and a team of students gathered at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico to perform a demonstration. Before the eyes of officials from the Department of Homeland Security, the team of academics used a hand-built device to stealthily seize control of, or spoof, an $80,000 Hornet rotorcraft drone flying about a kilometer in the distance.